Competing for Abrahamic Justice

Abstract

Abrahamic Justice represents an alternative to modernity's “top-down” efforts to establish “universal” principles of human justice as well as to persistent efforts within each of the major religious traditions to universalize some regional account of what is “good and just”. The result of these efforts is an unhappy competition between secular and religious universalisms. Each kind of universal is promoted as an alternative to the other, as well as to the “relativism” that would seem to be the only third alternative. “Abrahamic justice” refers, instead, to “bottom-up” activities of inter-Abrahamic scriptural study and reasoning for the sake of generating inter-Abrahamic measures of social justice. This kind of justice therefore emerges out of relational, rather than relativistic sources. The purpose of these activities is to generate neither “universal” principles nor merely local claims, but, rather, to generate whatever kinds of measure are called for to meet the urgent inter-Abrahamic and inter-national needs of the day. Faithful to this approach, Prof. Peter Ochs speaks here from his own sub-tradition of Jewish scriptural study and rabbinic commentary, still hoping to offer claims about Justice that could potentially speak for participants from all three Abrahamic traditions.