Interesting article.
We love only to the extent that we hate the opposite of what we love.
I am not yet convinced. :-)
Parents could love their children, care for them, help and teach
them without hating anybody else.
One concept could be to love some people and don't care about (but also don't hate) some other ...
In this specific example, the meaning was that if you love, say, your child, then you will hate someone who would harm it. True, there are people who forgave their child's killer or rapist etc., but this just shows the weakness of the analogy, not the principle (or it shows they held other values, like equanimity, that outwrestled their love for their child). I have to come up with these examples to make my ideas clearer, but really nothing depends on them. The essence of the argument is that you can't value something (i.e. freedom, pleasure, knowledge, etc.) without disvaluing its opposite. Our values are necessarily binary: there's 2 sides to them. Too many people today pretend they can be for something without being against something else. So for example people try to be atheists without being polemical atheists. It's one of the reasons I appreciate vegans, feminists, social justice warriors, etc., cos at least they wear their agonistic nature on their sleeve. I mean, if it's objectively true that we shouldn't eat animals, like the vegan believes, then of course vegans should be doing everything they can to convert the rest of us! Of course they can't sit at a table with meat-eaters and not think more lowly of them, and not think of themselves as morally superior. What else would we expect? Only a fundamental misapprehension of human nature would make us expect, or demand, otherwise.
Complicated topic ... I understand the idea that a trait can only be remarkable if the opposite exists. But in case of love the question is if hatred is the opposite of love? To know that I love someone I need not to hate someone else (to be able to feel the difference). I just claim the opposite of love is indifference. So I can know what love is because I also know that I don't have deep feelings for others ... So actually I would not necessarily argue against 'your' two-side-theory, but I would argue about what the opposite of love is. :)
If it is objectively true to eat no meat ... we will never know. Everybody has his own subjective (and possibly well founded) 'truth', but that depends on so many things, ones gustatory sense, environmental and health related aspects, our own moral values and believes, ... right up to the question why the universe exists :-) , so that I guess there will never be an agreement (or at least not intermediate term) about the objective truth.
Do you think in case atheists are objectively right that God doesn't exist they should do everything to convince everybody about it? Actually I see it like that, that even if I am convinced (or strongly believe) to be right I respect that other people follow other ways of life than I do ... To tolerate even 'wrong' opinions could sometimes be objectively better than always fighting against them. :)
And concerning vegans again: I fully respect them, even if I don't belong to them. Not everything is about morally superior or not. I just decided to eat meat from time to time, but that's a personal decision, and I really see no reason to think it was better in general than deciding not to eat meat ...
Well like you say, the original topic is complicated, and now your new topic here is ethics and morality and what we should do in different cases, and that's even more complicated!
So yeah that's just a very long discussion! I'd rather just go and read one more of your articles. In fact, that's what I'm gonna do! :)
;-)
Don't love just fuck