 Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Today we talk about love, the philosophy of love, that is. Now we all have some notion of what romantic love is. Our guides perhaps are the romantic novels of Jane Austen or the latest rom-com flicks available on Netflix. These guides give us a heterosexual and monogamous picture of romantic love, happily ever after with a singular person of the opposite sex who we will love and cherish for the rest of our lives. The matters, however, are changing. We are no longer in the time of strict monogamous heterosexual partnerships that Burton Russell's marriage and morals have put into question. Heck, even the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has opened the discussions on non-hetero partnerships. Now, but how should we think philosophically about these changing norms about romantic love? Now joining us to discuss this kind of new philosophy of love and why it matters, we have Carrie Jenkins, Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, and the author of What Love Is and What It Could Be. So hello, Professor Jenkins, welcome to philosophy and what matters. Hi, thanks for having me. Okay, so before getting into our main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. How did you get into philosophy? Yeah, I mean, it depends a little bit whether you mean the discipline known as philosophy in formal academic contexts or when did I start doing the activity? Because I think that activity goes back as far as I can remember ever since I was a little kid. I have very early memories of thinking about things that I would now call infinity and infinite regresses and skeptical worries. But I didn't know it was called philosophy until around about age 17, when one of my teachers in secondary school encouraged me to apply for philosophy undergraduate degree. And then when I realized that's what philosophy is, I was hooked and I was sort of just determined to stick with it from that point on. But very early, really, I mean relative to a lot of other philosophers, I decided that the philosophy was for me. So where did you go to your undergraduate? At the University of Cambridge in England. I went to Trinity College in Cambridge. And I did, in fact, I did all my degrees there. And Ph.D. as well. Wow, then you went to some other universities as well? Yep, then I got my first job at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and I've helped a few other academic positions in between before landing here in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. Okay, so who influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? You know, I didn't really need any encouragement for undergraduate admissions. When I went into my interview, I remember one of the last few, and I said, I want your job, basically, to the person interviewing me. So, you know, I just really wanted to have a career in the life that was, that revolves around being able to think and discuss and write about ideas that seemed intriguing and important to me. And this looked like it was a way to do that. Okay, so I don't, I mean, I, yeah, I was just, I was so determined from that early stage that any other outside influences were merely peripheral. Okay, so you are working on metaphysics stuff. You're working on epistemology, analytic philosophy in general. But what led you to the philosophy of love? That is the philosophy of romantic love. The philosophy of love came about as a kind of confluence of my interest in, especially metaphysics and questions like what's real and what isn't, what's natural versus socially constructed or even fictitious, you know, projection from our minds, maybe. So there was that kind of general interest and things I was already working on in more standard areas of analytic metaphysics. And then in my personal life, and I started using the slogan now the personal is metaphysical. I was in a, I was in a non standard relationship myself I'm in a non monogamous marriage now, and I started hearing comments like well that's not real love, you know, that's real love is it's you don't have eyes for one person would feel that way about anyone else. So being, you know, the kind of thinker that I am I was like, that's an interesting claim I wonder if it's true. You know, I was also deeply offended and hurt but I was also I also wanted to know if that's true is this doesn't mean it's not you're not really in love with someone. If you're also in love with someone else. And so that question basically became the book that this book what levels of what it could be. Of course it got expanded with a lot more, you know, questions that didn't come so directly out of my personal experience but what what love, what romantic love really is and how it's kind of how it's been theorized not just by philosophers, but by human beings in general. Okay, so let's get into your book let's discuss some details of your book. In particular you discuss the biological and sociological aspects of love. So can you give us a picture of what these aspects are, and what ultimately is your view about dramatic love. Of course. And so, I went into this when I saw was sort of interested in what human beings in general think about love. Part of my agenda, I suppose, there is a tremendous divide between scientific and maybe broadly humanistic ways of understanding what love is and specifically a romantic because I was seeing a lot of these sort of back and forth conversations. And that to me just felt too simplistic and it was as if there was this sort of competitive situation where one side had to win and say that the other side was just stupid about it like so the, you know, the scientists would say oh you're just so you're just the science denier you can't appreciate the, you know, the real chemistry and the real evolutionary background. And on the other side you get the humanists and say no you're just sociopolitically naive, and you haven't taken into account all of these biases and prejudices that everybody has. And so what I