In Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that love is a particular mode of caring. ‘It is an involuntary, nonutilitarian, rigidly-focused, and – as is any mode of caring – self-affirming concern for the existence and the good of what is loved’ (p. 40). What does ‘involuntary’, ‘nonutilitarian’ and ‘rigidly-focused’ mean? Frankfurt thinks that love is involuntary because we do not choose to love but fall into it. We choose to go to the dance, but we do not choose to love the person we dance with. Frankfurt thinks that love is nonutilitarian because we care for the object of our love, which can be ‘almost anything’, for its own sake. We love many things, including our pets, and, if we love them, we care for them even when doing so leaves us out of pocket. Lastly, Frankfurt thinks that love is rigidly focused because we love the particular thing rather than the type of thing the particular is. We love our children, but if our child were replaced by another just like him – the same face, and personality, and so on – it still would not be him: the child we love.

As I understand your question, what you want to know is whether I would love you in the proper romantic fashion if you were a worm. I must confess, that if your question is whether I would love you if you were a worm and had always been a worm, my answer is that I would not. I take it that your question is rather whether I would continue to love you, as I had before, if you were now suddenly a worm. At the risk of dodging this question, my aim here is only to show that I could love you just as I had before. I present three reasons that motivate this conclusion: conceivability, anti-essentialism and the scope of what is volitionally possible.

Can I conceive of you as a worm? It seems to me that I can. I can conceive of fantasy cases in which evil witches cast a spell that turns you into a worm. I can conceive of sci-fi cases in which evil scientists take your biomatter and splice it until all that’s left is worm. Can I conceive of loving you as a worm though? If I cannot, perhaps I cannot love you either. This is not yet a serious problem because although we must to some extent identify with our beloved, this does not entail that we must be able to conceive of identifying with our beloved. But your question is more particular still, and a conceivability problem which does arise is whether I can conceive of loving you as a worm as I had before. As I loved you before, I formed certain loving intentions, and these intentions were made possible because of beliefs I had about how to love you. A madman might continue to love you as a worm, since madmen might have previously thought it a possibility. But I am not a madman. Thus, from within the bounds of my possible loving actions, it’s not immediately obvious that I can conceive of my continuing to love you as I had before. And if I cannot, then perhaps I cannot continue to love you as I had before either.

One way to address this worry is to insist on conceivability. I can conceive of coming to identify with worm-like interests, because I can conceive of a good life for a worm. It involves things like moist soil, worm friends and the absence of birds. If you were a worm, then different things would be good for you, which would have serious ramifications for our relationship. If my sexual affections remain, for example, they might no longer be good for you. But surely my love would still be good for you. Unlike if you were a mountain lion, say, I could care for your interests while remaining present in your life, without the latter coming to compromise the former. And what could be more romantic than making available lots of wormly goods?

Nothing much, you might reply. A human caring for a pet worm casts romantic love in far too instrumental a light. However, by bringing into view not only your interests but our interests – our projects, from holiday plans to vision boards – I think I can make short work of this objection.

Many philosophers have argued that human lives have a narrative structure – humans create expectations about how their (love) lives should play out over time. When you were a human, you did this too, but now you are a worm this is entirely absent. But I am still human, and one of the projects I took up was to be with you in sickness and in health. Moreover, I took up this project on the understanding that you were also taking up the project of being with me in sickness and in health. In other words, being together was our project, not a his and hers project. That you are now a worm introduces various asymmetries to our relationship, but it does not change that being together was our project, and that this joint-project created conditions which still require fulfilment. If Frankfurt is right about love, these conditions needn’t be thought of as a burden. Others might be bound to their worms because of an unhealthy compulsion or an unshakable guilt, but my continued love for you could result from what Frankfurt calls the ‘elementary constituents of volitional reason itself’ if, by my loving you, I acquired final ends to which I now cannot help being bound (pp. 38, 43). In fact, conceived of this way, you becoming a worm is not so different than if you were to suffer from dementia.

Surely, though, all this being conceivable does not foreclose the question as to whether any of this is possible. When I amass your wormly goods, who benefits from these goods? Would you still be you if you were a worm?

We might say, surely not! Worms are detritivores – the value they derive from decaying roots and animal matter depends on them having gizzards and no teeth. Humans are not detritivores – the value they derive from such things is different. If the value of wormly goods comes down to a difference in the respective natures of worms and humans, then particular normative standards apply to humans because they are a particular type of creature. Presumably, something is essential about you – your human digestive capacities, your genetic makeup – without which you would no longer be you. And even if such things were not essential, we often say other things are essential – your self-conscious mind, perhaps, plus whatever are the necessary conditions for personal identity – without which you would not be you. No matter how I conceive of you, you are just not there to be loved as a worm.

Let’s take these points in turn. A human digestive capacity is not essential to what makes you the type of being you are – many humans lose their ability to digest in old age, and they do not stay human because of their new false teeth. Genetic makeup is a more difficult case. Humans have a genotype which admits of genetic variation, but there might be functional limits to this variation beyond which you are no longer you (e.g. sliminess, limblessness and other phenotypic worm-traits). However, these limits are relative always to specific environments. It’s true that nobody I know has developed phenotypical traits commonly associated with worms. But if the sun’s rays were to irradiate human embryos in just the right environmental conditions, then the relevant genetic changes might occur. If there is a possible world in which you turn into a worm, then it turns out you can change species. Widen our possibility horizons, in other words, and it seems I could love you as a worm because your genetic makeup does not entail that remaining a human is strictly necessary.

