Abstract
Andrew Cameron's The Logic of Love explores the moral valence of our emotions, insisting that emotions are not simply amoral reactions to environmental stimuli but a meaningful part of human engagement with the world that can and should be evaluated against the proper ‘logic of love’. Drawing on moral psychology, Scripture, and dogmatic theology, Cameron argues that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to make the ordering of our emotions a central priority in our moral formation.
The book begins with what Cameron later retroactively describes as ‘an exercise of oversharing’ (p. 194) in which he relates personal experiences to highlight the contrasting interpretations of human reactions offered by moral psychology and moral theology. He calls attention to the morally neutral framing of the former and the value-laden judgments of the latter to illustrate the gap between our contemporary instincts about emotions—as irrational and therefore categorically beyond reproach—and the Christian theological tradition's understanding of them as a quintessential part of our moral capabilities. As the book's subtitle, Christian Ethics and Moral Psychology suggests, Cameron is keen to explore some form of compatibility across these two approaches, and he makes a persuasive case that the distance between the fields and their assumptions is not as broad as our initial instincts would suppose.
The book's first part, containing three chapters, focuses on the work of moral psychology, broadly construed to include, in a citation from the social scientist Benjamin Voyer's description of the field, ‘every discipline concerned with human interaction—from philosophy and sociology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience’ (p. xvii). In this section, Cameron mines research from these disciplines in pursuit of a coherent definition of emotion and a comprehensive account of emotion's role in moral judgment. A thorough examination of multiple ‘taxonomies’ (p. 14) of emotions yields a valuable view of the varied human experiences we use the language of emotion to capture but also illustrates that developing a singular definition of the term is ‘basically impossible’ (p. 17). The chief contribution of chapter 1, then, is to show that the behavioural sciences generally accept a meaningful link between emotion and ethics but typically leave the nature of this link underdeveloped. Cameron's historical survey, however, does suggest some progress on this question in the twentieth century, setting up the turn toward psychological research in chapter 3.
Before pivoting to the insights of more recent moral psychologists, chapter 2 analyses the philosophical understanding of the relation of emotion and moral judgment in the field of ethics. Here, Cameron uses Kant and Nietzsche to establish two paradigms for this relationship, with Kant representing a strict separation between reason and emotion (and making ethics the purview only of the former) and Nietzsche epitomising a view of emotion as a more natural basis for human judgments (justifying a concomitant elevation of emotion over ethics as a result). While the work of each thinker is outlined quite quickly, the truncated summaries nevertheless sufficiently serve the argument of the book, as Kant and Nietzsche provide the two poles of a separation between emotion and ethics against which Cameron's project of rehabilitating a strong connection via the Christian tradition becomes clearer and more consequential.
With the limitations of these opposing approaches in place, Cameron uses the work of Svend Brinkman and, especially, Jonathan Haidt to note how newer work in moral psychology supports the contention that emotion has a valuable—and arguably necessary—role to play in the task of moral judgment. A concise recounting of Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory (pp. 43–46), for example, shows a clear emotional influence in each of the five domains of ethics, demonstrating the insufficiency of both Kant's and Nietzsche's alternatives. This analysis yields the summative conclusion of Part 1, which is that for all the historical efforts to separate reason and emotion in ethics, moral psychology shows us that emotions do function in morality, but the behavioural sciences are not adequately prepared to translate this insight into normative claims about how we should use our emotions morally. These disciplines need help from moral theology to have a more substantive impact.
Parts 2 and 3 provide this necessary theological engagement via scriptural resources and the reflections of influential Christian thinkers from the fourth through the twenty-first century, respectively. The biblical exegesis in Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5), while arguably more careful when engaging Greek texts (see the detailed appendix tracking the uses of epithumia in both the Septuagint and Greek New Testament on pp. 71–74), successfully supports the assertion that Christianity's scriptural tradition, in both Old and New Testaments, views emotion as a morally significant dimension of human life. The undertone of caution we have come to associate with desire in Christianity, Cameron rightly shows, is not based on a fair reading of this scriptural tradition, which views human desiring as a powerful gift that is both grounded in God and has the potential to lead us back to God. The danger, in this view, lies in the misuse of desire, not its existence.