ended thinking was that these are really not in fact stories that need to be in competition with one another. So yeah of course we are, you know, we exist in these meat bodies made out of bits of stuff and they've evolved to be a certain way and and also we are embedded in potent social contexts that influence everything that we experience and everything that we do. And so I think the best questions for philosophical purposes arise at the intersection of the scientific approaches and is more humanistic or sociological approaches to what love is so so questions like how do the biological and the social connect around this topic. And what's coming from where. So, just to give you my very, very, very quick answer. The, the, what I go for in this book is a form of functionalist view and the way that I explain it, trying to make it kind of as comprehensible as I can outside of philosophical contexts. I mean outside of context of formal academic philosophy. The way that I explain it is to say that it's as if there's a kind of role or, you know, like a script a role for a person in a movie or a TV show. And that's the romantic love role. And then we cast the biological machinery that we actually have with its long evolutionary history, we cast it in that role. We say how well does it play the role. Does it fit. Is this good fit. Is it a good casting decision to have this kind of biology try to play this kind of social role, determined by things like usually monogamy, usually heterosexuality the expectation that it will last forever and form a family around it. Also the reproductive unit and all of those pieces that define the role. So that's, that's what I tried to suggest as the connection between the two. And then I get into a little bit into some of these questions about so then what is, what is coming to us from the biological side of it. And this is where I would engage with questions like is monogamy natural, or is non monogamy natural. Both of these are claims that have been defended various times by different people with different purposes. My, my answer to those kinds of questions is usually. Yes, and yes, so one of the analogies that I end up drawing is, so I said look humans are naturally a very diverse species right we do very very well is adapt and try all kinds of different strategies to surviving and cooperating in our environment. It's like, it's a bit like asking whether having blue eyes is natural, or whether brown is the natural color for eyes. It's like, well, they're both, they're both naturally, they both happen and they're both just different ways of sort of adapting and I to try to solve a problem of how to process and monogamy and non monogamous configurations are just different ways of trying to solve a problem of how to cooperate socially into small units often involved in the formation of close adult bonds and or child rearing like that. So these are just different strategies both of which are natural. And I think a lot of other a lot of other questions can be answered in similar spirits about what's what's natural and what isn't. That doesn't necessarily solve the problem of what exactly counts as romantic love and what doesn't. That's where things like my thought experiments start to come in. Right. So before we before we get into the thought experiments, let me try to get a handle of your main position. So here are two stories about love you have the purely biological scientific story that we reduce love in terms of what's going on in the brain, perhaps. And here's another story, the humanistic story or the sociological story, but they'll see that love is just, you know, socially constructed, something that's brought about by our social interactions expectations in society. So what your project is trying to do is to well reconcile these two things and say that well both are two pictures of what's going on. But the interesting questions are the intersection between the two. So for example, whether heterosexual relationships are natural. So that's a kind of thing that you could work on or yeah your your project of whether monogamy is also something natural, or non monogamy something natural. I wonder though if this kind of picture is accepted by many scholars right now. I mean, to be fair, I don't think it's exactly not accepted. It's more that the question is not really raised this way. Especially like a lot of philosophers who are working on love. They're not quite asking that metaphysical question, or that kind of metaphysical question. A lot of the work that had been done when I was sort of getting into this stuff so books a few years old now and this is gradually changing over time but a lot of the work that had been done was sort of started from the assumption of permanent monogamous hetero romantic relationship and then kind of work from there and ask questions like, is it rational to pick one person and is it rational to love that one. Are there reasons for loving someone or is it just, you just, you know, love the person regardless of their features and qualities. And these kinds of questions and then you get into issues like the so called trading up problems so if you love someone for that quality is what if someone else comes along. All of this kind of stuff and it's all. Yeah, this one is the Robert Nozzi Harry fan for literature. Exactly. Yeah, so nozzi had his own contribution but this is very much a sort of continuous tradition through the 90s and 2000s. You know, it is these are really good questions and the rationality of love is fascinating to me, but they're not going to really address what I thought was maybe more urgent for some of these broader social and socio political conversations, especially witnessing you know in the course of my lifetime just such a massive massive change in the social acceptability of queer relationships from, you know, going through teenage my teenage experience they were completely rejected and it was absolutely a social death to admit that you were not 100% straight to, you know, my