Love as a "moral" emotion?

It's not often that the journal Ethics (edited by my esteemed colleague John Deigh) publishes funny articles, but the rejoinder by Elijah Millgram to David Velleman's 1999 article "Love as a Moral Emotion" (requires JSTOR) certainly qualifies (perhaps as wickedly funny). If your institution subscribes, you can access Professor Millgram's article here. An excerpt:

"The Kantian element [in Velleman's account of love] is that you are supposed to love that person as a rational being or, more precisely, an 'idealized, rational will' (p. 344); what you are supposed to love in them is 'the capacity to be actuated by reasons,' the 'capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us' (p. 365)....

"Velleman confirms the point I want to make here by calling your rational self your 'true self' (p. 365). It is not a new observation that when someone tells you that x is your 'true interest,' or that x is what we 'truly want,' or that x is someone's 'true home,' we can be pretty sure that x is not actually in your interest, that we don't actually want x, and that x is not actually his home. This use of 'true' might as well be a negation operator, and when Velleman tells us that our rational selves are our true selves, he is (inadvertently) acknowledging that they're not actually our selves at all....

"In a surprising book-length essay, Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) argues that what he calls 'crystallization' is a central feature of romantic love. One never, he thinks, loves a person as that person is. Instead, one loves an idealized fantasy of perfection that obscures the person from view, in something like the way that salt crystals growing on twigs in the Salzburg salt mines obscure the twigs from view. Velleman has produced an account that...ends up as Kantian crystallization, that is, treating empirical persons as the occasions for fantasies of Kantian practical rationality...."

Tired of Kantian fantasies about love? On a different note, here's what the scientists are saying.