Danielle Levitan, PhD

Vita

Danielle Levitan is present as Minerva Foundation fellow at a PostDoc level. She is working in the areas of moral and political philosophy, philosophy of love, moral psychology, value theory, and normative ethics. Her current project What’s Love Got to Do with It? is about promises, attachment, duty and autonomy, and their role in normative ethics. She also maintains a strong interest in Kant which complements her interests in the theme love and duty. In March 2022, she joined the Zentrum für Ethik und Philosophie in der Praxis at LMU as a researcher by the Minerva Research Fellowship. (Publication: “The Problem of Authority and Divorce,” Keele Law Review, Volume 2 (2021), 63–91).

Research at the ZEPP

Kant claimed that “Love is a matter of feeling, not of willing, and I cannot love because I will to, still less because I ought to (I cannot be constrained to love); so a duty to love is an absurdity”. But what about a duty of love? when I use the term a ‘Duty of Love’, I mean duties of intimacy, relationship, devotion, desire for happiness towards the loved one, and so on. These duties are manifested in actions. These are necessary things that we must do—not merely feel. Although I believe that children are in need of parental love in its authenticity, there is no moral obligation to supply or to continue loving. Intimate relationships seem to be all about personal goods. I want to add another view, namely the “Bads” of Personal Relationship Goods.

The guiding thought behind this proposal is comprised of the following two parts. On the one hand, and despite changes in both political reality and in some of the relevant scholarship, a fairly traditional, deontological normative theory is still the way to go. After all, I believe that the underlying deontological values, principles, and insights remain as valid and important as ever, at least when it comes to the most general and fundamental parts of moral philosophy. On the other hand, the fact that something is valuable or that it is good does not necessarily mean that we should care about it, and so when we love something this can shape our preferences and can guide and limit our conduct. What a person loves helps them to determine the choices that she makes and the actions that she is willing to undertake. In this research project, I propose to conduct my research by focusing on the value of personal relationships and related values, and on the difficulties faced by moral theories today.