life now where I could be an openly queer woman, bisexual woman in Vancouver in Canada. That's fine. That's not even a big deal most of the time. It's not like that all over the world of course and plenty of places. It's still a lot like it was 30 years ago but here at least that has radically radically changed and my so my experience of that shift has has really kind of and I think a lot of people have seen something similar over our lifetimes it really kind of puts the pressure on to explain from a philosophical point of view, well what the heck is going on there will we just really wrong that we changed our minds. And how does that happen and none of these questions about reasons and rationality of choosing one quick partner rather than others are addressing, you know, those kinds of issues. So, so this is, it's really not that people don't have that view I think it's more just like no one's really asking that question, or not in quite that kind of way, and for quite these kinds of reasons. So there's this sort of the book has a, it sort of sits at the intersection of metaphysics and I guess broadly social so super political philosophy and some ethics in there some feminist philosophy, things like that. And so I'm my, my, one of my hopes is that the book is able to, to move in the world in a way that speaks metaphysics to those other questions in a way that can be useful. Yeah, I like that picture because I'm into metaphysics as well. So I'm interested in social reality, social ontology. And your book is actually an interesting book because as you have said you're putting forward a different question, different sets of questions. And also, you're put, you're putting forward a functionalist story here. You know what, what is this functionalist story and how does it connect with your thought experiments, the alien love thought experiment in the 19th century lesbian love because those are really interesting thought experiments what's the what's the question you're trying to pump here. Good. Yeah, so I mean, these thought experiments and my, the kind of functionalism that I'm that I'm appealing to are very kind of standard fair for 20th century analytic metaphysics right so the functionalist idea that there's a difference between the role and the fertilizer for the role in a, you know, an approach to positive minds and some other things. Decades right and I'm just borrowing from their playbook to a large extent. I'm sorry that because you were in at the Australian National University right. I was, yeah, I did a little stint there for a year. Yeah, I was also there. And I wonder if the Canberra plan has something. Absolutely. So I mean if you if you kind of look under the metaphysical herds here what's going on is is very close to the Canberra two stage thing where you identify the role you take the Ramsey sentences or whatever. And the platitudes, and the platitudes in my case will be things like, you know, what love is is so and so and so and so sitting in a tree KSS INT. Marriage then comes baby in a baby carriage or what's the thing that comes after kissing but before marriage and baby. So it's really that kind of functionalist approach that's driving this. And then the thought experiments that I'm using here I just designed to help us get a handle on what the role and the realizer are. So the ones that I use the alien love. So the aliens I'm imagining they live in a socially socially organized exactly like we are and they have, you know, broadly, mostly hetero, mostly monogamous marriage like coupling relationships between the two kinds of aliens and then, you know, but they're biologically different from us and they don't share evolutionary history, they're made of different stuff. So, so there you I'm trying to say same role different realizers. And then I so I think about the aliens and then I think about these 19th century lesbians who are they have the same kind of biology and evolutionary history is contemporary humans but they have very different social scripts for what love should look like than we do. So, they are, for example, not even openly acknowledging or discussing the possibility of lesbian romantic love. And so what happens in, you know, you see a lot of letters going back and forth between women of this era and I'm thinking of like, you know, British upper class. And they're writing these kind of very passionate things and they're, they're clearly in very close loving in some sense relationships very intimate often sexually intimate as well. They don't call that love or they don't call it being in love, because being in love is just, you know, what you do with husband or, you know, if you marry for love which you may not you might have completely different reasons. That's its own whole separate thing so my thought is okay so those 19th century lesbians, let's say they're experiencing something that's biologically very similar to what I might experience if I was in love now. But the social role of their love is completely undefined. So they, and they have no, they have no script for it. And so in that case I want to say same biological realizer different role, or I mean the role is kind of absent. So I'm trying to sort of come at the two directions of what the differences between the realizer the biological realizer and the socially constructed role of romantic love. So the aliens, they don't have any of our biology let's say but they have that they do the role of the some other thing activates in them that makes them behave that way. So the 19th century lesbians all the biology is going off, but they're not going to couple up and form a family unit and raise children together because the social script in the context is not there. The role is not available for them to enter into despite in every other way fulfilling the biological requirements for doing that. I mean, I mean, having pointed out the difference between the role and the realized like every functionalists I have to answer the question of which one really is what