Свобода и справедливость в правовом осмыслении

Abstract

It is a response to the article by V.A. Belov and O.Yu. Skvortsov “Justice vs Freedom = Law: Antagonistic Contradiction and its Solution” (Statute [Zakon]. 2023. No. 2-3). The author examines the positive and negative aspects of the concept of justice offered by them, emphasising its natural law orientation and ideological closeness to the school of “revived natural law”. Another positive aspect of the proposed concept is the recognition of human freedom and justice as inalienable attributes of law. The very idea of opposing justice and freedom is regarded as controversial. The author argues that justice must not be opposed to freedom, because this opposition does not allow to think without contradictions of the very notion of freedom. The “narrow,” socio-centrist interpretation of justice has no satisfactory theoretical justification and must be reformed. The author offers for discussion his own concept of justice in law, based on a communicative approach, dialogical methodology and the principle of mutual legal recognition. Arguments in support of this view on the nature of justice are derived not only from philosophical and sociological research but also from evolutionary theory, biology and neuroscience. The basic idea is to justify the existence of two fundamental traditional values that underlie human conceptions of justice: the value of the human person and the value of society. Their optimal coexistence is possible only on the basis of the realisation of the principle of mutual legal recognition and the mutual rights and obligations arising from it. In the realisation of this principle lies the idea of justice. Law is born not in a struggle between justice and freedom, but in a struggle for justice and freedom.