Justice in Private: Beyond the Rawlsian Framework

Law & Philosophy (2017 Forthcoming)

24 Pages Posted: 9 Jul 2014 Last revised: 11 Jul 2017

See all articles by Hanoch Dagan

Hanoch Dagan

Berkeley Law School

Avihay Dorfman

Tel Aviv University - Buchmann Faculty of Law

Date Written: July 9, 2017

Abstract

This article argues against the wholesale collectivization of the responsibility for doing justice and defends, in its stead, the important place of private individuals in realizing some of the demands of justice (beyond those associated with preserving formal freedom and equality). We claim that the demands of justice can implicate (in the appropriate sense) private individuals in particular and not merely the state. Certain facts concerning the human condition — the existence of personal differences and the fundamental significance of interdependence — warrant the view that the more substantive liberal understandings of freedom and equality are just as crucial in our horizontal relationships as they are in our vertical ones. A normatively defensible conception of relational justice must therefore cast interpersonal interactions in terms of accommodative frameworks of relationships between free and equal individuals who respect each other as the persons they actually are.

Keywords: justice, relational equality, freedom, private law, responsibility, accommodation

Suggested Citation

Dagan, Hanoch and Dorfman, Avihay, Justice in Private: Beyond the Rawlsian Framework (July 9, 2017). Law & Philosophy (2017 Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2463537 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2463537

Hanoch Dagan (Contact Author)

Berkeley Law School ( email )

890 simon hall
215 Bancroft way
berkeley, CA 94720
United States

Avihay Dorfman

Tel Aviv University - Buchmann Faculty of Law ( email )

Ramat Aviv
Tel Aviv, 69978
Israel

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