one is it really is it the biology of the social stuff. Just like functionalists about the mind right they have to say well it's, it's really the functional role and it's not actually not the real life and unusual kind of functionalist but what I do is is a little unusual hearing that I say no it's some. It's much more messy with something like romantic love. There's just too much indeterminacy around. And with something like this. I think it's just not a fruitful way of proceeding to try to must pin down the analysis kind of that kind of attitudes. What are the images I use in the book you saying look if you're trying to define romantic blood with precision. It's like you're trying to nail some jello to a wall. But the wall is also made of jello and by the way you also have a jello nail. It's not going to happen and so the the useful and the productive philosophical conversations at that point I think have to move beyond the question of. So is it really the biology or the social role. It's, it's, no it's really both that they're both happening this is the connection between them. I can't get to the questions about what is possible from there what have we done what have we made out of what it was given and could we change it if we wanted to. Yeah I can't help but see the connection with your thought experiments with David Lewis's mad pain Martian pain. Yeah, it's very very similar kind of stepping stepping through these very similar kinds of arguments. Yeah, but but your conclusion is that okay so it's not purely biological. It's not purely sociological so, but those two things are there. So, yeah. So, can I push your further. So what is romantic love for you really. The title of your box is just what love is so what is what is love for you. I end up saying I have a dual nature account right so that's the social nature that's the biological nature. They're not unconnected. They certainly influence one another back and forth. What we're able to do in our social context has an impact on us biologically with it literally is going to shape our brain reinforcing certain connections and certainly changing things like, you know, we change our physical bodies in response to our environment. And on the other hand of course we are also constrained in certain ways by our physical nature and embodiment and certain kinds of change that we might say we might like to see. It's going to be very difficult for us to achieve given the kinds of beings that we are biologically. And so I mean it's it's as for what love is it's I mean, I don't give an answer that looks like what analytic philosophers like to see there's no necessary. Nothing like that. The most you can get out of me as I'll say there's a dual nature theory, but it's not really a definition. And it's very much a kind of like this is this that's messy, you know, and that there's a lot of there's a lot of flexibility not just in how we characterize what what exists now but also in terms of what's possible for you know what it could look like in the future and really what I'm trying to do is more than answer the question of what exactly is it. I'm much more interested in opening up the, you know the subtitle part of the book what could it be. Partly because I think we're ready to ask that question now. I don't mean we as well I mean like humanity is, we've just seen a massive shift in cultural social attitudes, right around particularly queer love. The US made same sex marriage legal in every state, you know, very recently, comparatively speaking like it's given, but but quite that change was quite rapid the attitude and all social change quite rapid. And that's the US being positioned the way it is. It's very globally influential that that change happens there. And it's not unrelated to what's going on in other parts of the world. And I think that given, we've seen that shift happen. We've seen, and I think just going back only a little bit earlier than that, a big shift around interracial love relationships happen as well. Because you know it was only a few generations ago that it was illegal for a black person and white person to get married in the US right. This is this is not out of out of all kind of living memory. And it was just kind of off the table that that could be real love right now. So we've kind of seen two really dramatic shifts and quick succession in our conception of what traditional real or you know genuine romantic love can be. I think that that just sets us up to ask about the rest of it. This part's negotiable we didn't think it was but it is this part's negotiable to we didn't think it was but it is what else and and you know the answer is not, I think, literally everything, because we are as I said you know we're we're animals we have. We have certain kinds of things that happen to us as such. But maybe more than we might have thought this question. And there's a, I think it's not coincidental that there's a big kind of uptick in interest in things like non dogma at the moment, because people are starting to ask those questions about what else is is possible. And you know, I, I, all my training in philosophy in, in, in analytic philosophy as a metaphysician, it's hard for me to answer questions about modality. Okay, let's go there for these questions. The subtitle of your book, as you have said is what love could be. Now, first question, are you referring here to a kind of metaphysical possibility or what kind of possibility are we talking about. Yeah, I mean, it is metaphysical possibility and it's driven by the metaphysical theory that underpins the book. I'm most interested in which ones are like live possibilities, not just pure metaphysical possibilities if they were very distant and you know, unfeasible, they would be less interesting. I'm more interested right now in kind of what could we do going forward so one of the things I say is that because a big part of our current conception of romantic club is the socially constructed scripted element. We have a lot of responsibility