This nuanced view of desire facilitates the transition to Part 3, which begins with chapters on Augustine and Aquinas, who both had plenty to say on the subject of desire and its misdirection. Indeed, Cameron uses the examination of Augustine to present a twofold meaning of the ‘logic of love’, first a ‘deliberative logic’ (p. 79) (flowing, in turn, from love's ‘ordinant logic’) that allows us to identify which of the many things we encounter truly deserve our love and then to put them in relation to each other; and, second, a normative ordering implied by the problematic experiences that arise from disordered love. While Augustine's thought points toward both dimensions of this logic of love, his life offers plentiful illustrations of the second one, so Cameron justifiably spends most of chapter 6 articulating the implications of Augustine's experience with disordered love. When he turns to Aquinas in chapter 7, then, Cameron offers a fuller explanation of the deliberative logic using the Dominican's strong teleological vision and detailed anthropology to demonstrate that the logic of love has a normative force.
Read together, chapters 6 and 7 show that embracing the normative order implied in the logic of love is no easy task; it requires a commitment to formation. Chapter 9 ultimately explores strategies for this process of formation, but before delving into that practical issue, Cameron uses the work of Sarah Coakley in chapter 8 to argue that the normative ordering of our loves is properly grounded in the God who is love, both protecting the discussion of formation from devolving into a Pelagian version of self-improvement and addressing concerns that talk of divine affections threatens classic assumptions about the impassibility of God. With these critiques considered, Cameron examines the contributions of Joan Chittister, a twentieth- and twenty-first century Benedictine writer who shares the best of both the Eastern and Western monastic traditions to present a vision for personal formation and the reformation of desire that simultaneously reorders our desires and calls attention to our need for community, supporting a logic of love that is properly attentive to both God and neighbor.
The book concludes with a chapter on ‘Affections, Passions and Modern Life’ that looks to show the application of these practices to everyday situations, making the case that one of the best things we can do is work to expand our sense of who, and whose interests, deserve our consideration in love. Thus, alongside any psychological analysis of our affective discomforts, Cameron insists, we need a robust, theological account of the way our loves should be ordered so that we can put our preoccupations in perspective. The rationale for this shift in modern assumptions amounts to a summary of the argument of the book: ‘that what we habitually call ethics and morality is more fruitfully construed as manifestations of love, or at least as forms of grappling with its logic’ (p. 211).
Taken as a whole and on its own terms, the book is successfully executed. Much like its subject, the text has its own logic and Cameron does an excellent job in keeping this logic at the top of the reader's mind with clear, succinct conclusions in each chapter that ensure the proverbial forest is never lost amid the detail of the trees. The author's sense of the impact of this logic, however, is not as sharply delineated. The book, for instance, makes a compelling case that love has a (theological) logic to it, and appropriately notes that this has ethical significance, but it does not delve as deeply into the details of this logic as a full consideration of the ethical importance of the emotions would seem to require. Certainly, there is an explicit indication that the goal is to align our human loves with the normative order of God's loving, but it seems that some additional specifics about the normative ordering itself might help, particularly if one is supposed to use the insights from the monastic traditions to train one's affections.
Such concerns are minor, though, and may simply reflect a difference in emphasis, or perhaps assumptions. There is, after all, a rich history of analyzing love's logic in the Christian tradition without seeking to overanalyze its applications. Whereas Aquinas offered a detailed ordering of charity in his Summa Theologiae, Augustine was no less an advocate for an ordering of love even as his ethic tends to be remembered for his less systematic exhortation to simply ‘love, and do what you will’ (Homily on 1 John 4:4–12, no. 8). In our current time, with the pluralistic presuppositions Cameron identifies in his introduction, simply establishing that there is a logic to love, and that this logic has normative potential, remains a meaningful achievement. To explore the implications and applications of this logic further is, in fairness, a subsequent project, and if anyone wants to take it up, they will find that Cameron has done them a service by laying a solid foundation for that analysis in this text.