Plato spoke of love in terms of vision, and Jollimore grants also that love can involve a truthful vision of reality, though he rejects Plato's inference that our vision is blinkered if love remains fixated on human beings. Jollimore is concerned exclusively with love for and between persons, and the love in question comprises erotic love and friendship. These loves, he says, ‘can be treated by a single account’ (xiv), and this ‘friend/lover model’ is most relevant to love between human beings. Agape is excluded because it is doubtful whether we are capable of feeling it (xiii).

Love is a vision in the sense that it involves ‘an appreciative attention directed towards the beloved's positive qualities’ (7). The claim contravenes the common refrain that love is blind, a refrain which tends to go hand in hand with the idea that the lover invents rather than discovers the qualities she finds in her beloved. Jollimore allows that some beloveds bear no resemblance to their lover's image of them, but resists the assumption that such pathological cases are paradigmatic. So genuine love is not blind in this sense, but it might be thought nonetheless to involve misperception and delusion about the value of the beloved's qualities – everything about her becomes wonderful, even her toothmarks on a pencil (8). Hence the suspicion that love is fundamentally irrational.

Jollimore resists this conclusion and argues that love can be justified by reasons, the most powerful sources of reasons being ‘the attractive and otherwise valuable properties of the beloved’ (13). He is quick to point out, however, that awareness of such properties does not rationally obligate the lover, or anyone else for that matter, to fall in love with their possessor: ‘no list of attractive or otherwise valuable features of B is such that a person cannot admit that B possesses all of those features and yet fail to love B without being irrational’ (14). Likewise, there is no requirement that the lover fall in love with anyone else who happens to share the properties of her beloved.

Jollimore fastidiously surveys the standard responses to this familiar problem. We are invited to reject ‘hyper-rationalist’ accounts which combine the thought that love is a response to the beloved's valuable properties with the claim that a lover is compelled to behave like a rational economic agent (valuing the relevant properties wherever she finds them, comparing and maximizing goods from a detached and calculative perspective). We must acknowledge other types of response to value more appropriate to love, responses which lend justice to the idea that the lover's response to her beloved is guided by reason. The recommended model borrows from John McDowell's neo-Aristotelian account of the reasons which guide the virtuous agent, when, for example, she is motivated to be kind or courageous. Such an agent is not in the business of comparing values from the detached and calculative perspective of the homo economicus. Her evaluative reasoning is ‘deeply non-neutral’: it presupposes commitment to a moral way of thinking which entitles one to embrace certain values, and reject others, freely, and so reach a coherent if provisional moral identity: ‘(s)ome types of value are best appreciated, and perhaps can only be appreciated, from within a practice or set of commitments…some values, and some value-bearing objects, simply forbid us to regard them from a detached, objective standpoint’ (87).

Human beings are value-bearing objects, and love is a way of recognizing the value of an individual person, of ‘placing her at the centre of one's world’ (90) in a deeply non-neutral manner. Love is precisely not a standpoint from which all persons and values are seen equally. ‘A reasonable lover knows that other people are, in a fundamental moral sense, as significant as her beloved, just as she knows that there are other people in the world who are as beautiful as the person whose beauty moves her or as intelligent, as charming, as witty, as creative, as admirable, and so forth. She knows these things, and she acknowledges that other persons have values similar in many respects to those of her beloved. But in the case of her beloved, she does more than simply acknowledge his valuable characteristics: she appreciates them’ (124). She knows also that ‘they are there for anyone else to see and appreciate, so long as one looks in the right way’ (125).

The right look is the look of love, so the claim is that the beloved's valuable characteristics are there for anyone else to appreciate provided they are in love. This appears to revert to the idea that the vision of the beloved is a creation of her love, a return which is not counteracted with the admission that the lover ‘takes the features of her beloved to which she is responding to be real and genuinely valuable’ (124). After all, she could simply be wrong about this. We are encouraged, however, to compare the lover's (first) sight to that of the virtuous agent whose sensibility and upbringing transforms her conception of reality, and to attribute resistance to either picture to the offending hyper-rationalist model.

