Ethics of Love

Ethics of Love

Hook’s Criticism

One of Bell Hook’s criticisms of the modern perception of love is that we understand love as a feeling. According to Hooks’, we have faulty definitions of what love is. The most popular flawed purpose is that love is the feeling of profoundly being drawn to someone else. This definition is commonly propagated in movies, novels, songs, and poems; therefore, these faulty definitions are learned when we are young. As we grow up, genuinely loving only becomes more challenging and misunderstood. According to Hooks’ explanation, one can feel drawn to another person, leading to cathexis (Hooks). As elaborated in the book, cathexis is when one invests their emotions in another individual, making them essential to us. Hooks explains that this is what most of us confuse with love. Hooks further explains that for one to love another truly, one must learn to mix several components, with the most important ones including commitment, care, admiration, fondness, appreciation, truthful and open communication, and trust. In addition, Hooks also criticizes how there are many resources on “How to” when it comes to love. For example, “how to kiss” and “how to dress up for a date.” Conversely, there are little to no resources addressing how to love: “how to appreciate someone” or “how to show commitment” (Hooks).
Subsequently, Hooks also sheds light on how our perception of love is flawed. Another faulty definition is that love is non-existent, and people mistake simple attraction or attachment to love. Consistently, a significant percentage of the youth today are cynical about love, especially romantic love. Hooks quotes Harold Kushner, who talks about how the current generation of young people is afraid of love because they are terrified of being betrayed or disappointed (Hooks). Do you need urgent assignment help ? Get in touch with us.
In addition, Hooks also highlights Kushner’s prediction that people will only be interested in pleasure short of significant emotional investment or affection that comes with no risks. Today, a substantial percentage of youth are engaged in relationships with no emotional investment, such as casual relationships, using online dating apps just for pleasure, or being in polyamorous relationships. Hooks further criticizes the stigma placed around love. People who confess their love aloud are labeled as hopeless romantics or desperate. Hooks criticizes this perception of love as a weakness and explains it as more of a “transformative force” (Hooks) that symbolizes humanity, bravery, and other virtues.
Redefining Love
Being an ontological event, the exact definition of love has not been made. Therefore, this undefined state is unsatisfactory and can sometimes cause conflict, for example, in care ethics. The term caring originated from the Latin Caritas, meaning selfless love. Altruistic love is selfless love; one loves others without gaining anything in return. To care, one has to feel emotions like empathy and love, which, in turn, leads to forming a relationship. However, dominant ethical theories, such as deontology, proper virtues, and utilitarianism, dictate that relationships are hindrances to unbiased decision-making, especially in professional settings. This insinuates that a judge caring for a defendant or a therapist caring for a patient is similar to a mother caring for her child; these theories argue that watching makes one lose one’s autonomy. The dominant ethical theories contradict the idea that love is also one of the necessities for one to be moral. Therefore, it is significant that there is a redefining of love. Suppose love is redefined as one of the bases for caring and ethical acts and not a hindrance to one’s logic and reasoning. In that case, we can look for and apply phenomenological expressions of love to boost other people’s perceptions of life.
Casual Sex and Hookup Culture
The hookup culture is defined as a culture that embraces casual encounters, mainly sexual, that do not involve any emotional investment (Thorpe 624). SomeHookupse encountershookupde one-night stands or friends with benefits. Looking at hookup culture through the lens of love, my opinion is that the culture is contrary to love. As mentioned before, Hooks explains that casual sexual encounters are hookups in which individuals avoid emotional connections while being able to access the physical benefits of a romantic connection, which is mostly sex. Most individuals do not want to get into a relationship for various reasons. Either way, their actions demonstrate that they do not love or care about the people they are involved with. Most hookup relationships do not include trust, commitment, affection, respect, or any other elements of love that Hooks highlights, not to mention that the hookup culture requires that the people involved should know each other (Thorpe 625). With online dating apps, strangers are getting together to have sexual hookups without caring what the person they get involved with was doing before or will be doing afterward. There is always a brief interaction, which mainly involves small talk followed by sex, and then the relationship is over. Therefore, the hookup culture goes against the concept of love.
However, some may argue that hookup culture is all about self-love. Historically, men have always preferred casual relationships to women. However, today, society is encouraging women to be involved in hookups in more casual connections in the name of feminism and empowerment. Unfortunately, in most studies on how women feel about casual relationships, a majority of them reported feeling low self-esteem, regret, and even mental distress (Townsend et al. 3). As much as casual relationships present a sexist double standard, evidence shows that women do not enjoy them. Therefore, the idea that the hookup culture promotes self-love or self-confidence is not valid.
Moreover, the hookup culture does not only contrast with love, but it also contrasts with the ethics of chookuphe foundation of casual sex, which is having purely sexual relationships without ahookupimacy. Ethics of care require a vulnerability whereby one party becomes dependent on the other person. However, this kind of intimacy is rarely, if ever, exhibited in the hookup culture. Therefore, there is a contrast to ethics of care in that the culture emphasizes complete autonomy and does not have a space for interdependence (Verkerk 2hookupeople in hookup relationships view each other as a means to an end, while ethics of care requires that we consider humans as interdependent.

References

Hooks, Bell. All about love:hookupisions. Harper Perennial, 2001.
Thorpe, Shemeka, and Arielle Kuperberg. “Social motivations for college hookups.” Sexuality & Culture 25.2 (2021): 623-645.
Townsend, John Marshall, Peter K. Jonason, and Timothy H. Wasserman. “Associations between motives for casual sex, dephookups, self-esteem, and sexual victimization.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49.4 (2020): 1189-1197.
Verkerk, Marian A. “The care perspective and autonomy.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 4.3 (2001): 289-294.

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Assignment: Write a 3-4 double-spaced page paper (12 font, Times New Roman)

Topic: In All About Love, Bell Hooks defines love as a choice to nurture the growth of ourselves and the ones we care about. She says our society does not know how to love correctly and analyzes sexist attitudes where men are taught to fear love and women are taught to lie to get romantic attention, substituting romance for love. She says, “Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other is weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless (…) Naturally, anyone socialized to think this way would be more interested in and stimulated by scenes of domination and violence rather than by scenes of love and care”.

Ethics of Love

Hooks’ concern that society is not interested in scenes of love and care is raised by a moral theory called “the ethics of care,” which criticizes past moral philosophies for being interested in individualized notions of justice and autonomy while neglecting the importance of interpersonal relations.

For this paper, I would like you to Lecture  (124) EthicsCasualSex – YouTube ( file on Halwani and Kelly)

1. Briefly summarize Hooks’s criticisms of how we currently perceive love. Then, I would like you to think about why redefining love is necessary for an ethics of care (and discuss this in your paper).
2. I would like you to consider our course readings on casual sex and hookup culture (Halwani and Kelly). Analyze these readings alongside the hook’s text. Some questions you want to address are:

– is hookup culture or casual sex contrary to hookup? Why or why not?

As Kelly argues, hookup culture is centered on individual notions of autonomy, thus neglecting the importance of interdependence. If so, is hookup culture contrary to an ethics of care?

• Makhookupyour introduction has a clear thesis statement
• DO NOT use any sources outside of the course readings. I am interested in hookup analysis.
• CITE YOUR SOURCES.
• Your Works Cited page should begin on a new page.