LOVING AN UNFAMILIAR WORLD DEMENTIA, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND CLIMATE CHANGE

摘要

If climate change is as bad as many now predict, we may be faced with the problem of how to cope with a natural world that is changing more rapidly than our ability to form emotional attachments can keep pace with. How can we love a natural world that seems so strange and unfamiliar to us? For help in answering this question, I turn to structurally similar problems that we face in our emotional attachments to other people. Using the cases of dementia and mental illness, I investigate how people adapt their love in cases where their beloved changes in ways that render her, at least at times, unfamiliar, strange, and unpredictable. I argue that in both human and nonhuman cases, love can be compatible with dramatic and rapid changes in one's beloved, but to achieve this one must remain open-minded about the nature of the beloved and morally attentive to the ongoing question of which states will promote its well-being.