The start of the school year is creeping up on us but it is still summer.
If you can, find some time to relax in the sun, perhaps by a pool or ocean, enjoy a tropical drink, and enjoy the following guest post.
It’s by Nick Laskowski (University of Maryland), who provides us with a seasonal example of the time-honored tradition of philosophers overthinking song lyrics.
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Yes I Like Piña Coladas:
On Haecceities and the Normativity of Love
by Nick Laskowski
When I received Justin’s invitation to write a guest post, the consequentialist’s compelling idea that it would be permissible, as well as the perhaps less compelling idea that it would be obligatory, to use the opportunity to promote the best outcome for the profession became vivid. Perhaps I would make an argument for why senior philosophers should almost always submit non-anonymous referee reports to avoid submitting lazy or nasty reports. Or perhaps share first-hand evidence that the perceived persecution some philosophers keep droning on and on about isn’t unique to conservative positions on gender: ordinary territoriality and vanity—maybe even my own!—cost my co-author and me eight years in publishing our recent paper defending the view that your gender is the one you intrinsically desire to belong to. Bias against gender conservatism isn’t even the right kind of thing to explain our ur-woke idea’s slow route to print.
Instead, I’ve decided to prioritize fittingness and write on something more appropriate for the summer: piña coladas, or rather, Rupert Holmes’ 1979 pop song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)“.
It’s a feel-good song with lyrics about a couple who appear to fall out and then back into love with one another. It’s written in the first person, so it is Holmes himself who expresses boredom about his own relationship with his long-time romantic partner with the lines “I was tired of my lady” and “We’d been together too long”. Accordingly, he checks out the “personal columns” of the newspaper (i.e. 20th century Tinder) in the hope of finding a new romantic partner, where he finds the following ad:
If you like piña coladas
And gettin’ caught in the rain
If you’re not into yoga
If you have half a brain
If you like making love at midnight
In the dunes on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for
Write to me and escape
Hence the song’s title. Now if you’ve never read the lyrics before, you might be hung up on the fact that Holmes is trying to ditch his partner. Reserve your judgment. Seeing himself as someone who likes piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, and so on, Holmes describes (anonymously) meeting the ad’s author at a local bar:
So I waited with high hopes
And she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant
I knew the curve of her face
It was my own lovely lady
And she said, “Aw, it’s you”
Then we laughed for a moment
And I said, “I never knew”
The big, seemingly sweet reveal, of course, is that the ad’s author was the very partner from whom Holmes was trying to escape. Holmes’s partner tried to ditch him for someone who likes piña coladas, Holmes tried to ditch his partner for someone looking for someone who likes piña coladas, and each ends up realizing that their existing partner fits the bill. It’s a twisted kind of “meet cute”.
But their meet up is more twisted than cute and not just because they each avoid engaging in the morally bad behavior of cheating on their partner by benefiting from a generous amount of moral luck. The song should not inspire any “Aww, shucks” because it presupposes a low down, dirty, sordid view of the normativity of love that’s probably false.
Think about the reasons why you romantically love your husband, wife, partner, or partner(s). When I do so, I find myself reaching for my wife’s creativity, attractiveness, strength, and various other qualities. When I invite my students to engage in this exercise, they also tend to reach for their own partner’s qualities. And qualities seem like an excellent place to reach. Indeed, on reflection, it’s not terribly obvious what else might serve as our reasons for (romantic) love. It’s easy to conclude that a person’s qualities exhaust our reasons for loving them.
The song seems to assume this kind of qualities view of our reasons for love. After all, Holmes’s lady’s ad for a new romantic partner just is a list of qualities—she’s looking for a romantic partner who exhibits the qualities of liking piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, having half a brain, and the like. And before meeting at the bar, Holmes describes himself as answering the ad in the following qualities-centric way:
Yes, I like piña coladas
And gettin’ caught in the rain
I’m not much into health food
I am into champagne
I’ve got to meet you by tomorrow noon
And cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O’Malley’s
Where we’ll plan our escape
In his mind, Holmes should answer the ad because the person on the other end of it is looking for someone like him—someone with the qualities of liking piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. But that’s just it. Holmes’s partner isn’t looking for him. His partner is looking for someone, anyone, who exhibits the qualities of liking piña coladas and getting caught in the right. I happen to love piña coladas (though as far as creamy tropical drinks go, I prefer a painkiller). Now assume that I also like getting caught in the rain, and, generously, that I have half a brain, and so on. The qualities view seems to imply that there is a tie between Holmes’ partner’s reason to love me and her reasons to love Holmes. That is, the qualities view implies that if Homes and I both show up at O’Malley’s, Holmes’s partner ought rationally to flip a coin. Meet cute? Twisted.
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As it happens, there is an easy way to break the tie in favor of Holmes. For example, some philosophers (like Tom Hurka in his book The Best Things in Life, which is where I, a metaethicist by training, started learning the little philosophy of love I know) argue that the way out of this kind of puzzle is to locate our reasons for love not just in any old type of quality, but the qualities that we exhibit in virtue of standing in various historical relations to one another. Homes and his partner presumably shared many happy moments together in the past. But even if they didn’t, and their time together was more fraught than fond, their relationship was unique—no other individuals inhabited the very same places at the very same times as they did when they did whatever they did together as a couple, nor will they ever. There’s a sense in which that’s special, and that specialness attaches only to them.
So Holmes and his partner’s shared history plausibly tips the balance of reasons in favor of his partner loving him over otherwise qualitatively identical me. That view’s fine, I suppose (though I’m sure someone has made the point that there’s a possible “Repugnant Conclusion” analogue for such reasons for love that should give us pause). It does seem to yield the right result about our case, after all.
[archived image unavailable] Rupert Holmes with thisness (artist’s rendering)Nevertheless, I alluded to a much more fun view above, namely, that Holmes’s partner’s reasons for loving Holmes includes the “thisness” that is Holmes himself. The haecceity that is Holmes gives his partner a reason to love him that I lack, thereby making it rational to pick him over non-historically qualitatively identical me. Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” turns out to be more cute than twisted after all, at least on a haecceity-based view of the normativity of love, the haecceity bit of which I leave to commentators to work out below. Have fun!
