A Puzzle About Loving Your Enemy

The ideal of loving our enemies figures in a range of traditions and political movements even if it is an ethical principle most of us fail to live up to. That does not keep us from thinking of the person who loves their enemies as exceptionally admirable; and we might think enemy love is good and good for us, not least because of its promise to restore relationships broken by trust and move us towards each other amidst polarization. But if we dig into our contemporary philosophical conceptions of love and consider the psychological implications of loving those who merit hate, we will see that the norm of enemy love looks either psychologically impossible or morally inappropriate. I explore three less-than-satisfying strategies for dealing with this puzzle and conclude by asking what this all means for recent theories of love.