Ordinarily, when we speak of love between human beings, we speak of persons
loving each other. The point I wish to emphasize is that the object of love is
ordinarily understood to be a person, not the characteristics or properties of a
person. While the beloved may have many attractive, fascinating, desirable or
otherwise valuable attributes, one loves the beloved, not a set of attributes. This
conception of love seems to commit one to the view that that the beloved is
properly regarded as irreplaceable in a philosophically interesting sense:
valuing an individual “for [her] own sake” seems to presuppose a
recognition that no substitute will do: the beloved is not so valued if she is
regarded as fungible. After all, a willingness to accept a substitute suggests
that what is valued is not the particular individual after all, but some cluster
of qualities that the individual happens to manifest. And if it turns out that
what one is valuing is an abstract collection of qualities rather than a
concrete individual, it is difficult to see how one could plausibly be said
to value the beloved for [her] own sake (Grau, “L’amour”).1
Thus, the lover takes the beloved to be irreplaceable. Being irreplaceable, in the
relevant sense, does not rest on any supposed qualitative uniqueness of the
beloved. That is not the sort of nonfungibility at issue. Rather, the beloved is irreplaceable in the sense that one would reject or regret the substitution, for the
beloved, of a numerically distinct, but qualitatively identical, substitute.2, 3
