Seowon Baek Dissertation Defense

Seowon Baek will be defending her dissertation: "Self-love: Reasons for and Commitment to It." Abstract: This dissertation develops a rationalist account of love and self-love, which treats love as an attitude responsive to normative reasons. Self-love, the attitude one takes toward oneself that involves accepting, valuing, and caring for oneself, as well as acting in one’s best interests, has received comparatively little attention in contemporary philosophy of love. I argue that self-love is best understood as the same type of attitude as other-love, reflexively directed, and amenable to the same philosophical analysis. Chapter 1 considers the qualities view, on which the reasons for loving a person are the attractive qualities they possess. I construct an account of self-love from the qualities view’s resources and assess its tenability. The view captures the merit-based intuition that we want to be loved for what is admirable about us, but faces four well-known problems that persist or worsen in the case of self-love. I propose two solutions and argue that neither works. Chapter 2 considers the personhood view, on which the reason for loving a person is their personhood. I distinguish two versions of the view and consider personhood-based self-love according to each. The view captures the non-merit-based intuition that we want to be loved despite our flaws, but struggles with accommodating merit-based intuitions, and I press two further objections against it. Chapter 3 develops my positive account: the commitment-complex view. Love, on this view, is a complex of two reasons-responsive components: a pro-attitude toward the beloved that responds to features warranting it, and a commitment to sustain that pro-attitude for the right kind of reasons. I motivate the view by showing how it accounts for a wide range of ordinary experiences of love and self-love. Beyond its explanatory strength, the view offers four theoretical advantages. It accommodates the dual demand for merit-based and non-merit-based love. It preserves the unity of love across kinds, with the same structural shape applying to romantic love, parental love, friendship, and self-love. It dissolves the appraisal/bestowal tension by locating each function in a different component. And it extends to self-love without strain, providing diagnostic resources for attitude-internal failures that rival accounts cannot accommodate.

When 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm on 2 June 2026
Building STH 541