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Can you love your baby after it's born?

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JacobGalt

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Not in the Christian/egalitarian sense. A child represents the culmination of a lot of productive effort, can symbolize your value of human nature, etc.. You can also look ahead to all the values of parenthood. Some people think babies are cute, the captured essence of new life or something like that.

Just because a fetus, as a potential person, doesn't have rights, that doesn't mean a fetus or small child cannot be of great value to its parents by virtue of that same potential. It just isn't exactly equivalent to the person it will grow up to be.

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Of course you can. As the father of three sons, I can assure you that when you look that child in the eyes for the first time, you will love him. A normal person will do everything he can to feed, clothe and shelter that child - and will do so even if they are an adult and need your help.

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You love that which is of high value to you. Can you, then, love your newborn without knowing its virtues?

Don't confuse love with romantic love. What "virtues" does a dog or a cat have? Or a house? Or a car, a sports team? Or anything else non-human or non-rational? Can one love these things? Of course. Don't equivocate on 'virtue' either. It also means " a commendable quality or trait" or " a beneficial quality or power of a thing." So, yes, you do indeed know its virtue when you love it. It's just not referring to "Objectivist virtues".

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I think that my children live under my assumption of their being virtuous until they have the ability to express and thereby demonstrate that as they grow. They came from me, and given that I am raising them with compassion and reason, they have every opportunity to embrace virtue and conviction and with an example of that in their mother. I assume they value their lives foremost and will desire virtue.

They are also pure potential when they are born and live under every manner of assumption to do with human capacity and ability since this is the only way that human beings come about (as newborn babies), so it is our only option and we must assume the best of its future and outcome. I don't think that is why I love them though.

I am honesty not sure what the mechanism for loving them is other than that they came from me and in the beginning, we make a transition from being as intimately related as any two human beings can be, to being two people distinct from one another as they grow, and we develop a new dynamic that allows for their growth, and mine too. From that place of intimacy, that I have only with each of them distinctly from any other relationship in my life, my love for them is like a 'mini' tandem or parallel version of the love I have for myself.

That, and a content baby can make a person feel like the most important person in the whole universe, which is better than flattering. Their unmitigated welcome and utter dependence illuminate my heroic nature. I keep my babies alive, and better, I guide them and they trust me implicitly. I also genuinely delight in discovering who they are as individuals; it really is fascinating and for lack of a better term, adorable.

Why that evokes love from me, I'm not sure, except maybe that this sort of love is as natural to man as industry or faculty of reason, which we accept as given. For me, having become aware of their presence in my body was in all ways synonymous with loving them. I don't think I can really tease this all apart in any reasonable way unless it is true that this love is an expression of my nature in relation to their existence or that my nature includes love for people I grow in my body.

I'm pretty entrenched though, having five children and the youngest being 6 weeks old. Perhaps I will have a clearer explanation when they are grown. For now it is what it is.

I think that not loving one's baby is the departure from reality, actually, but again, I think that my emotional involvement in the subject likely occludes at least part of my ability to reason this fully- even if I turn out to be correct in my assessment, I admit to taking a pretty circuitous route.

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If all anyone ever did was search, no one would ever post anything, O' member with many numerals for your username.

And doing a search on '0096 2251 2110 8105' would reveal that the it could be a reference to the last line sung in the song 'Even Less' by the band 'Porcupine Tree'.

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If all anyone ever did was search, no one would ever post anything, O' member with many numerals for your username.

If all anyone ever did was search, no one would ever post anything, yes. Anything that is completely unnecessary, out of place, already discussed, and it would decrease a good number of overly redundant and unnecessarily repeated topics just because of the OP's laziness or unwillingness to use the search function, as in JacobGalts case, which happens to be all the time. Anyway, I never said that using it is all anyone should do, but it should be done at least before posting a new topic.

Edited by 0096 2251 2110 8105
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And we wonder why new people are scared off of this board...

True enough.

If you are new-ish to a topic the search itself can be hard.

No one here is forced to answer questions that have already been answered.

As to the question....

Do you love yourself? Do you love your life?

Then yes, of course you can love a child.

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Loving a child is like loving your chosen career. It's not the same context as the love you have for your friends or romantic partner, although it has the same source--the things you love enhance your enjoyment of your life. Friends enhance your life when they are virtuous people, which is why Objectivists say that you love your friends for their virtues, but this doesn't mean that virtues = love. Love = value, it's just that the virtues of other adults ARE of value to you.

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(Moral) people are having children because of:

a ) Love of each other and the value of (the will to) love by the child

b ) Productively, all of those things you can learn by educating him

c ) Sex

You love somebody because it has same values of yours (in proper to all the standard and ultimate values etc.) and some well virtues, not as an evident of its existence, nor by mercy and negative of admire.

You can love a baby after educating him, after willfully educating him very well, that which requires a lot of intellectual work, and belief in ideas. To educate somebody is to (try to) make him moral, to make him qualified to be loved and to love.

Then please, don't doubt what I'm saying as 'hating your own children' or anything else.

T.R.

Edited by Tomer Ravid
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(Moral) people are having children because of:

c ) Sex

A minor correction... "sex" used to be the case, but no longer holds true for rational folk. Nobody needs to have a baby just because they had sex and conceived.

You love somebody because it has same values of yours ...
Consider this: you can love your dog or your car. Consider this: your neighbor may have exactly the same car you have and you can still love yours while liking his. Or, consider Jenni's example: you can love your chosen career. In other words, loving a child is not the same thing as loving another adult. You are not responding values that have been chosen by the other person (the child), but you are responding to values nevertheless. Of course as the child grows things change.

Aside: I'm not sure why, but the forum editor doesn't like something in your posts. I wonder if you're using an external editor and then pasting those into the forum, and that is putting in some unexpected characters... or something similar.

Edited by softwareNerd
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A minor correction... "sex" used to be the case, but no longer holds true for rational folk. Nobody needs to have a baby just because they had sex and conceived.

I do not exactly know since I have no big experience range of philosophy. All I can say is: that it apparently does do with sex as a part of sexual passion between the sides: it does have a clear metaphysical connection with the idea of having children, that's known.

Consider this: you can love your dog or your car. Consider this: your neighbor may have exactly the same car you have and you can still love yours while liking his. Or, consider Jenni's example: you can love your chosen career. In other words, loving a child is not the same thing as loving another adult. You are not responding values that have been chosen by the other person (the child), but you are responding to values nevertheless. Of course as the child grows things change.

Yes, there are serial concept in the word of 'love'. You can love a car or a career, and that has a relation with the original definition of love; it means: 'There is something I own which is well in a certain standard of a certain thing', or 'I am realizing own my values while producing these things' or 'I could admire the guy whose been making it I met him'.

The second one, I'd say, is more like the verb 'to like', as you like your own parents and you anyway will, independently on who they are after a certain thing they've done for you. I'd define it as a mix of gratefulness, mercy and simply an acclimation to something. But it's only context with love is the fact you may feel a sort of joy with them both as a creation of knowing people (or dogs), but nothing serious else.

Anyway, I'll call the concept love however I like, if that word is more clearly connected with other definition. But still, if you keep occurring to it as you can love a sock in that context of love I defined, you are destructing this concept!

T.R.

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Aside: I'm not sure why, but the forum editor doesn't like something in your posts. I wonder if you're using an external editor and then pasting those into the forum, and that is putting in some unexpected characters... or something similar.

Only when I already have a relevant post referring to the contex of the consideration well enough. This specific time: I didn't.

Edited by Tomer Ravid
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