Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
Exodus 20:12 (KJV)
We’re taught again and again that we are to show our relatives, and especially our parents, a higher level of respect than we grant to others. Usually, we make others work for the respect we show them (at least beyond the base respect some of us may grant all conscious beings). Our close relatives, however, are not required to earn their respect. Often, this turns into unconditional love. And, of course, cultural norms have reinforced the idea that children should unconditionally love their parents and parents should do the same for their children, with these notions usually being extended to siblings.
How does this not undermine the very concept of love?
All we are doing is determing our so-called ‘love’ from genetic relatedness. This served a purpose in our evolutionary past, but it is no longer needed for the civilized world. We demean the notion of love by using this ‘basis’. Through unconditional love we are telling our parents and children that, no, we do not love you for the person you are: we love you for no good reason at all. It isn’t your good nature, your heart, your intelligence, or how you affect the lives of those around you. No. Instead, it is your genes.
Our love should be wholly conditional. Anything less is an insult to the concept of love and, more importantly, an insult to those we claim to love.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: evolutionary history, Genetic relatedness, Unconditional Love |
For the Sake of Science 
Spoken like a true non-parent. If parents didn’t love unconditionally, most children wouldn’t survive long enough to return the favor.
If you truly loved your children unconditionally, then you would be insulting them as human beings. When you say “I love you unconditionally” you are saying your love is based upon nothing except your genetic relatedness. That is not a reason to love.
If you truly loved your children unconditionally, then you would be insulting them as human beings. When you say “I love you unconditionally” you are saying your love is based upon nothing except your genetic relatedness. That is not a reason to love.
If you ever have children, and you are able to love your children because of their ability to soil their diapers, puke on you as you pat their back, and wake you repeatedly during the night with their consistently needy cries, then feel free to write a book on it.
Until then color me skeptical of some college kid who probably couldn’t handle caring for a gerbil.
Other than that, the reason we love our parents after we are grown is an ancient idea obviously unknown to you – it’s called gratitude
You’re confusing ideas and setting up strawmen. My argument is that unconditional love fits no meaningful definition of love. Can you tell me what your basis is for loving your children, siblings, and/or parents without condition? Is there one beyond the genes you share?
I never said love for one’s children is based upon the reasons you cited. That is a gem of a strawman.
Your ‘point’ about gratitude is short-sighted and off-base for this post. First, I am talking about loving parents, children, and siblings without condition. If gratitude is the reason we love our parents, then in instances where there is no gratitude to be had, love would be expected to be withheld. That is conditional love and thus not on point. Second,I doubt most people have single reasons for loving their parents once they’ve grown, anyway. If they do, gratitude isn’t a bad one, but it’s far from universal. For you to claim otherwise is wrong – and it’s easy to show why. Take a foster child that was taken from a drug addict of a parent at birth. There is nothing for which to be grateful from that person. The drug user did nothing beside endanger her fetus.
Unconditional love is the primary definition of love. In real life, children (actually, most people) for most of their youth do very little to ‘earn’ our love – love counts for very little if we have to gain by doing a particular thing or set of things that somebody else thinks is ‘love worthy’.
Seriously, what did you do to earn your parents love? If you don’t fulfill their expectations, are they going to stop loving you? Is that how you would advise someone to raise their children?
We are talking some serious dysfunction here.
What ‘reasons’ do a child have to give to get their parents to love them? What reasons did you give yours?
I think you are confusing ‘unconditional love’ with mindlessly devoting oneself to another person; that isn’t what unconditional love is – it is finding the humanity in others and the ability to forgive others, in the same way we desire to be forgiven when we fail in some way.
The crux of it of course is the understanding that we all fail others in a myriad of ways – and if we expect others to forgive us and love us despite those failings, than we have to be willing to do so to those who hurt us. That is the only way any sort of love really works, otherwise it’s simply paying back obligations to one another. This is something we can extend to anyone, not just those we happen to be related to.
People love their spouses based upon who they are as people, the connection the two have, etc. That is precisely conditioned love. That holds meaning because it has a worthwhile basis.
