“Which one of your children do you love the most?” is an infamous question* because it requires us to negotiate the meaning of that verb “love.”
Granted, the word “love” has many meanings, many competing definitions. We can kinda sorta make that question work by selecting certain of those while ignoring the others, but among the others you’d be ignoring would be those I consider the most important. And those meanings — those I think are most essential for understanding “love” — don’t allow for it to be treated as a zero-sum game bound by the economics of scarcity. Love for one child does not and ought not to diminish love for the others.
But perhaps that’s all pious nonsense. It’s all well and good to talk in lofty terms about boundless love, but we humans are not ourselves boundless. We can only be in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time. And given that, “Which one of your children do you love the most?” might actually be an eminently practical, unavoidable question. Whether or not we conceive of love as a zero-sum quantity, we are finite, zero-sum creatures.
We are thus confronted with the King/Taylor dilemma. You’re probably familiar with Carole King’s lovely, sappy song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was a big hit for James Taylor:
You just call out my name,
and you know where ever I am
I’ll come running to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer, or fall,
all you have to do is call
and I’ll be there, yeah, yeah,
you’ve got a friend.
That’s great — a fine description of what it means to be a friend. Or at least it seems great until we consider what it would mean if King/Taylor has more than one friend.
James is sitting there on Martha’s Vineyard, strumming his guitar, when his good friend Carly calls and tells him she needs him to come running. But then as soon as he hangs up, the phone rings again and it’s his good friend Bonnie calling to say that she, as his friend, needs him to come running. He cannot come running to both of them at the same time. One will have to take priority over the other.
So does the King/Taylor dilemma mean that no finite human being is capable of having more than one friend? Or does it mean, at least, that we are able to have only one person to whom we can say, “If you ever need me, I’ll be there for you”?
Not really. In real life, when such conflicts arise, we wind up weighing additional factors. We consider the relative need of each friend at that particular moment, the relative urgency, which friend we might be better able to help, etc.
Parents do this all the time. One kid’s school play is the same night as another kid’s basketball game. You can’t go to both at the same time, but you can figure out which one it’s better or more important to get to on that particular night. The notion that you must therefore love one of the kids more than the others has nothing to do with this necessary decision-making. Parents can, and do, tell multiple children that “If you ever need me, I’ll be there for you.”
But what if, what if, what if …? It’s easy to imagine all sorts of what-ifs** — situations in which a parent would be compelled to drop everything to rush to be with one child and would, therefore, be unable to drop being with that child to rush to be with one of the others. And any such situation would be, again, a dilemma — a situation in which you are faced with two equally unpalatable options. If the parent in question actually loved one of the children less than the other, then they wouldn’t experience this as a dilemma. It would only be, instead, a matter of haggling over price.
There’s a sense in which the existence and experience of true dilemmas affirms the reality of multiple boundless or superlative claims. Our human finitude and the complexities of life will, at times, present situations in which such claims will be put into conflict or apparent competition with one another. When that happens, it may be tempting to cry: “Aha! That proves that only one of these claims can be legitimate!” This is the ironclad logic of grammar, which teaches us that there can be only one superlative at a time — only one “tallest” or “fastest” or “best.” A second best could only be second-best.
But while there’s a seeming formal logic to that, it doesn’t correspond to our reality. This logic will not convince most parents that it is impossible for them to love all of their children absolutely, boundlessly and superlatively.
Parents will, rather, bristle at this logic — perceiving it as a kind of accusation. They will insist that they love all of their children best. And if that doesn’t make strict grammatical sense, it makes perfect parental sense. These parents will also likely suspect that anyone who insists it is logically impossible to love all their children, equally and absolutely, doesn’t really understand what love means. This logical vise may seem to have clamped down on something, but that something has little to do with love as they understand it or recognize it.
At that point, it will not aid the logician’s case to make a pedantic appeal to the dictionary definition of love, insisting that these parents misunderstand its meaning by investing the term with notions of limitless, inestimable value that cannot be found in those denotations. “I love my children,” these parents say. That certainly includes “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties” and “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another,” but the thing itself contains those meanings, those phrases do not contain it. These parents, having explored and inhabited the terrain of love, will not be convinced to accept an approximate map of it as a substitute.
If we’re determined, though, we have other means to take this grandiose talk of boundless love down a peg. Daily life offers plenty of ammunition for that. “All you need is love” … until the rent is due. “Time with my children is priceless” … except for the 60 hours a week you spend away from them in exchange for a lousy $14 an hour. “The most important thing …” is competing with a half-dozen other things that are inevitably going to be equally, or sometimes more, important.
Life is, among other things, a series of dilemmas. We can view those dilemmas as an indication that there can’t ever be any such thing as “the most important thing.” Or we can view them as evidence that maintaining more than one most important thing at a time is a necessary part of the human condition. Most parents will go with the latter view.
“Which one of your children do you love the most?”
“All of them.”
That’s poor grammar. But it’s good parenting.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* Like most parents, I have been asked this question, repeatedly, by my own children. I usually answer it the same way. I look my daughter in the eye, straight-faced, and, without hesitation, say her sister’s name with as much finality and flat certainty as I can muster. Then we laugh.
The other answer I used to sometimes give was to say, “Willow. I love Willow the most because she never asks me that question.” But that wasn’t really honest. Willow is our Yorkie-poo and, like most dogs, is incapable of human speech. But if she could, I think she would be asking me that question all the time.
** “Might I have a word?” asks the tendentious undergrad philosopher. “This is where I like to chime in with questions about hypothetical Nazis.”
“Is there any stopping you?”
“Probably not.”
“OK, then. Go ahead.”
“You parents all say you love all your children equally, but what if hypothetical Nazis kidnapped all of you and said they’d kill everybody unless you chose for them which of your children to kill. What if you were thus forced to choose one to live and the others to die?”
“Why would these hypothetical Nazis do such a thing? What motive could they possibl–”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re Nazis. Hypothetical Nazis don’t require a rational motive. They’re only here to artificially constrain your hypothetical options.”
“And why are you convinced that this hypothetical Sophie’s Choice would entail culpability for anyone other than the Nazis you’ve invested with this hypothetical omnipotence?”
“You say that like there’s something weird or unhealthy about my preoccupation with hypothetical Nazis.”
“…”
“OK, fine. Forget the Nazis. Let’s say you’ve all been poisoned by hyp … you’ve all just been poisoned, OK? Doesn’t matter why or by who. And there’s only enough of the antidote to save one of you, so you’re forced to choose one of the children to be saved and to choose to allow the rest to die.”
These, and many other such hypothetical scenarios can be interesting — as well as disturbingly morbid. But they’re also beside the point. Such drastic scenarios cannot disprove the claim that parents love their children equally because they’re based on that claim. The presumption that this claim is true is what gives all such scenarios their power. If that claim weren’t presumed to be true, then these hypotheticals wouldn’t pose a dilemma — they’d simply be asking a question to which everyone already knew the obvious answer.
Presume that one child is loved less and we move away from the realm of tendentious hypotheticals and slide closer to the realm of bad sermon illustrations from preachers teaching penal substitutionary atonement.
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