The Relational Conception of Justice and the Limits of Legitimate Claims: Cooperation, Reciprocity and Interaction

From a rawlsian-inspired relational conception of justice, the ideas of cooperation, reciprocity and interaction have been proposed to interpret the grounds for legitimate claims to distributive justice and to restrict its scope of application to particular political societies or states. This article analyses the main attempts to justify this restriction and argues against them. The paper will conclude with the presentation of another way of interpreting the relational conception of justice that makes possible a critical approach to the complex injustices with which we are challenged by the current globalizing world, according to which, if any element of the social structure imposes relations that can be evaluated as just or not, any of them can be a focus of injustice, whether basic or not, formal or informal, national or transnational.Desde una concepción relacional de la justicia de inspiración rawlsiana, las ideas de la cooperación, la reciprocidad y la interacción han sido propuestas para interpretar el fundamento de las reivindicaciones legítimas de justicia distributiva y para restringir su ámbito de aplicación a sociedades políticas o Estados particulares. En este artículo se analizan los principales intentos de justificar esta restricción y se argumentará en contra de ellos. Se finalizará con la presentación de otra forma de interpretar la concepción relacional de la justicia que posibilita una aproximación crítica a las complejas injusticias con las que nos interpela nuestro mundo en globalización