A child is deserving of love due to his inate good nature. Understanding that how one raises a child affects the very behavior of the child is key to understanding that a lack of fulfillment of expectations often reflects more on the parent than the child. Indeed, the child is largely limited by his environment.
More important is intent. Teaching a child that good intentions are important and then seeing that the child has learned and understood that (while also recognizing the child’s ability to comprehend) gives a good indication of his deservedness of love. In most instances, the child does deserve it.
I can find the humanity in Hitler through his love of art. That does not make him deserving of love.
We must have a basis for our love that can be extended to everyone. That does not mean it will be extended to everyone, but the principles behind our love should remain the same for every person. To have love that is reserved for our close relatives is to prove my point – we ‘base’ this love on genetic relatedness. That’s a poor version of love.
Well, no, that is what might attract them in the first place, but as someone who is married and has children unlike yourself, and has observed hundreds of other couples whose relationships last, it has to be more than that, and there are numerous times where we have to love selflessly and self sacrificially – i.e unconditionally.
Again, I have to point to your utter clueless lack of experience; children don’t have an inate good nature – they are innately self-absorbed and demanding; they have to be taught to do what is kind, loving, and selfless. And the patience to instruct and model for them kindness and good behavior is part of the necessity of unconditional love.
Why would you have to teach these things if they are ‘innate’? Seriously, talk to your parents, they will set you straight on your hopelessly naive idealism.
The problem isn’t seeing that Hitler isn’t deserving of love, it is assuming that you are. It isn’t clear why Hitler was who he was, but you can bewt it wasn’t because his parents unconditionally loved him.
Well, again, such a basis comes with the humility to admit our own shortcomings. When we have the maturity to see that we ourselves aren’t particularly loveable, and yet desire and benefit from the unconditional love of others, then we might find it in and of our self to love others.
It really comes down to ‘who begins’ – if one is constantly waiting for others to ‘deserve’ our love, then one pretty much ends up spending their life never loving anyone – and in turn, being unlovable.
That’s a good description of the results of love. It has nothing to do with unconditional love, however.
Human morality is innate. As such, all humans are innately good upon birth. The shaping of this good nature is largely dependent upon the parent(s).
Maybe you’re confusing “innate” with “instinctive”?
The entire point of this post is that this unconditional love between close relatives that is preached by society is easily shown to be worthless. If a mother should unconditionally love her children, then Hitler’s mother should have loved her son. This is inanity as Hitler was so clearly undeserving. To say he was is to say his genes somehow granted him privileges to his mother’s love.
We may interpret unconditional love from others as meaningful love and therefore love them in return. That does not mean that their love ever had a basis beside genetic relatedness.
Plenty of people deserve my love and therefore have it. Plenty of people also love me, hopefully because I deserve it. I am sure I am not an isolated case.
No, it’s a good description of the day in and day out choice to love someone unconditionally; perhaps you will learn this if you are ever in serious long lasting committed relationship.
Again, if you ever have children, and raise them, you will find out that children left to themselves are capable of all sorts of behaviors that would be considered immoral, especially in an adult. Children must be taught to share, not take things from others, tell the truth, be unselfish, etc. Until then this is simply a college kid fantasy with absolutely no basis in any sort of observed reality.
I am not sure the distinction here is important enough to matter.
Ignoring your assumptions about my personal life, if we are speaking of a spouse or significant other, then I’ve already established that that love is conditioned – it is based upon the nature of the person (at least in large part for most individuals). If the person was poor natured as perceived by the spouse at the moment the two met, love would be unlikely because that person did not meet the conditions of the potential spouse.
You glossed over the point. An innate sense of morality makes infants worthy of love. The fact (as I acknowledged) that children must have their ideas of morality shaped and honed by parents has no bearing on the fact that their sense of morality exists prior to the shaping and honing.
Serious? It entirely matters. It can be argued that Mozart was innately talented in music. That does not mean he did not need to be taught certain things. Something which is instinctive, however, does not need to be taught.
