Love and Cause: When Is Biomedically Enhanced Love Desirable?

ABSTRACT There is a philosophical debate about whether the use of biomedical enhancements to promote or sustain love in romantic relationships is compatible with the desirability of such love. We argue that enhancements are problematic in this respect only if they substantially replace the causal role of the beloved's identity in generating the lover's disposition to care. When enhancements remove psychological impediments to seeing the beloved ‘as they really are’ without introducing new (significant or overriding) inauthentic causes of love, they do not reduce the value of the love between the lover and the beloved. In this article, we discuss three conditions for love to be an intrinsically valuable good and the causal role of the beloved's identity for each of them. We show that the fundamental desirability of love understood in terms of these three conditions does not depend on whether enhancements are used, but on whether the identity of the beloved continues to play the right causal role. Enhancements can help us preserve valuable relationships and support the causes of love that are already in place. Finally, even if relatively less desirable than unenhanced love, enhanced love can still remain valuable and desirable in absolute terms.