Abstract

“Fraternity” and the often synonymously used concept “solidarity” are usually understood as ideals or values that go beyond justice. It is no surprise that the liberal tradition has found it difficult to fully embrace fraternity as a political value. Fraternity as an expression of our moral motivation is beyond the sanctioning power of the liberal state. I will defend a different conception of fraternity in this article. Taking the feminist slogan “The personal is political” seriously, I’ll interpret fraternity as a foundational political value. Fraternity does not go beyond justice but is one of its constitutive elements. I do not use the term in the broad sense of “unconditional love.” The intended narrower meaning is based on the idea of a luck egalitarian interpretation of reciprocity or mutuality. This narrower notion of fraternity takes its initial clue from what I will call Rawls’s luck egalitarian insight. According to my interpretation, we take a fraternal attitude towards each other if we don’t demand undeserved distributive advantages and agree to a scheme of cooperation in which brute luck differences are not reflected in such a way that they lead to distributive advantages.