Suppose we replace “unconditional love” with “unconditional promise”. E.g. suppose Alice has promised Bob that she’ll make Bob dinner on Christmas no matter what. Now it would be clearly confused to say “Alice promised Bob Christmas dinner unconditionally, so presumably she promised everything else Christmas dinner as well, since it is only conditions that separate Bob from the worms”.
What’s gone wrong here? Well, the ontology humans use for coordinating with each other assumes the existence of persistent agents, and so when you say you unconditionally promise/love/etc a given agent, then this implicitly assumes that we have a way of deciding which agents are “the same agent”. No theory of personal identity is fully philosophically robust, of course, but if you object to that then you need to object not only to “I unconditionally love you” but also any sentence which contains the word “you”, since we don’t have a complete theory of what that refers to.
A woman who leaves a man because he grew plump and a woman who leaves a man because he committed treason both possessed ‘conditional love’.
This is not necessarily conditional love, this is conditional care or conditional fidelity. You can love someone and still leave them; they don’t have to outweigh everything else you care about.
But also: I think “I love you unconditionally” is best interpreted as a report of your current state, rather than a commitment to maintaining that state indefinitely.
Suppose we replace “unconditional love” with “unconditional promise”. E.g. suppose Alice has promised Bob that she’ll make Bob dinner on Christmas no matter what. Now it would be clearly confused to say “Alice promised Bob Christmas dinner unconditionally, so presumably she promised everything else Christmas dinner as well, since it is only conditions that separate Bob from the worms”.
What’s gone wrong here? Well, the ontology humans use for coordinating with each other assumes the existence of persistent agents, and so when you say you unconditionally promise/love/etc a given agent, then this implicitly assumes that we have a way of deciding which agents are “the same agent”. No theory of personal identity is fully philosophically robust, of course, but if you object to that then you need to object not only to “I unconditionally love you” but also any sentence which contains the word “you”, since we don’t have a complete theory of what that refers to.
This is not necessarily conditional love, this is conditional care or conditional fidelity. You can love someone and still leave them; they don’t have to outweigh everything else you care about.
But also: I think “I love you unconditionally” is best interpreted as a report of your current state, rather than a commitment to maintaining that state indefinitely.