© Jesper Ahlin Marceta 2025
This is a short text I wrote as a PhD student when I studied John Rawls’s book Justice as Fairness. I’m not sure the argument holds, but I re-read it today and found it interesting. In Justice as Fairness, Rawls argues that the family is a basic institution (2001, pp. 162–3). His main arguments are that the family has an essential role in the production and reproduction of society, and is a reasonable and effective way of raising and caring for children. In this brief text, I argue that Rawls’s arguments would also support treating the clan as a basic institution. Clan societies, however, are…