for that right we have a lot of power over that part of it. So, you know, not to say that we can just ditch what we have and change it completely but we do have we collectively like everybody, everybody acting together has quite a lot of control over the social side of this. So that power to affect different possibilities comes with responsibility to choose wisely to exert influence in a direction that we would actually like to see change happen. And when I talk about what love could be I'm often talking about what what kinds of change to the to the social script which are usually social constraints what kinds of changes to those constraints are possible and how would we make them or would it take to change our picture of love and I think you know that question is largely answered by by looking back to what did it take to change our picture of love over the last 2050 100 years into what it is now. And I talk about things like the world of popular media and depictions in, as you say that the rom-coms and master novels. All of these, the social for these cultural products, they've always been playing that role. We're acting back what we have now but also hoping to generate what what love will be for the next generation of consumers of these products. And it's not just like high art it's also, you know, what do we teach children on the playground, what rhymes are they teaching each other, because they are really that's basic training. I wasn't kidding when I said that rhyme about, you know, so and so and so and so sitting in a tree. It's really that is a theory of love. Right. And kids learn it so early that it's gotten in there really before they have any bullshit detectors. We haven't gotten their critical thinking on board yet. Our brains are not our brains are not really fully developed until we are, you know, much older than that I think 20s or something. Certainly not when you're five years old and playing skipping jumping rope games with other kids and saying these rhymes. So, what's possible is largely on the social side what's possible is largely a matter of how can we change stories or tell more stories right because it's not like I want to stop telling the boy meets girl story that's great story but there are lots of other good stories as well. If we can sort of expands our repertoire of what love stories can look like. That's a way of releasing some of the constraints that we've currently put in place. And the other thing I'm super fascinated by is what we can do by way of intervention on the biological side. Yeah, I'm interested there as well. Yeah, right there's this tendency to think for something biological and natural that means we're just stuck with it forever but of course, we don't really think that's true about, you know, cancer or COVID we're going to try to cure them or find vaccines right we try to change what's biologically the case for us right now by intervening. And this is also true for love and there are a long history, some of which I get into some of it's kind of weird thinking about love as a very much an embodied physical thing that you can intervene medically even when so you can give people, you know, cures or potions to induce love. You know, the history of that's a little dicey sometimes people recommend onions or you know. Aphrodisiacs. Aphrodisiacs, so I mean that there's a long, the long and very dubious tradition of trying to intervene in our biology and whether we love someone or not. But the thing is now that we have a little bit more of a grip on what's going on in there, right. We actually have some, not like fully worked out an ideal science of love but we have some idea of what kinds of neurochemistry are involved, which areas of the brain are implicated. We actually do realistically have a shot at intervening at this point. And so there's some really interesting work being done by a guy called Brian Earp, who's working on love drugs and thinking about these questions. Not, not only drugs to sort of switch love on but also to switch it off so what if you've been in an abusive relationship, but you still feel, you know, you still feel your feelings about this person and it's making it hard for you to leave. Would you take a pill to fall out of love with them, right. So these are, I mean these are not trivial questions. There's a lot of complexity to even to how to frame them exactly and who should be making those kinds of decisions. But these, these, what I'm really what I'm trying to get out here is a very long way to go. It's not only the social aspect that we might be able to change. We also have some questions to ask and I think it's time to start asking them responsibly about how, how and when and whether we would want to intervene on the biology of love as well. In your chemistry, the physical embodied experience of being in love or, you know, being hurt in love or disappointed in love. No, that's interesting because I'm thinking like you could transform some person to have a kind of monogamous relationship. So transformations, physical transformations, but now you're talking about bringing chemistry so I could make someone fall in love with me, or I could have someone fall out of love. Yeah, so I mean, so maybe, maybe it's, it's, this is why I say it gets, it gets very much more complicated very quickly because if you think about, well, give someone the, so let's say, you know, you get a stranger in a room and you give them supposedly and we, to be clear, we don't have this yet, but it could be. We have some of the, we have some of the kinds of things that it would probably take to make something a bit like this. So you get them in the room and then, then you give them certain kinds of drugs and it makes them, let's say it just raises the chance it makes them a lot more likely to have a kind of experience that we later would describe as falling in love, right. Now, what is missing from that picture would be a lot of the social script, right, so let's say you haven't, you haven't done the