Imagine this: Jack and Vika were lovers living together in Houston. Unfortunately, on a summer trip to Paris, their plane crashed. Jack died; Vika witnessed shrapnel cut his throat. She, however, survived, but was in a coma for some time. Here’s where things get weird – and where your intuitions will be tested. When she finally returned to Houston, a perfect clone of Jack was waiting for Vika. The clone has the exact same features as the original Jack: the same birthmarks, the same memories, the same preference for white wine over red, the same love and affection for Vika. Cloned-Jack even remembers the plane crash: he went blank when the shrapnel hit, then woke up in a hospital bed.
Now, consider Vika’s perspective. Could she love this clone of her beloved the same way she loved the original? Could her love for Jack simply transfer to his clone, picking up where they left off before that unlucky flight to Paris? Or, perhaps better, think of the person you love in your own life. Could you love that person’s clone in the same exact way? The intuitive answer, I think, is no (and, for what it’s worth, that’s the answer given by the overwhelming majority of people I’ve asked about this thought experiment). Vika cannot love cloned-Jack in the same way she loved Jack. She cannot simply transfer her love to the clone.
This thought experiment aims to serve as a cognitive tool to help us understand our inability to love the cloned version the same way we love our beloved, and reveal something important about the nature of love. As I believe this thought experiment shows, love is arational – meaning that love cannot be rationally justified or explained.
So why can’t Vika transfer her love to the clone? After all, her love for Jack was the product of a sensitivity to certain characteristics and traits of his, a sensitivity that allowed her to love him for who he is. If the clone now possesses these characteristics and traits, it seems odd to say that Vika cannot possibly love the clone: all of the features that she originally loved are replicated! Indeed, it seems that if she were to give up her love for Jack only because he is cloned, it calls into question whether she truly loved him in the first place. But that’s exactly what our intuitions seem to suggest: the clone can’t be loved in the same way, despite all the similarities.
So what is it about the actual clone that makes it difficult to see how Vika could love it in just the same way? I suggest that her inability to love the clone stems from how the relationship has been altered, primarily due to what I’ll call an ontological shift.
The beloved has changed, and that shift alters what her love can be
We can understand this shift as follows. Jack and cloned-Jack are identical. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are the same. Although ‘identical’ implies a high level of similarity and exactness between two things, so much so that they are indistinguishable from each other, it does not mean they are the same. Consider: the white mug I use every morning for coffee is identical to the white mug in my cupboard. In fact, they were made from the same ceramic on the same day by the same person. Yet, we cannot say they are the same because of this. There is an ontological difference between the mugs, even though we call them identical.
The implication here is that when there is an alteration to the ontological status of the beloved – when there is a shift that has occurred in the beingness of our beloved – then the love we have for the beloved comes apart: it is altered because its intentionality – what it is about – is altered. If we say that Vika loves Jack in a specific way, when Jack is replaced by a clone, something significant has changed. Even if the clone looks and behaves exactly like Jack, Vika can’t love the clone in exactly the same way she loved Jack. The beloved has changed, and that shift alters what her love can be.
Let’s go back to the coffee mugs. Imagine you have a favourite. You love it, for some reason. But one day it breaks. You pull the identical mug from the cupboard and start using it instead. You might love the new mug because it reminds you of the original, but it would be strange to say you love it in exactly the same way: part of the value of the replacement is that it recalls the value of the first. You haven’t simply ‘transferred’ your love from the broken mug to the new one, but developed a new love. This is because love is directed at something specific, and what that something is shapes the kind of love we can have. Even if a new mug – or a clone – is identical to the original in every visible way, the fact that it is not the same alters the directionality of love: the fact that it is not the same has an impact on what we are affectively able to do. (What this means for Vika is that, down the road, after she’s been able to process the whole cloning issue, she may develop a genuine love for the clone. But it wouldn’t be the same love as she had for the man who died in the plane crash. It would be something new.)
To substantiate this argument, consider the epistemic problem that appears in our case. By the epistemic problem, I do not mean the obvious sense in which Vika’s awareness that Jack is cloned might influence her ability and desire to love the clone. On the contrary, my concern is that, if she had not known that the clone she met at home after returning from the hospital was indeed a clone, she would mistakenly love the clone just as she loved Jack. It is intuitive to think that, in such a case, her love is not only directed at the wrong subject, but she’s not loving the clone the same way she loves her beloved, since that part of her life story has ended. We can say she’s building another love, unintentionally, with the clone. But Vika’s love is misguided: she’d mistaken her love for the clone as the love for Jack.
To reduce someone to an object is to deny their subjectivity, freedom and agency
Loving the clone can be morally problematic, too. Our beloved is not just the object of our love. They are also a subject in love – that is, a person from whom flows forth an abundance of love for us. Both lovers are subjects to each other’s love; the beloved is an irreplaceable fount of love which is attracted to ourself. This is why, as the philosopher Alexandra Gustafson puts it in the context of unrequited love: ‘When in love, we usually have a deep desire that our beloved love us back. If they don’t, it can pain us very much.’
However, it seems that if Vika, upon returning to Houston, simply transfers her love for Jack to the clone, she will no longer experience the beloved as both a subject in love and the object of love, but only as an object of love. This is bad because, as French existentialists tell us, to reduce someone to an object is to deny their subjectivity, freedom and agency. This is a typical failure to recognise and care about another. This is a moral failure. You should not love someone because she is a reminder of an ex.
What does all of this – and particularly the ontological shift – say about the nature of love? Much of this thought experiment is founded upon the presence or absence of reasons for loving someone. In general, there are two common views in philosophy about the rationality of love as an emotion. On a view that is called rational love, we love because we have good reasons to do so: Vika loves Jack because he is self-sufficient and handsome. Love is grounded in rationality. On another view, love is arational: it is not justified by reasons. It is not the sort of thing that is amenable to rationality. As the philosopher Laurence Thomas once put it in his essay ‘Reasons for Loving’ (1991): ‘no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational.’
One of the reasons we should accept that love is arational is what philosophers of love call the ‘problem of particularity’. If it is true that Vika loves Jack for some identifiable reasons – such as that Jack is self-sufficient and handsome – then it is not clear why she cannot transfer her love to the cloned version of Jack, whose physical and character traits are identical, and therefore the same reasons she had for loving Jack could equally be applied to the clone. If love is rational, then we really cannot explain Vika’s inability to love cloned-Jack the same way she loves Jack. But love does not work that way: it seems to exist beyond the bounds of rationality – which makes it all the more mysterious and more powerful.
