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Justice as a Family Value: How a Commitment to Fairness is Compatible with Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Pauline Kleingeld  and
Joel Anderson
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Abstract

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice‐oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 320 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Herbert Anderson, Jochen Bojanowski, Beate Rössler, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2009 conference on “Justice, Care, and the Family,” Erasmus University Rotterdam, and at the Practical Philosophy Research Group of the University of Groningen in 2012. We would like to thank the participants in both meetings for valuable comments and suggestions. Some of the ideas presented in this article appeared in German under the title “Die gerechtigkeitsorientierte Familie: Jenseits der Spannung zwischen Liebe und Gerechtigkeit,” in Von Person zu Person: Zur Moralität persönlicher Beziehungen, ed. Axel Honneth and Beate Rössler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 283–312.

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