@Audiobellum said:
If we can accept that love is an emotion or desire, then we have to accept that love isn't necessarily merit-worthy; claiming other would be an appeal to emotion fallacy. Also, notice how we don't see other emotions or desires as being necessarily merit-worthy.
The problem I see in most people's confusion about love, is that they try to treat it as something divorced from basic biological impulses. Fraternal love/compassion/sympathy is simply the mammalian impulse that encourages supporting your group. It's good (beneficial), because it's a survival trait, even to modern humans. This doesn't require any ethical judgement -- even though there are probably cases where fraternal love does harm, overall, it's beneficial.
Romantic love is the impulse to procreate. It can result in other behavior, just like any instinct can, but it came about to keep us reproducing, so it was hugely beneficial to our species. People speak of love changing over time, but that only applies if you don't consider it to be centered on making and raising children. It only seems different because you're at a different point in the process.
Even in an over-populated world, some procreation is necessary, so it's still a beneficial instinct.
The same impulse is responsible for rape, which is fairly common in animals since it creates offspring which inherit the impulse. In modern humans, it's not as viable a strategy, but we haven't been modern long enough to greatly change our instinctive behavior, and although we are all reasoning creatures, our reason is largely devoted to reaching the goals our instinct sets for us.
Human behavior is only confusing if you forget that we're just animals at our core, and that instinctive behavior can be harmful to an individual and beneficial to our species.
Racism and warlike impulses, for example, were very beneficial to our ancestors. They lived in groups that were constantly fighting each other for territory. Attacking anyone in a different group gave your band the edge. Those impulses are probably too dangerous to be beneficial now, but they might have had a net-positive effect right up to the point where we learned how to kill huge populations quickly.
Infidelity and obsessive love were beneficial to individuals because they increased their chances to reproduce. The reason we hurt when someone is unfaithful, is because it hurt our ancestors' chances to propagate their genes when someone was unfaithful to them.
Reason and morality did not create love -- even rats can love -- so debating the ethics of love or hate is never going to be very effective, however worthwhile it may be.
