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Love and Justice: a Paradox?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Anca Gheaus
Anca Gheaus*
Affiliation:
Law Department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
*
E-mail: agheaus@gmail.com
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Abstract

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox.

Keywords

Distributive justicelovecaremetric of justiceduty to lovefeasibility
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , 2017 , pp. 739 - 759
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017

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