Is Enhanced Love Fragile Love?

It appears that it might be possible to enhance love by pharmacological or even genetic means in the near future. Julian Savulescu and others have argued that we should use such enhancement to promote the human good. Sven Nyholm suggests that for the most part Savulescu and the others want enhance love for instrumental reasons, for the benefits love can deliver rather than valuing love itself (1). Nyholm does not oppose enhancing love for instrumental reasons but suggests that love also has intrinsic value and argues that enhanced intrinsic love would not have the same value as natural intrinsic love. In what follows when I refer to the value of love I am referring to the value of intrinsic love rather than its instrumental value unless stated otherwise. I will argue that Nyhom’s is mistaken about the fragility of enhanced love due to the nature of love but that concerns about the authenticity of love matter.

Nyholm argues that love should be robust.

“The idea in giving somebody our love, we bestow upon them something that is not fleeting, but rather robust across various different changes and scenarios.”(2)

Nyholm’s argument that enhanced love does not have the same value as natural love seems to depend on three premises. Firstly artificially enhanced love is not robust love. In what follows I shall treat such love as fragile love. Secondly what is important about intrinsic love is being loved. Thirdly it is better to be loved in a robust rather than a fragile manner. If the above is accepted then enhanced love would seem to be an inferior form of love. I accept Nyholm is correct in his belief that it is better to be loved in a robust as opposed to fragile way. I also accept that one of the important benefits of intrinsic love is being loved. I don’t accept that this is the only important benefit. I would suggest simply loving someone or something is of benefit to the lover even if this love is unrequited. People feel the need to love. Some people love their dogs and benefit from this love. However it is by no means clear that this love is returned in the way we commonly understand as love. I will not pursue this point here. I now want to argue enhanced love is not fragile love due to the nature of all love.

Let us assume that the intrinsic love someone feels is enhanced. What is the nature of loving?

“It is in the nature of a lover’s concern that he is invested in his beloved. That is, he is benefited when his beloved flourishes; and he suffers when it is harmed. Another way of putting it is that the lover identifies himself with what he loves. This consists of accepting the interests of his beloved as his own.” (3)

I would suggest that this is the nature of all loving enhanced or not. If this is the nature of loving then the will of the lover is captivated by her beloved and as a result is constrained. According to Nyholm if love is enhanced then this love is fragile. It is by no means clear to me why this love should be fragile. Let us consider genetic modification. Let us assume someone’s genome is altered prior to her birth giving her an increased disposition to care about and love others. Once the lover’s genome is enhanced her genome should be stable and this stability should ensure her love isn’t fragile. Let us now consider pharmacological enhancement of love. It might be suggested that in this case the lover’s enhanced love is fragile because she might simply stop taking the means of enhancement. However I would suggest the nature of loving means this option is not open to her because her will is constrained by the interests of her beloved. If she stopped taking these means then the lover does not accept the interests of her beloved as her own. In this situation her apparent love, enhanced or not, is not real love. I would suggest that the nature of loving means the enhancement of love does not mean enhanced love is fragile love, it follows the value of enhanced love is the same as that of natural love. Of course someone’s love might be fragile for other reasons but enhancement alone does not make love fragile.

It might be concluded that if the enhancement of love doesn’t mean enhanced love is fragile then enhancement should be perfectly acceptable. Some people might still have some reservation about accepting this conclusion. Let us accept Nyholm’s premise that what is important about love is being loved. Someone who is being loved may have no doubts concerning the robustness of this love but still have doubts about how someone else came to love her. Firstly she might believe that her lover came to love her in an inauthentic way. He didn’t choose to love her. In response I would point out that by its very nature all love, enhanced or not, loving is not a matter of choice, love is constrained. (4) We can’t simply choose to love someone, we come to love someone. However if we choose to enhance our love pharmacologically this is exactly what we do. I will now consider four reasons why we shouldn’t make the choice to enhance our love. Firstly it might be suggested that because coming to love someone is easy this somehow devalues the love. I would reject this suggestion as just because something is easy doesn’t automatically devalue it. Some might find generosity easy but this doesn’t devalue his generosity. Secondly it might be suggested that pharmacologically enhanced love is inauthentic love. Once again I would reject this suggestion provided the lover freely chose to be enhanced. It would appear that my first two objections to the enhancement of love fail however my next two objections seem to carry some weight. It might be suggested that enhanced love for someone or something might not sit easily with other things the lover has come to love in a more natural way. Enhanced love might have a very wide domain. Perhaps the breadth of this domain might make our capacity to love weaker over the entire domain. It is easy to imagine someone who has enhanced his love for another finding he and his beloved love very little in common. Lastly let us assume what we love defines us as persons. If this is so then if a couple enhance their love then they change themselves and the ones they love. Does such love remain authentic helps define us as persons then perhaps such a separation makes us less authentic? I’m not sure.

1. Sven Nyholm, Love Troubles: Human Attachment and Biomedical Enhancements, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 32(2) 2015.
2. Nyholm, page 195.
3. Harry Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, Stanford University Press, 2006, page 41.
4. Frankfurt, 1999, Necessity, Volition, and Love, Cambridge University Press, page 135.