Hitler’s immorality was the result of several things, perhaps his mother’s poor parenting included. Assuming she taught him to be racist and hateful, she should have expected him to grow up to be such. It would be, on some level, acceptable for her love to continue because, despite Hitler being a bad person, she perceived him as being good – in other words, he met her expectations and some conditions of her love, insofar as we can speculate about the thoughts of Hitler’s mother. I doubt, however, she would have encouraged genocide; it’s possible it was within her mind, but that’s more speculation. Assuming she found murder to be egregious, her love for Adolf would have minimal justification come 1945.
That’s out of bounds.
Love is not obligated and I did not say it was. I gave a potential reason for a person loving another. Joe may love his mother because he perceives her as caring and loving him so deeply that he cannot feel anything but thanks and gratitude and wonder at her good nature. That, however, does not mean his mother’s love, if unconditional, is based upon anything worthwhile.
Love should ideally be between two people who know each other deeply enough to be aware of how they should treat each other. That typifies the best relationships.
You have again confused ‘establishing’ with ‘stating’ – you didn’t in anyway ‘establish’ that love is conditioned, whatever you think that means. A person may or may not be attracted to another for a variety of reasons. And at some point they may choose to love that other person and commit themselves to them. At that point if they plan on having a successful relationship, then they better be prepared to love the other person even when they fail to ‘deserve’ love, or they won’t have a relationship for long; again, this is a matter of experience, something I know you don’t have because you wouldn’t have this opinion if you did.
Michael have you ever even been around an infant? In what way do they express an ‘innate morality’ that causes us to love them?
Both are function of genetics however; there is no evidence of a genetic morality.
Wow, talk about convoluted. How do you know Hitler wasn’t good by some measure? If he was a chimp and he was part of a group of chimps that harassed and killed another group of chimps and drove them from a certain territory, would he be immoral?
Again, this is all convoluted beyond comprehension; we apparently can do nothing to deserve love and yet be perceived as having done something to deserve love and as a result be loved by others.
We should only love others when they deserve love, and yet a person is apparently born innately deserving love, which they can lose by doing things which don’t deserve love, even if that loss is caused by people who love us for the wrong reasons!
Do you write this all down, or make it up as you go along?
If anything the Christian proscription is superior in its simplicity; “Love others as Christ has loved you”
Well, when and if you experience such a relationship, you will discover that we all have failings and shortcomings undeserving of love; and yet we choose to love despite that realization, in part because we are honest about our own shortcomings.
How do I know someone would hold this opinion? They don’t have experience. How do I know they don’t have experience? They hold this opinion. Sound.
Anyway, I think you’re under the impression I believe failures to deserve love are easy to come by. They are not. Love is a high commitment. It takes a lot of undeserving behavior in order to lose one’s love, at least ideally.
Morality stems, in large part, from altruism. All humans have this inherently. Incidentally, most other apes do as well. They just tend to be more blatant about their altruism being for ultimately selfish means than humans. I’d suggest reading one of the many books available on human morality rather than make this another lengthy discussion.
See above.
Hitler may have been good by some measure. In fact, I would argue that he was good in that he wanted to improve the lives of Germans through the creation of a country centered on the arts. However, I think we can both agree that the whole genocide ordeal cancels that out by several fold.
If you wouldn’t consider Hitler ever potentially worthy of your love, you can justify him being worthy of his mother’s love unless you appeal to genetic relatedness, thus debasing any meaningful notion of love.
Yes, Joe can do nothing to deserve love yet be loved by his mother, even despite her recognition that he perhaps hasn’t done anything deserving. It happens all the time. You’ve made that very argument about babies. You’ve said several times that babies do nothing to earn love (except be human), yet I assume you loved your kids from birth.
I still don’t know what your justification is for loving your children or mother without condition beyond your genetic relatedness.
A parent should not stop loving their children when their children do something which is not their fault. Really, that idea should apply to any love.
Christ is not a simple subject.
Hopefully our more deserving aspects are strong enough to outweigh our shortcomings. Love is something which can at one moment be felt and at another be taken away. It happens every day. The basis is often that one’s shortcomings outweighed the deserving aspects.