We must, of course, begin be describing in a fairly rigorous fashion what we mean by "love," a word which is used frequently and understood rarely. I shall use the term "lover" (not to be confused with the colloquial use of the same term having sexual implications) to refer to the person who loves, and the "lovee" to refer to the person who is loved. The lover loves the lovee. I shall begin by enumerating properties I believe part of "love" as various people commonly use it.
I shall take the weakest possible definition of love from which I can make my point. Thus, if your definition of love is stronger (it includes what I give here plus other things), this will apply to you as well. If your definition of love is weaker, or completely different, this will not apply to you. I would, however, be interested to hear your definition of love if you can spare the time to email it to me.
I shall take, as my definition of love, a belief that the state of affairs in which the person who is being loved gets what he wants is superior to one in which he does not. A willingness to act to assist this person is stronger than I need. However, merely saying that the lover would be happy when the lovee received what he wanted would be too weak.
Furthermore, I shall weaken this definition further by saying that it applies only to adults. You are free to use whatever definition of love you want for children. (The motivation for this is that one doesn't necessarily want children to get what they want, such as when they want to eat so much food they'll be sick.)
Let us suppose that there are two people who disagree. Let us suppose, to take an example which indisputably occurs on a regularly basis, one is suing the other in court. One wishes to receive some money from the other. The second does not wish to pay it.
Let us further suppose, then, that you "love everyone." This means that, for all adults, you consider the state of affairs in which they get what they want better than that in which they do not. This, however, is a problem. If person A wins the suit, he has gotten what he wants. Because you love person A, you consider this state of affairs better than that in which he did not win. However, if person B wins, he has gotten what he wants. Because you love him, you must consider this state of affairs superior to that in which he did not get what he wanted. This, however, contradicts the conclusion derived from your love of person A.
One state of affairs cannot simultaneously be both better and worse than another. Therefore, if we admit that our world includes situations where people disagree, we must disallow the possibility of loving everyone. In a situation where people are in conflict, one can love at most one of them. One might have loved both of them previously, but at such time as they come into conflict with each other, one can love only one.
A more palatable solution to this problem may be to love both people, but love one more than the other. This is discussed below.
Is it possible to love one person more than another? Certainly this seems so. The definition above works quite well in this way. We have taken our definition of love to be the consideration of one state of affairs better than another whent he person being loved so considers them. Let us suppose that the person being loved assigns some number (the details of this are not important) to the difference between these states of affairs. For example, he cares about being a quadriplegic vs. not so being much more than he cares about being cheated by a vending machine vs. not so being.
To calculate the difference in desirabilities between two states of affairs, then, we first take the amounts by which everyone we love considers those states of affairs to be different. We then multiply each of these by a factor representative of how much we love the person in question and add them up. This gives the net difference in desirability between the two states of affairs.
Let's use our previous example of the court case to illustrate. Suppose both people care exactly the same amount about the outcome. Therefore, we prefer the situation favored by the person we love more. With the expanded definition, it's even possible to love them both the same amount - in that case, we simply don't care who wins.
Quantifying love seems to have solved the problem. It is now possible to consistently state that one loves everyone, and even that one loves everyone to the same amount! In fact, the problem of consistency has been solved. There is a new problem, however, and that is one of meaninglessness.
Suppose you love everyone the same amount. This means that, whenever there is a disagreement, you base your preference of the winner on the party who cares about it more. If a thief desperately wants to be set free more than the prosecuting attorney wants him to be jailed, you side with the thief, for you love them all the same amount (assuming this amount is positive). If this complete lack of preference or morality is in fact what you mean when you say you love everyone, you have no problems. It seems quite likely, however, that this is rather different than what people think about when they think of universal love. It might be better described as a universal indifference.
How, then, can we provide a definition of universal love which is more compatible with what people actually think? If we have eliminated the possibility of loving everyone the same amount, the only remaining possibility is that of loving some people more than others. You can say "I love everyone, but I love some people more than others." This seems quite acceptable. It's possible to love all people by a positive amount, and thus wish them well so long as no one else is harmed by it, but care about some people more and be willing to take their side in a dispute. If your definition of loving everyone allows for loving some people more than others, I have no complaint with it.
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