It’s undeniable that something would be missing, however. As a worm, you’d no longer have those distinctly human parts and traits – a self-conscious mind, episodic memory, the language instinct, a social life, or the capacity to integrate your projects and commitments over time. Which of these are strictly necessary to remain the same person and how these components relate are tricky questions. For as long as you don’t give up on this line of questioning, however, I admit I don’t have a ready answer. As a worm, you’d still have a mind of sorts, although probably not a mind capable of self-consciousness. For some, the intuition will be strong that without that you are just not around to be loved anymore. However, I believe I could love you on the grounds that your baser animal-self remains. In fact, in terms of what’s possible, me continuing to love you as a worm seems just as possible as me continuing to love you were you to slip into a coma.

Of course, such a love is not without its limits. We can make sense of these limits by following the philosopher Rachel Cooper’s lead in her article How Might I Have Been? and making allies of Harry Frankfurt and the philosopher David Lewis. On Lewis’s view, I, who exist in the actual world, am bound to this world and only exist in the possible world in which you are not a worm. Now, I didn’t plan my life with you on the assumption you might become a worm. Forgive me, I did not even consider such a possible world until you presented it to me just now. But I surmise that a course of action is, as Cooper says, ‘volitionally possible [if] it occurs in a possible world that is consistent with a person’s deepest cares’ (p. 507). Thus, coma or worm, it might be consistent with my deepest cares that your sudden condition provokes in me the desire to stay by your side. Moreover, coma or worm, it might be consistent with my deepest cares that I never allow myself to leave your side, even if the time came when I no longer loved you as I had before.

I say ‘might’, because there is a possibility that I do not know my deepest cares. Although I don’t think myself a superficial lover, you suddenly becoming a worm might focus my attention on cares I never knew I had – for example, that my beloved always keep their human-traits (or at least not come to have worm-traits). Much like, to borrow Cooper’s example, a teenager who comes to learn about their cares by breaking up with his girlfriend and then, ‘through feeling upset at the split, discovers only too late that they were in love’ (p. 506); I might discover my deepest cares through experiencing your transformation, only I’d learn that my love for you had always been conditional on you not becoming a worm. Going in the other direction, I might come to discover some very strange things about my cares. If worm-love is my deepest care, then that you were once a human might repulse me! Or else, if I am not so repulsed, I might find myself drawn to humans who used to be worms! Heck, my deepest darkest care might be nothing less than to be the human pet of a possible Sandworm, God of Arrakis.

Don’t be too worried about such discoveries coming to pass. They are not of equal concern, obviously, but any such discovery would be far more likely if I were actually a teenager. The perils of teenage love suggest a minimal amount of self-knowledge is necessary for romantic love. I think I know myself well enough. I’m not about to come out of the closet by dumping you for a prized showworm.

Maybe that’s just because there are no prized showworms. But there are plenty of other earthworms in the garden-patch. How can I say that anything about this worm makes it different from that worm? When I consider the attributes that you have – the worm in my pocket – and I compare them to the attributes of any other worm, at first glance there’s not much to set you apart. Therefore, you’d end up awfully replaceable as a worm, and I’d never have thought you replaceable loving you as I had before. What if the sci-fi scientists who turned you into a worm, after seeing the error of their evil ways, gave me the opportunity to turn any worm I wanted back into the human you! Why should I care which worm? More to the point, what if the witches gave me a similar opportunity, but, because witches who see the error of their evil ways are still a little bit evil, they stole you from my pocket, hid you away, and gave me until midnight to bring them any worm which they’d turn back into the human you! What then should I do?

My answer is that I should try to find you because my love for you is rigidly focused. Frankfurt tells us this about love: that we love the particular thing rather than the type of thing the particular is (p. 40). Romantic love is what some philosophers call a de re attitude – I love you, the individual, rather than your specific collection of attributes. Upon realizing you are a worm, I don’t go ahead and fall in love with your identical twin, because my beloved is the object of a de re attitude born of a historical moment, and I didn’t fall in love with your identical twin, I fell in love with you. Thus, I hurry to find an individual before the clock strikes twelve. I don’t just give any old worm to the reformed scientists, even if there are many such worms around.

I still hesitate before handing you over though, and not just because I hope these witches and scientists are trustworthy. I hesitate because your language faculty is about to be restored, and I worry about what question you’ll ask me next. What if you ask: ‘given how you loved me as a worm, how do you love me now that I am a human again?’ That your follow-up question is possible places me in a double-bind. If anti-essentialism is true, then I guess you could be a worm, but then if my deepest cares involve loving a worm, what else about my deepest cares am I unaware of? I can’t have the romanticism with which I stuck by possible worm-you end up alienating the actual human-you from me. So how can I safely answer ‘Yes’ to your original question? However, if essentialism is true, then were you to become a worm, I guess it would no longer really be you, so my answer to your original question must be ‘No’. But you, my girlfriend who asked the question in the actual world, are clearly waiting for a simple one-word answer, and you look rather mad at the idea I wouldn’t love you as a worm.

So how can I worm my way out of this one? Frankfurt’s conception of love goes some way to answering the question of whether I could love you if you were a worm. It does not, however, provide a fail-safe reply to the question of whether I would love you in this condition. That the object of my love could change radically over time is only the first step to answering your original question, a question which boyfriends like me can only answer by making clear the limits of our love as we find them.