Can Tort Law Be Moral?

According to the established orthodoxy, the law of private wrongs - especially, the common law tort - fails to map onto our moral universe. Four objections in particular have caught the imagination of skeptics about the moral foundations of tort law: They Purport to cast doubt over the moral appeal of the duty of care element; they target the seemingly inegalitarian objective standard of care; they object to the morally arbitrary elements of factual causation and harm; and they complain about the unnecessary extension of liability under the guise of the proximate cause element. Analyzing these four prevailing arguments against the a-moral (and, in regard to some, anti-moral) character of tort law, I shall seek to show that the normative structure of tort law can, nonetheless, be reconstructed so as to reflect, to an important extent, our considered judgments about basic moral principles.