Affective Equality: Who cares?

Human beings are not just economic actors, devoid of relationality; rather, they are interdependent and dependent with a deep capacity for moral feeling and attaching. The presumption that people are mere units of labour, movable from one country to another as production requires, is, therefore, an institutionalized form of affective injustice. As love, care and solidarity involve work, affective inequalities also occur when the burdens and benefits of these forms of work are unequally distributed. Kathleen Lynch argues that affective inequality is an acutely gendered problem given the moral imperative on women to care, and an acute problem for all of humanity given that vulnerability and inter/dependency is endemic to the human condition.