Here is an odd reason for love. Someone is doing really well, and when we come to love them, their wellbeing becomes in part our wellbeing. So it’s especially good for us to love all the people who are doing well. The most extreme version of this is loving God. For God has infinite wellbeing. And so by loving God, that infinite wellbeing becomes ours in a way.
My first reaction to the above thoughts was that this is ridiculous. It’s too cheap a way of increasing one’s wellbeing and seems to be a reductio of the thesis that whenever you love anyone, their wellbeing is incorporated into yours.
But it’s not actually all that cheap. For consider one of the paradigm attitudes opposed to love: envy. In envy, the other’s wellbeing makes us suffer. It seems exactly right to say that in addition to the other-centered reasons to avoid envy, envy is just stupid, because it increases your suffering with no benefit to anyone. But if so, and if love is opposed to envy, then it is not surprising that there is a benefit to love. And because envy is hard to avoid, the opposed love is not cheap, since it requires one to renounce envy.
But what about the oddity? Well, that oddity, I think, comes from the fact that while the benefit to ourselves from loving is indeed a reason to love, it cannot be our only reason, since love is essentially an attitude focused on the other’s good. At most, the realization that loving someone is good for us will help overcome reasons against love (the costs of love, say), and motivate us to try to become the kind of person who is less envious and more loving. But we can’t just say: “It’s good for me to love, ergo I love.” It’s harder than that. And in particular it requires a certain degree of commitment to the other person for good and ill, so if an attitude is solely focused on the desire to share the other’s good, that attitude is not love.
