Introduction

This chapter arises out of a larger project in moral philosophy with a working title, Love as a Guide to Morals. My task is to examine love as a sufficient basis for moral life. In this chapter, I address one facet of the larger moral picture: the important critical framework of intersectionality as a means of understanding layers of domination and oppression that contribute to human suffering. My suggestion is that intersectionality, as theoretically descriptive, alone does not provide a normative approach to human relationships. It needs a way of thinking about how normative moral commitments are shaped. My assertion is that love provides a useful compass to steer through the complexities of this particular moral maze.

Moral philosophers since David Hume have grappled with the difficult relationship between the empirically descriptive and the morally prescriptive. Hume's analysis has become known as “Hume's Law,” “Hume's Guillotine” (Black 1969, 100), or the is/ought question (1969, 421). His assertion was that it is impossible to derive “ought statements” from “is statements.” What is the case will never tell us what ought to be the case. Theoretical, sociological, political and critical analyses, though so important in helping us understand what is actually true rather than what merely seems true, are indispensable. However, alone it cannot move us to moral commitments without some way of forming value judgments.

Hume thought that values derive from the innate human sympathy people have for others and from common sense benevolence. In contradistinction to Immanuel Kant, he argued that moral commitments couldn't be rationally justified. Hume established a trajectory in moral philosophy that would have profound influence in the twentieth century. George Edward Moore, building on Hume, likewise rejected any rational defense of morality and preferred an intuitive basis (1905).

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the trend continued. Many agreed with Hume and Moore—that morality had no rational basis—yet rejected both intuitionism and innate sympathy. All that was left of the moral project was emotivism: moral statements are merely expressions of emotion and have no truth value.