Love, Fairness, and Sharing a Life

According to a long philosophical tradition and a potent kernel of common sense, loving partnerships are governed by affection and care, and so not properly evaluated by standards of justice or fairness. In this paper I precisify and challenge this idea. I argue that love and fairness are unified in the sense that some partners are only able to perform particular act-types (loving and expressing love) if their actions are sensitive to considerations of fairness. When loving acts are aimed at “sharing a life”, we properly evaluate more-basic acts of sharing – where this concerns their adherence to standards of fairness – as a way of evaluating them as complex acts of loving. Life-sharing offers an attractive feminist ideal of love, immune to concerns about the alleged imposition of fairness-related considerations where they don’t belong.