ABSTRACT
Rawls says little about love in A Theory of Justice, yet people take on and impose unfair burdens in the name of love. Love in spousal, familial, and associational relationships can come into conflict with the demands of justice, but love appeals to its own commands and obligations. From the point of view of Rawls’s conception of justice, this chapter identifies several ‘vices’ of love and shows how they confront justice as an alternative normative order. However, the author argues that love and justice can be aligned and reconciled with both Rawls’s principles of justice and with his own notion of love. In service of this argument, the author advances a notion of proper or just love.
