Love and moral psychology in global politics: A Kantian reworking of rawls and nussbaum

Funding Information: 1 This research was supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. • Pärttyli Rinne (PhD, University of St Andrews) is a visiting researcher at Aalto University, Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Brain and Mind Laboratory. Rinne specializes in Kant’s philosophy and philosophy of love. He is the author of the monograph Kant on Love (De Gruyter 2018) and has published several articles on Kant’s philosophy and philosophy of love more broadly. Besides collaborating with cognitive neuroscientists on a project “Somatic and Neural Correlates of Love”, Rinne is currently co-editing a collection of essays Kant on Sex, Love, and Friendship. Rinne is also a novelist and an award-winning scriptwriter. Email: parttyli.rinne@aalto.fi Publisher Copyright: © 2020 CSIC Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. All rights reserved.For both John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, the concept of love plays a significant role in moral psychology. Rawls views the sense of justice as grounded in parental love, and continuous with love of mankind. Nussbaum’s recent defence of patriotism revives the emotion of love as essential for political contexts. I argue that love ought to play a substantial part in the shaping of global politics, and that a moral psychology of love based merely on a combination of Rawls’s and Nussbaum’s accounts fails to produce an adequate ground for conceptualizing moral motivation with respect to addressing transnational concerns of justice. I contend that by critically synthesizing Rawls’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of love and moral psychology with resources from Kant’s ethics, it is possible to develop a more attractive, and potentially politically effective, conception of love of human beings in the framework of political liberalism.Peer reviewe