Abstract

When x loves y, x is concerned about y’s well-being. A plausible assumption is that love’s concern reflects the intimacy that is a hallmark of the emotion itself. On one approach, the intimacy of love’s concern is a matter of a lover’s assimilating a beloved’s well-being, either by effecting a “union” of interests, as Harry Frankfurt and Robert Nozick suggest, or through what Bennett Helm calls “intimate identification.” A second conception is to see the intimacy as inhering in what Alan Soble refers to as robustconcern: a desire for the well-being of the beloved for the beloved’s sake, and the attempt to further that well-being, sometimes at a cost to the lover’s own interests. The dispute between these proposals centers on whether love’s concern requires a lover to become a simulacrum of the beloved. Two considerations militate against this assimilationist idea: preserving the personal integrity of the lover and protecting the privacy of the beloved. It turns out that robust concern is intimate enough.