Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

THE ETHICS OF BREAKUP I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once we painted a giant fireplace onto the wall of her apartment as decoration for a dinner party we were hosting — and then, at the end of the party, she led our guests up the stairs onto the roof of the build-ing, bringing with her a boombox playing Strauss. I climbed up the fire escape in a ballgown. I held out my hand. We waltzed with speed and gusto. Our friends and professors looked on, terrified: there was no railing. Another time she planned a scavenger hunt through San Francisco, and I found myself in a store selling sex toys, forced to examine each device meticulously to find the next clue. The finale of the scavenger hunt was at a disco, and she danced with me there, too, even though I had to cover my ears — I am very sensitive to sound — and there is nothing in the world dorkier than someone dancing with her hands over her ears. I haven’t done as much dancing in the seventeen years since I ended that relationship. The breakup happened like this: we had planned an elaborate outing in Sonoma County for her birthday. The picnic supplies alone took days to gather. We left early, and got home late, and, as she told me when she hugged me goodnight, everything in between had been perfect. It had been a perfect day. The next morning, I wrote her a letter telling her that I did not want to be friends with her anymore. I had my reasons, of course. As I say, she is crazy. I am, too, but in a very different way. The immense effort it took for me to spend a whole day with her and ensure that it was “perfect” — that I did nothing that would offend, upset, or bother her — proved to me that we just didn’t work. And I thought: when a relationship does not work, each party has the right to exit. It will hurt, but we will get over it, and we will both be better off in the end. The thing is: the pain hasn’t gone away. I still miss her. I still dream about her. And lately I have come to think that part of the problem lies in how I broke things off: unilaterally. I took matters into my own hands, as though there were no rules governing how you break up with someone. “All’s fair in love and war” dates to 1850, when the ethics of warfare were very different than they are today. Two world wars generated explicit international agreements as to behaviors prohibited in wartime; we now reject wars of conquest and plunder; we harbor deep suspicions about the glorification of military violence. Have we made similarly substantive revisions in the ethics of love?  “All’s fair…” made its debut in the then popular but now obscure British novel Frank Fairlegh: Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil, by a certain Frank E. Smedley. The scene runs as follows. Frank, on the brink of unilaterally breaking off relations with his love-interest, recoils at opening the seal on a stolen letter — “I cannot avail myself of information obtained in such a manner!” His more pragmatic interlocutor is the one who has the “All’s fair…” approach: since the letter promises to reveal her virtue and innocence, he insists that Frank should open it. It is notable that Frank’s high-mindedness about invasions of privacy at no point extends to questioning his own breakup plan. He apprehends no moral duty to talk the issue through with the girl. Today, as in 1850, high-minded people feel free to condone unilateral breakup — in romantic as well as non-romantic love. When people act as I did, exiting a friendship perceived as, on balance, detrimental, we tend to view the decision as sad but not immoral. The reason is clear: we see love as having a certain kind of autonomy from the space of moral judgment. Even the arch-moralizer Kant agreed that you cannot be “morally obligated” to have feelings for someone; and it was for that reason that he interpreted the biblical command to “love thy neighbor” in terms of the rules governing your voluntary treatment of your neighbor. You do not actually have to feel love for them. You cannot legislate yourself into experiencing passion, empathy, or lust. And this is part of what we love about love: that it affords us an opportunity to lose control, to go a little crazy. But does it really follow from this that a free and clean exit is available? I don’t think so: even if it is impossible to moralize one’s way into passion, it remains open to us to moralize about passions that are already in place. There are more regulations governing exiting relationships than entering them. These regulations exist not in spite of but because of the fact that the connections between people are idiosyncratic and passionate. It is precisely because such connections are real and irreplaceable that disconnection is not a trivial matter. Over time, people’s lives grow together, such that what happens to one person affects another. When I come to care deeply about you, I can actually feel your pain. And that lateral growth also makes vertical growth possible: with your hand in mine, I become someone who waltzes, paints walls, and drinks Japanese tea that looks and tastes like the forest floor. (Having spent a year abroad in Osaka, she introduced me to tea ceremonies of various kinds.)  You can’t waltz by yourself. When I lose you, I also lose the me I became for you. And vice versa. Which is why cutting you off, once we have grown together, is an act of violence. I am not “cutting” anything visible, like your arm or leg, but I am nonetheless cutting away something that is a part of you