Abstract

In The Just Family, Richard Dien Winfield presents an ethics specific to the family. His aim is to show that the family is an “integrated sphere of right, wherein individuals exercise rights and duties as autonomous family members that are nowhere else possible”. His account of the just family is explicitly set out in the context of the other spheres of right, namely, property, family, civil society and state. The philosophy of right is presented in a manner that conforms to the tenets of immanently developing, systematic philosophy. The work builds upon Hegel’s philosophy of the family. At the heart of the conception of the just family is the notion of the ethical community. The book can be divided in terms of this concept. The first part of the work seeks to establish the validity of this concept and its appropriateness for the family. The rest concerns working out the concept’s ramifications for the particulars of the normatively conceived family.