The lover is not, of course, in love with valuable characteristics, but with the characteristics of her beloved, this beautiful, witty, intelligent person. Some philosophers find difficulty in this thought: one cannot both value a person's qualities and value the person themselves. Jollimore dispels this worry. He discusses McTaggart's delightful:

Jollimore objects that the cause is too small: someone who falls in love with a woman for her beautiful eyes alone would be a ‘fetishist, a quirk lover, in an objectionable sense’. This is well taken if the beloved is simply a pair of eyes on a plate, although it is questionable whether they could count as beautiful. However, the eyes are the eyes of this woman, and such a small cause could easily determine a very great thing, the love of one who is neither a fetishist nor a quirk lover.

For Jollimore, love is a moral emotion, but one posing moral dangers. A danger that has led philosophers and theologians to replace eros with agape is the blindness of lovers to the interests of others. Doubtless some lovers are guilty of this, but a measure of preference and emotional attachment is compatible with respecting obligations to others. Following McDowell, Jollimore denies that morality requires an ideal of impartiality and impersonality and that the love central to morality is agape traditionally conceived. Rightly so. But a question remains about how we are to view the recommended alternative conception, and whether Jollimore allows that its dimensions exceed the eros and friendship-involving terms which define his own stance. He has little time for God's love, but it is worth reflecting that Pope Benedict XVI (whose views he mentions) would agree that morality cannot depend on agape alone, and that love has an irreducibly erotic component. However, he would give more weight to the worry that, care and concern for the beloved notwithstanding, eros involves an irreducibly desire-involving aspect which not merely sets it apart from friendship, but threatens a moral danger which Jollimore disregards. As Roger Scruton puts it, ‘(w)hereas your friend wants your good, your lover wants you, and if he cannot have you, then his love may turn to hate’…erotic love ‘notoriously bypasses moral judgement’.Footnote ¹ This may be overstated, but it expresses a real difficulty, imperiling Jollimore's assumption that friendship and eros can be treated in a single model, a model sufficient to generate a satisfactory conception of the love central to morality.

Jollimore returns to God's love in a discussion of sexual exclusivity, and suggests that loving like God would provide an instant justification for unlimited promiscuity (‘if God is permitted to love not one person but many, why should we, whose love is supposed to be an image of God's, not be granted similar permission?’) Perhaps this was intended as comic relief. However, Jollimore is clearly worried about sexual exclusivity, and expresses sympathy for ‘increased liberation and a lessening of traditional restrictions on behaviour’, forgetting that this has already happened, and resulted in visible unhappiness and ‘the decline of the sentiment of sex’ as William James put it. The reconciliation of ‘propromiscuity’ with the supposed exclusivity of true love (164–165) is effected by a convenient turn to friendship and parental love, demonstrating again that these forms of love, to the extent that they are not exclusive, are different to eros. But then, to fit eros into the equation, he allows that a beloved person need not always occupy the centre of one's field of vision:

These latter forms of love do indeed suggest the opposite, but eros does not, and it is unclear why Jollimore is compelled to argue otherwise. He suggests that the ideal of exclusivity arises, in part, from infatuation, and that we are just not designed to remain obsessed with one person for life. He concludes that ‘even if we decide to make love maximally exclusive and restrict it to a single other person, it is not obvious that sex, rather than conversation or table tennis must be the primary domain in which this exclusivity is manifested’ (167).

The idea that conversation and table tennis are on the same level as sex is absurd, and requires us to treat sex as just one more pleasurable pastime. It can be so treated, but such treatment cannot begin to capture the sexual behaviour of lovers, and there is simply no excuse, given the literature of the world, for reducing erotic love to a pleasurable companionship. Erotic love requires not simply that the beloved get enough attention, as if she were a ping pong partner who warrants the occasional bash, but that she get exclusive attention, and that she does so even after the initial infatuation has receded. There is, of course, a massive moral problem lurking here, which Jollimore does not so much as raise, fixated as he is upon the temptations of sexual pleasure. This is the problem faced by the lover who genuinely falls in love with a second person and who faces a moral conflict which is a million miles away from the predicament of one who is considering playing away for the fun of it. Such a problem poses the most interesting moral difficulties for the vision view of love, it poses a serious challenge to the idea that eros and friendship can be lumped together in a single account, and it suggests that the friend of ‘propromiscuity’ is blind to the facts.