Comment by nelox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nelox | Hacker News Reader

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The idea that morality is grounded in love rather than rules sounds appealing but it collapses once applied outside personal relationships. Love is subjective and unevenly distributed. People love their family more than strangers, their country more than foreigners. If morality is only love, then preference and bias become virtue. That is no foundation for fairness in law, politics, or daily life.

Rules and duties exist to correct for partiality. The point of justice is that it applies equally, even when love does not. A judge cannot acquit someone because she loves him, a doctor cannot favour a patient because he is charming. Love without principle too easily becomes nepotism or tribalism. The most brutal conflicts in history were driven by deep love for one’s own group, not lack of it.

Love matters for motivation. It can inspire people to act with kindness. But moral frameworks require more than sentiment. They need universality and consistency, which only rules and duties can provide. Murdoch’s vision mistakes a source of energy for the standard itself. Without shared norms, love does not scale beyond the private sphere.

It seems that you are conflating attachment with love, which is often done, but always wrong. They are absolutely not the same thing and are at odds with one another as often as they align, if not more often - as your examples illustrate.

It is possible to hold love for everyone, in any situation, regardless of the circumstances. Of course no one is perfect and so just because something is possible does not mean it always occurs. But this is not the point.

The point is that the origin of morality is love. In the absence of the experience of love, it is possible to approximate the correct behaviours to imitate it, but it is a pale and brittle imitation of real love-derived action and most often descends into immorality under pressure or nuance.

The modern justice system is a fantastic example of this. It doesn't work in any but the most extreme cases - and even then there is an argument to be made against it. Locking people up like animals doesn't improve society or help the offenders. It provides a temporary relief to victims but even that is hollow. Punishing children has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective for correcting behaviour. Why we think adults are different is a simply a lack of love.

The distinction between love and attachment is valid, but it does not solve the problem. Even if one defines love as universal, impartial goodwill, it remains aspirational and fragile. To say morality originates only in love is to assume a capacity that human beings rarely sustain in practice. That is precisely why societies construct rules and duties: to create reliable standards even when love fails.

The justice system is far from perfect, but dismissing it as a “brittle imitation” overlooks what it prevents. Most people are not saints. Universal love may be possible in theory, but history shows that in practice societies without enforceable norms often descend into cycles of revenge, corruption, or rule by the strongest. Systems of law are crude, but they are better than trusting every individual to embody unconditional love.

Rehabilitation and restorative justice models do exist, and they align with the spirit of love by seeking repair rather than punishment. But they are still structured by rules. Without those, there is no guarantee of fairness or safety. Love can inspire moral action, but rules are what make morality workable in communities of imperfect humans.

I agree with some of what you have said. But I feel that you are moving the goalposts slightly. I understood the discussion to be on the origin of morality. Implementing its upkeep is a separate issue.

However, to respond to your point:

I do agree that rules are an important component. But I would argue that rules only work insofar as culture supports them, and indeed may only be a codification of the underlying values already present. t Thus I would argue that the culture in which those rules are embedded is what is of importance. And thus we come back to love.

The essay goes into this, clearly means love in a different way to how you've taken it, and doesn't exclude the use of rules to codify it:

"Loving attention: a kind of just, patient, generous attention to others. This, she thinks, is what will improve the moral quality of our vision and put us in touch with reality as it truly is. Loving attention, she insists, is central to morality, and that is because it draws us out of ourselves towards the object of love, overcoming our habitual tendency to turn inward."

The issue of love's notorious inconsistency is especially damaging to using it as a foundation of an ethical system. If I acted when I loved something and then decided later on that I didn't love it and would make a different choice, which frame of mind do I use to evaluate the morality of the decision?

Philosophers have pretty much torn love apart as a basis for an ethical framework. It is true we're all very biased and love plays a role in how we perceive but morality has to be based on slightly more objective concepts like fairness, evidence and precedence that we have a chance of evaluating consistently when our feelings change.

I think it is unfortunate that you should pick examples of poor behaviour in our species and use it to justify your opinions. Pure, selfless love does exist. The fact people fail to live up to it at all times is an existentialist question. But the failure does not support what you are saying.

How we raise our children, the values we enshrine in our culture and the skills we prioritize are levers through which we can move substantially closer to a practical love-derived morality.

Saying that we haven't achieved something cannot be used as evidence of its impossibility, as much as we would like to.

I agree that in stressful moments people can fail to live up to an ideal. And in those cases it is useful to rely on rubrics. But the article in question is about the origin of morals. And thus I say again, the origin of morality, whether intuited, codified or otherwise, is love.

The main point is that love isn't an emotion. When love is present it can be felt in the body, but it also modifies thought.

Yes. Love is mammal behaviour. I know my hind brain is telling me to love my kids. Do you know your own mind?

This conception is simplistic, a straw man, and one that appears to be wholly ignorant of the Cosmopolitan tradition and reasonable criticisms thereof.

Perfect explanation of why love and reason are often opponents. We are humans, we have emotion, but alas not all are aware of their own minds.

if you make it a rule to do the most horrible things to children and women and men and the elderly, would it then be moral?

That would mean harming themselves and everyone they know. Who would agree to that and why? Such a person would not be of sound mind, and fit to be in a position make judgment on these matters.

State your case for this absurd rule. To paraphrase Hitchens, that which is asserted casually can be dismissed casually.

Many people do not have mind. That's why they stab each other with blunt instruments due to "disrespect".

A rule to harm people systematically cannot be moral because it contradicts the very point of morality

but we started with "morality is grounded in rules". what does "grounded in" means then?

how would you define morality?

Morality without rules is arbitrary and unpredictable. The thesis is that morality without rules isn’t workable. Maybe it’s clearer when replacing “rules” by “principles”.

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