| I think it comes down to the definition of "love". There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way). The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people. A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov: I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. ... Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. |