Private Order and Public Justice: Kant and Rawls

This paper lies at the intersection of two larger projects, one on Kant's legal and political philosophy and the other on the relation between private law and distributive justice. It uses the Kantian idea of private ordering to explain the place of private law in what John Rawls has described as the "division of responsibility" between society and the individual. I explain why private law is an essential part of what, for Rawls is the fundamental subject of justice - the coercive structure of society. I argue that private law is only a system of reciprocal limits on freedom, provided that those limits are general in the right way. I also argue that the best way to think about Rawls's emphasis in public provision of adequate rights and opportunities is in parallel terms: they are essential conditions to the very possibility of enforceable rights, because they are the moral prerequisites for a share public sphere.