courtship, right, there's no, there's been conventional dating. Okay, okay. Now, what are we going to say about whether that person is really in love with you or just brainwashed or, you know, manipulated in some way. That's a tricky question for exactly the same reasons as the aliens and the 19th century lesbians, right, there's, there's something that they have some part of it going on and there's something else that's really missing from whatever's going on there. So it's, so it's a really, it's a really tricky question not to mention, let's not even start on the ethical implications. Just some metaphysics are huge. Just, just even considering the metaphysical question of whether or not that's real love. This is very complicated stuff. And it's so messy, I just, you know, I think, again, we hit the point there where it's like, that's not really useful question anymore, we have to ask more specific questions about this person's experience and how it fits into our social conception of love, how it fits into biological science. I'm thinking about you explored non heterosexual and non monogamous love in your book. We've talked about Muslims and Mormons already practice non monogamy, even some ancient cultures permit mon heterosexual partnerships. So, are these love relationships in your point of view. Part of what's very complicated there is whether they are romantic relationships because that room, the romantic part is, its history is bound up in a kind of European centric conception of the role that this thing would play relative to the couple and to monogamous marriage conceived in that historically traditional way as a way of kind of basically transferring women as property between men from father to husband. So that that kind of there's a lot there's a lot bound up with our ideas of romance. It may not be applicable in other times and places. And, but with respect to things like, you know, other cultural and religious practices of non monogamy, I think it's absolutely the case that those, those are, those are real and outstanding parts of the world have not done things the way that we do. And do not now, right. It's absolutely not a universal that that all humans are are by nature by default monogamous socially monogamous even nevermind sexually monogamous features. And that is different about the kind of non monogamy that I'm primarily talking about here and some of these other sorts that you that you're describing is that I'm I and this is where some of the feminist philosophy gets in. I'm trying to talk about when I'm talking about like what kinds of change might we want to see. I'm trying to get away from patriarchal models. So, there's a kind of polygamy that is patriarchal polygamy where one man has multiple wives, but a woman couldn't have multiple husbands. And so, patriarchal polygamy is, you know, that's another kind of sexist and misogynistic tradition like patriarchal monogamy. And there's, so it's not really the polygamy or the monogamy. That's the problem there. It's patriarchy. Yeah, I can't solve that by just getting the monogamy out of the picture. There are other ways of understanding non monogamy that don't require that kind of gendered imbalance. And so, when we talk about contemporary situations, we might talk about polyamory. The word that's more commonly used than polygamy, but the non non marriage based non gendered form of non monogamous relationship involving a romantic type of love. And sometimes people just use the more general term of consensual non monogamy to get away from talking about polygamy that has those connotations of being one man with his multiple wives, and not the other way around. And has these associations with religious background that are not necessarily required for being a person who practices non monogamy. So there's a, there's a, there's a form of non monogamy that is already quite widespread, although in many places it's, it's not, it's not as openly practiced as it might be if the world were more tolerant, which is consensual non monogamy or polyamory. And those those relationships that don't have their, their roots in necessarily in any religious tradition. Or patriarchal structure. They are potentially a challenge to patriarchal structures in that, you know, so in my situation, for example, I'm a woman and I'm in more than one relationship with men. And that is potentially a challenge to patriarchal conceptions of what a woman should be like. And I do get a lot of pushback from, you know, people telling me that I'm doing it wrong. This is, this is a bad way to be a woman as a result of this fact about me and it's quite different from the kinds of pushback that men would get. If they were doing this, if they had two female partners. So there's, there's, there's lots of words people call me, but you wouldn't call a man if I could put it that way. I think I read somewhere. Yeah. So patriarchy is, is still, is still very present in these situations. And, but they're, they are at least not fully structured and determined by certain. radical assumptions about what kinds of structural relationship could have. No, I read somewhere. Yeah, so I read somewhere attack against your view in your lifestyle. So they're saying that it's unnatural. It's immoral and so on. So how do you respond to those criticisms. These are very different criticisms. So, so some things that are unnatural are great, right, like I do profan. I really like Mac books, they're not natural. So I'm less worried about being unnatural, although I do actually think that, you know, as I said earlier, non monogamy and non monogamy are both natural. But on the ethical side of it, I think, you know, this is a lot, it's a lot tougher. And I think the questions there. I mean, it would take a whole other book to answer what love should be right now. But the claim that I'm doing something wrong is very, it's difficult for me to find any basis for it that doesn't come down to something like I have a commitment to religious or other ethical system that you