The Moral and Religious Case Against Unconditional Love By Dennis Prager for American Greatness
If people are loved no matter how immorally they act, love becomes the one thing in life that is completely divorced from morality. Unconditional love makes love amoral.
Unconditional love is neither biblical nor rational nor moral.
Can you name anything good that is or should be given with no moral or ethical conditions?
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Take salary, for example: Do you see a problem with continuing to pay employees no matter how they perform? In other words, do you see a problem with unconditional salaries?
The question is rhetorical.
If people believe they will receive the same salary no matter how well or poorly they work, few will work hard. The fact that a worker can be fired is precisely what prevents most people from slacking off.
Furthermore, paying the same salary to the lazy and careless worker as to the hardworking and responsible one is so unfair that it would completely undermine workplace morale.
Now substitute love for salary.
If everyone received the same amount of love no matter how terrible or beautiful their actions, wouldn’t that create the same problems as unconditional salaries?
If we gave everyone the same amount of love no matter how they behaved, what would motivate anyone to behave better? And would it be fair? If kind, self-sacrificing, responsible people were to receive no more love than narcissists, murderers, and thieves, the world would be a far more unjust place than it already is.
Unconditional love is no more desirable, no more fair and no more goodness-inducing than unconditional salary. Yet, remarkably, unconditional love has become the great human and even divine ideal.
This is a recent development.
Google charts the use of words and terms in English-language books from the beginning of the 19th century until the present. If you look at its chart for the term “unconditional love,” you will learn that until the 1970s, the term almost never appeared in English-language books. And then, all of a sudden, it was everywhere.
