SOURCE: Richardson, Henry S. “Nussbaum: Love and Respect.” Metaphilosophy 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 254-62.

In the following essay, Richardson discusses the tension between concepts of love and respect in Nussbaum's theories of institutional justice.

Immanuel Kant insisted that we must not regard human beings as subject only to the laws of empirical nature. Nonetheless, he admired the precise symmetries of Newton's celestial mechanics. In the striking passage in his Doctrine of Virtue which sets my theme, he applies a Newtonian analogy to relations among persons:

According to the principle of mutual love [persons] are directed constantly to approach one another; by the principle of respect which they owe one another they are directed to keep themselves at a distance. Should one of these great moral forces sink, “so then would nothingness (immorality) with gaping throat drink up the whole realm of (moral) beings like a drop of water.”

(Kant 1983, Ak...