don't share. And I'm like, well, that's okay. I just don't share that. So I don't know what to tell you. I don't think it's, I don't think it's wrong on any grounds that I accept. And I haven't met anyone who's been able to convince me that it is so that I mean that. And then beyond that it really has to get into the specifics of what people are saying as well. And, you know, if anyone has specific, specific claims about that, I try to answer them, but usually it's not very specific. It's, it's general. It's just, you're bad. It's premise on religion. And it's against a 10. It's really just, you know, I understand if you have a religious commitment to being another way. What's actually quite fascinating to me is that a lot of this, a lot of the disapproval doesn't come from religious people necessarily. Actually, I know I'm good friends with lots of people who are various religions and very tolerant and open and accepting people. The, the, I only mentioned religious reasons for thinking I'm doing something wrong because I, I, those are the only ones that make any sense to me, right. A lot of the disapproval that I get, it's just like, well, it's just icky and yucky. I don't think so. It doesn't seem that way to me. I'm like, why, why do you think it is and then it tends to be I think more motivated by feelings people have necessarily rational arguments that they have worked through carefully. Okay, so where do you see the philosophy of love heading given our discussion so far. I hope that it will start to broaden and diversify. So, I would like to see more work on different questions about different kinds of love. So, not just more of the same old story, the boy needs girls story and the same old questions about like I'd be rational loving one another. I said those are good questions but I think there's so much more that we can ask and our world is a very exciting place and in some ways not not a great thing but some ways it's good. And romantic love especially is one of these things that has been super exciting. I think that's a really critical point of view for the last at least the last 20, 30 years. And I would like to see the philosophy of love really kind of come and bring to bear all of its strategies and power of thought and argumentation and theorizing and idea generating barriers where it can really kind of make a difference. Not that it has to stop doing the other stuff like those are also great questions but like I think there's so much scope, so much potential. And so, I think I would love it if more philosophers of love were able to speak to different concerns like one that I've noticed coming to the front again and again recently is between romantic love and a sexual relationship. So, so much of the philosophy of love has kind of just straight up completed the two that it's, you know, of what I look at it's very striking. It's just an assumption that if you're in a romantic relationship, you're having sex with the person if you're having sex with the person, you're interested in romantic relationships and it's just like, well, how about what about people who don't have sex what about people who have casual sex that is a lot of people right what about people who have friends with benefits and there are all these other kinds of configurations of loving relationships, and of sexual relationships and those sometimes overlap and sometimes don't. And there's actually really good philosophical work to be done, charting this rich complicated territory but for whatever reason, the philosophy of love has kind of gotten caught up with a quite traditional traditional, traditional model. And I think it's time, it's time for us to, to look at more than just that and, you know, to the extent that there's really an ethical argument against being a polyamorous woman let's say, they should bring it out there. I'd like to see that published in a journal and made really kind of clear and explicit so that I could respond to it. That sort of thing would be would be interesting. I would probably be, you know, hurt and angry as well but at least that'd be something I could I don't, I don't think it's right. That's not good. But there's not much I can do about that. I can't, I don't know how to, how to respond to that kind of, it's just a feeling that I have. So, and I mean, like I said, I'm just one person with one perspective and there, there's such a rich and diverse range of stuff and perspectives and people experiences. I would love to see entering the philosophy of love as a discussion, not just old white men. Like Roger Scruton. Never mind. I wasn't going to swear. I'll edit that out. Okay, so on a more professional note, what's your advice for those who want to get into hadamic professional philosophy. There are still people who want to do that. I think I mean the one thing that the one thing that I would say is it's important to know what that means what it really is like to be a professional academic philosopher now. And because I didn't know at all. Honestly, I love the subject matter the discipline and I loved the kinds of writing that I was reading and I wanted to get into that. But I didn't really know what it meant to work in a university I had no idea what academic admin is like and how much of it there is and I had no idea like how what the kind of the zeitgeist going to be like and so when I was a graduate students in Cambridge I asked one of my mentors, you know what's it like to be a woman in philosophy because she was one of the few senior women around and she told me there was no discrimination anymore in terms of gender in philosophy and I said oh that's great. And then so that's not turned out to be my experience and so I was I was sort of, I was a little bit clueless and and I felt a bit misled by some of this. I think what she meant was that it's not explicit anymore. I'm going to come out to you and say you can't do that because you're a woman. But though, there's still a lot of ways in which those prejudices continue just under under