Love's Virtues

Martin offers a philosophically rigorous yet highly accessible argument for the importance of developing the various virtues found in a robust notion of love. Martin argues that love encompasses a wide variety of virtue-structured ways in which persons value each other as having irreplaceable worth. In short, love is "a virtue-structured way to value persons" (1).Although there are a variety of loves, Martin chooses to examine erotic love, defined as love involving sexual desires and monogamous marriage. By marriage, he means moral relationships involving sexual desires and long-term commitments to one's partner. His purpose in writing the book is to clarify the role of moral values in understanding this kind of love. This is a book that provides internal justification for marital love by examining the moral dimensions of love that make it desirable insofar as love's virtues are imbedded in marriage.The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which, except the first, addresses particular virtues of love. The first chapter, "Love and Morality," is one of the most important, because it frames the issues that the author highlights throughout the remainder of the work. Martin argues that love is internally related to morality: "Moral values define love as ways to value persons" (10). The notion of morality that he proposes is pluralistic insofar as Martin realizes that people have differing conceptions of moral ideals of goodness. These moral values enter into the very meaning of love by structuring love's relationships and shaping its experiences. In short, virtues and ideals enter into defining what love is.Martin believes that moral philosophies and prominent ethical theories have failed to give love its proper place. Those moral theories that presuppose an impartiality paradigm give little attention to the preferential treatment that love often calls for. In proposing his own moral philosophy, Martin affirms an ethical pluralism that acknowledges objective value, affirms liberty and tolerance of diversity, and underscores the moral significance of personal caring relationships. "Love encompasses a variety of virtue-guided and virtue-structured ways to value persons. Understood within a pluralistic perspective, love makes possible morally creative forms of shared caring" (31).In examining the particular virtues that shape and partly define love, Martin begins with the virtue of caring. According to him, caring is the central virtue that defines love. It is central partly when it has good motives and intended objects, partly because it tends to produce good consequences, and partly because of its connections with other virtues. The object of genuine love is the well-being of the beloved together with the shared well-being of two lovers. This means that love that interweaves altruism and self-interest; in fact, Martin claims that it fuses them. "Love transcends the dichotomy between eros and agape by creating motives to promote the shared good of two or more people" (39). The caring involved in genuine love is "directed toward persons in their full individuality, motivated in part by a concern for their well-being intending with any luck to produce good consequences" (42). Caring is expressed in, conditioned on, enhanced or limited by, and in general interwoven with other virtues within a complex moral tapestry" (42).For the remainder of the book, Martin examines by chapter the following virtues: faithfulness, sexual fidelity, respect, fairness, honesty, wisdom, courage and gratitude. Regarding the virtue of fairness, Martin argues that neither mutual consent nor 50-50 distribution of benefits and burdens is adequate for understanding fairness in terms of love. Instead, Martin advocates the idea of equal autonomy as the primary love criterion of fairness. Martin notes, however, that "although love is never entirely selfless, love includes a willingness to make sacrifices on behalf of one's spouse" (116). Love intertwines the good of two people. Love contains elements of benevolence without being a disinterested altruism: it blends the self-interest of two persons so as to transcend the distinction between selflessness and selfishness.With regards to the virtue of wisdom, Martin argues that wisdom is primarily understanding what love is, including love's requirements, constituent values, and contributions to meaningful life. Wisdom is "knowing how to care for the person we love and putting that knowledge into practice" (147). "Knowing how to love implies knowing how to be honest, how to be faithful by establishing mutual commitment and arrangements reasonably designed to protect love, how to find the courage to confront dangers to relationships, how to be fair in balancing benefits and burdens, how to show gratitude for love" (148). In sum, Martin's book is a top-notch book of moral philosophy concentrating upon love as the uniquely important touchstone for virtue ethics.