Rawls and Tort Law: Against the Consequentialism Thesis
Keywords:
Tort law, Rawls, Difference principle, Consequentialism, ShiffrinAbstract
Rawlsian accounts of tort law have argued for one of two extreme positions. Sometimes it is affirmed, as does Arthur Ripstein, that tort law must remain indifferent to the distributive goals that animate most part of Rawls’s conception of justice (e.g. the difference principle). For others, like Kevin Kordana and David Tabachnick, tort law is only defensible from a Rawlsianism perspective to the extent the former’s distributive effects are desirable. Distancing itself from both these extreme views, the paper explains why parties in Rawls’s original position cannot disregard issues of convergence between law and interpersonal morality. On one hand, convergence prevents tort law from being a mere tool to the pursuit of distributive goals. On the other hand, assuring convergence between tort law and interpersonal morality still allows for some distributivism in the realm of torts.
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