the surface in people's assumptions and biases and what they actually feels like to go into a class as a woman and find yourself in another room full of old white men who are, you know, if they're interested in you at all it's potentially not for reasons that have to do with your brilliant ideas and that kind of thing. I didn't know what it would be like in that way. And I think there are lots of other kinds of nasty shocks that different people encounter when they enter the academic space that Yeah, so I think I think I mean my main piece of advice for people who who really want to get into this is to really know what they're getting into because there's a, there's an image of being an academic that maybe comes from a different era, where it's very pure and people are out of the world and they sit in their ivory tower and they have very well mannered and deep conversations with one another and that's not the life. I have come to know. And you're from Trinity College, Cambridge. Yeah. I mean, even there, it wasn't like that. It was more like that. I had heard stories, yes. But, but it, no, it was not. It was not that at all. And so it's, it's important to kind of, I mean, the only way to find this out is to ask people and hope that they tell you the truth. Because with the best will in the world, some people don't tell you the truth because they don't know the truth. Not everybody knows what it's like, you know, I don't know what it's like to be, you know, a black woman or white men philosophers at the conference. I can't speak to that, because it's not been my experience but for people who are getting into the discipline now I think it's just important to get as many perspectives as possible. Including from the people who are usually the loudest about this, this kind of thing to really know what it means. And, you know, that sounds like I'm being terribly pessimistic and off-putting, but in a way I kind of, I kind of want to be because I'm a little pessimistic about the state of academia at the moment. Honestly, I think we're in a little bit of a crisis stage. All over the world. Yeah, all over the world. So I don't think it's the kind of security that it used to be. I don't think it's the kind of life that it is sometimes depicted as being. And, you know, there are still lots of good reasons to do it, but you have to know it. You have to know what it is to choose it. Make an informed choice. Okay, but is your career worth it? I think it might be. I had, actually, I was thinking about this question because you gave me your questions in advance and I was thinking about this word or phrase job crafting. And it's out of actually this stuff, this research is being done by someone who's in a school of business or management or something like that. Not a philosopher, but I find her her way of thinking about career fascinating. So job crafting. Her name is Amy and I'm going to mispronounce her second name because I don't know how to pronounce it, but it looks to me like. And her theory is that people who craft their job are a lot more satisfied. And they stay in the job longer and they find it more meaningful and they flourish more. You dimonia in philosophical terms, what she's talking about. And what job crafting means is that you don't just sort of take the job description as is as an external thing that you have to conform to. But instead you kind of shape it more into what you want the job to be. So the further I get through my career, the more job crafting I'm trying to do. And that includes things like, you know, writing this book that was not a conventional monograph. And now I'm starting to do more in this direction. A lot of my work now is in creative writing. Yeah, my last book was was poetry collaboration with a historian and so this stuff is not the stuff I was trained into. So it's not the job I was handed, but it's the job I want. It's the kind of thing I thought I might be able to do if I became a philosopher. So I'm kind of trying to reshape the job into that. And I think that, you know, I think that when I say that I feel like my career could be worth it, it's because I'm able to do that. I'm lucky. I'm one of the lucky few in a tenured professorship at a good university, you know, that makes it possible for me to do these kinds of things. And I think, you know, it's a little bit like when I was talking about the responsibility we have to kind of reshape the story of what love is. I actually feel the same way about our responsibility and my responsibility to contribute to shaping the story about what a philosophy professor is. And so that means, you know, being willing to do kinds of work that look more like what I would hope a philosophy professor might be able to do. Even if that does backfire in some ways, and you know, I got hate mail from this book and for lots of the other stuff that I've been doing. I don't get necessarily, not all the work I do is necessarily regarded as being real philosophy in certain circles, but I'm okay with that. And to me, the important thing is the elements of the elements of job crafting and the responsibility to make the story going forward to have the influence that I want to have on that. So it's kind of, yeah, I think it's worth it if I can do that. I keep trying to the extent that I can. Sometimes I use that convention this but I don't like the word interdisciplinary, even though a lot of the work I now do with fall under the heading of interdisciplinary work, but I do like the word undisciplined for it. So I think getting out of the discipline of philosophy. The kinds of constraints that tell you you have to write this kind of article for this kind of journal and achieve this kind of result. And if you don't do that, it's not real philosophy. I am quite resistant to that thought. And so I'm trying to undiscipline the discipline yourself. Okay, so on that note, thanks again, Professor Jenkins for sharing your time with us. For you guys, join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers.