Love as a reactive emotion

One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically an affectionate attachment to another person, appropriately felt as a non‐self‐interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and paradigmatically manifested in certain kinds of acts of goodwill and characteristic affective, desiderative and other motivational responses . ‘Virtues of intimacy’ as expressed in interaction with the lover are agent‐relative reasons for reactive love, and like other reactive attitudes, reactive love generates reasons in its own right. Within a broad conception of the virtues, reactive love sheds light on the reactive attitudes more generally