For Yourself Alone: On the Specificity of the Reasons to Love Someone

This paper is about reasons to love people. I defend a “particularist” view: that the central reason to love someone is simply who she is. I begin with a framing question—“why do you love me?”—and a taxonomy of views of love's reasons (§1). I argue that a particularist view is demanded by that framing question (§2). But offering such a view requires saying something about who the beloved is —so I borrow an account of human nature from Edith Stein which, I hope to show, yields a compelling account of love's reasons (§3). I conclude with an argument that the extent to which a view of love's reasons genuinely answers our framing question is the extent to which it becomes particularist (§4).