LIBERAL EGALITARIANISM, PRIVATE LAW AND BILATERAL VALUES

The paper addresses the relation between distributive justice and what Scheffler (2015) refers to as private law's 'bilateral values'. The first section reconstructs Scheffler's argument about liberal egalitarianism's strong distributive implications for private law. In the second section, the concept of bilateral value (as a potentially conflicting value with distributive justice) is rendered more precise. In the third and last section, the articles draws on a provisory list of private law's bilateral values in order to assess the claim according to which liberal egalitarianism's strong distributivism represents a threat to those values. It is asserted that, at least in some instances, the conflict between distributive justice and bilateral values is restricted to non-ideal conditions.