Question No. 63
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Another dimension of love is the fact that love is not a simple state of existence but occurs over and through time. After all, love is not only a noun, love is also a verb. The essence of love is dependent on the time we devote to it. Like a flower, love requires the right mix of devotion and acceptance to spread its aroma. Loving is an intention and an action that has consequences, and like other actions, it’s one that we can be responsible for and accountable for. Even though we can fall in love, it remains something that we can make choices about — we can work to remain in love, and we can strive to free ourselves from it.
Is love ethically justifiable? In many ways, love is like a moral danger. Love is often “blind” — it can beguile us into seeing the world wrongly. Love also stops us from valuing others impartially — which can seem like the exact opposite of what ethics requires of us. The way we value our beloved can even parallel moral respect. We value and desire the person in and for themselves, similar to the way morality requires us to respect others for their own sake.
Also, love has a complex relationship with autonomy: the capacity to direct and control our lives, and a central part of being a free and responsible human being. Love can threaten autonomy. When we invest emotionally in another person, plan our lives around them, and start to feel their gains and losses as our own, we relinquish the amount of control we have over both big and small life decisions. Still, there is another side to love, which sees it as ethically critical. After all, love extends us beyond ourselves, giving us an attachment to others that pushes us out of self-interested and self-absorbed ways. Love is complex and ambiguous — if thoughtful philosophers can’t agree on its qualities, different people may understand it in different ways.
Ultimately, love may be too wonderfully multifarious and dynamic to be pinned down by a definition or philosophical theory. But we can still benefit from thinking deeply about love’s nature and the challenges and promises it presents.
Question:
Identify the parts of speech of the underlined words.
These philosophical ideas about love suggest some practical lessons.