Tucker Sigourney

This paper is about reasons to love people. I defend a “particularist” view: that the central reason to love someone is simply who she is. I begin with a framing question—“why do you love me?”—and a taxonomy of views of love's reasons (§1). I argue that a particularist view is demanded by that framing question (§2). But offering such a view requires saying something about who the beloved is—so I borrow an account of human nature from Edith Stein which, I hope to show, yields a compelling account of love's reasons (§3). I conclude with an argument that the extent to which a view of love's reasons genuinely answers our framing question is the extent to which it becomes particularist (§4).

In this paper, I suggest that the conversation about the norms of unconditional forgiveness would benefit from a framing in terms of the question “How should I respond when I am wronged?” Taking cues from Thomas Aquinas, I propose that the best answer is “You should love,” and that there are two acts of love in response to wrongdoing: forgiveness and correction. I sketch some principles for deciding whether to do one or the other, and the result is an account which agrees in large part with “unconditional forgiveness views”, except that it holds out correction as a second—and sometimes better—option. (This, I think, is a more complete and more helpful bit of guidance than you normally get just by answering the question “When should I forgive?”) Finally, I reorient to the contemporary conversation by considering some objections to unconditional forgiveness views, and then comparing other unconditional forgiveness views to my own with respect to the reasons for forgiveness.

Thomas Aquinas famously held that (1) theft is always wrong, and also that (2) it is permissible for a starving man to take the bread he needs, openly or secretly, from another. He reconciled these two positions by claiming that (3) in cases of great need, it is not theft to take someone else’s property when she does not need it herself. On its face, 3 looks like a theoretically costly concession that Aquinas is forced into in order to reconcile 1 and 2. Our first aim is to show that this is not so. We argue that 3 is in fact the only way to accommodate a set of intuitive norms of keeping and taking. Our second aim is to show that 3 has important implications for theories of property more generally: a plausible theory of property must acknowledge a foundational sense of 'belong' on which things belong to those who need them.

In this paper, I argue that the dominant contemporary accounts of forgiving do not capture what forgiving most centrally is. I spend the first parts of the paper trying to elucidate what it is that these accounts miss about forgiving, and to explain why I think they miss it. I spend the latter parts of the paper suggesting an alternative, which I call “the charity account.” This account draws much of its theoretical framing from the work of Thomas Aquinas, presenting forgiving as something importantly volitional and essentially loving.