Agape: loving even one's enemy

Agape; love your enemies

Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 · 1968Minister and leader of the civil rights movement: he defends nonviolent disobedience to unjust laws, openly and accepting the penalty.

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What it claims

To love is to will each person's good for their own sake, friend or enemy: love is above all an act of goodwill, not a feeling of affection.

Why

To love is not to feel affection: it is to will everyone's good, even of the one who wrongs us, because hate also destroys the hater.

The same idea through history

Martin Luther King Jr.1957The sermon is delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, a year after the bus boycott. King links Jesus's teaching ('love your enemies') to his method of nonviolent struggle.

In short

"Agape: loving even one's enemy" is an argument by Martin Luther King Jr. ('Loving Your Enemies' (sermon, Montgomery, 17 November 1957); Strength to Love (1963), 1957) on the question "What is love?" (answer: willing the other's good). Its claim: To love is to will each person's good for their own sake, friend or enemy: love is above all an act of goodwill, not a feeling of affection. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

'Loving Your Enemies' (sermon, Montgomery, 17 November 1957); Strength to Love (1963)

Valid with an implicit premise

What is it to love? For King, a Baptist minister, Greek distinguishes three loves: eros (desire), philia (friendship) and agape. Agape is not a feeling of affection: it is understanding goodwill toward all, including those who wrong us, expecting nothing in return. Jesus does not say 'love your enemies' in the sense 'like them': one may dislike what they do and still love them. King draws a rule for struggles from this: one fights injustice but does not seek to crush the person.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.

Valid with P4. P1 defines agape, P2 separates it from affection, P3 gives two reasons to practise it (it protects the one who loves, it can transform the enemy). P4, hidden, says true love is measured by what one wills and does for the other. Points of attack: P4 (can one call 'love' what involves no feeling?) and P3 (does love really transform enemies, or sometimes encourage them?). For King, agape is religious (God's love at work), but the argument also stands without that belief.

Analogy. A doctor treating a disagreeable, even hostile patient. He may feel no sympathy, but he wants the patient's recovery and acts for it. King would say that this is love, in the sense of agape.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1887 · attacks premise 3

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche argues that the Christian morality of neighbour-love and forgiveness was born from the resentment of the weak: it makes a virtue of impotence. Loving one's enemies would then be a disguise for impossible revenge.

no reply

see the argument

We have not yet found a direct reply by Jr. in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) Reconstructed reply (our reading): the agape King describes is not passive: it comes with boycotts, marches and arrests, so with courageous and costly action Nietzscheans answer that the suspicion concerns deep motives, not gestures.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Nietzsche: love of enemies hides resentment. King: it is an active force. Core disagreement: can we judge a love's worth by its hidden motives or by its deeds?

Reinhold Niebuhr 1932 · attacks premise 3

Niebuhr argues in Moral Man and Immoral Society that love and moral persuasion work between individuals but not between groups: dominant groups yield only under coercion. Love alone therefore does not transform an unjust system.

a defender replies

Martin Luther King defender of the argument · 1958

In 'Pilgrimage to Nonviolence', King says he owes to Niebuhr an awareness of collective evil and of the illusions of easy optimism, but he faults him for confusing pacifism with passive non-resistance: nonviolence is resistance to evil. As we read it, his method (boycotts, marches) answers the objection by combining agape with nonviolent pressure.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Niebuhr: between groups, coercion is necessary. King: agape with nonviolent pressure. Core disagreement: is love enough, or only part of a strategy?

Jeffrie Murphy 1982 · attacks the conclusion

In 'Forgiveness and Resentment', Murphy argues that resentment at an injustice suffered expresses self-respect: forgiving too quickly, or feeling nothing, may be a sign that one does not respect oneself. Applied to King (our reconstruction, Murphy does not target him), asking the victim to love the aggressor risks asking them to give up that respect.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1982, after the author's death (1968).

The debate goes on (our summary) King distinguishes love of the person from refusal of the unjust act: one keeps opposing injustice without hating (see 'love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed'). The disagreement concerns whether this separation is possible (our reading).

Where the debate stands (our summary)Murphy: resentment protects self-respect. King: one opposes the act without hating the person. Core disagreement: can one respect oneself while bearing no grudge against who harms us?