Of Soulmates and Old Spouses: How to be a Romantic Kantian about the Ethics of Love

This paper introduces and defends the foundations of a comprehensive Kantian view of the ethics of love, and shows how this relates to the ethics of respect. The view is Kantian insofar as it maintains that everyone shares a feature that makes them lovable. But it maintains that, due to the metaphysics of this feature, particular qualities of people provide reasons for love. This allows us to account for both the stability of lovability whilst also making the justification of love romantic. In the second half of the paper, I argue that the view, when properly supplemented, can account for patterns of partiality that have come to dominate the discussion of the ethics of love.