ABSTRACT
A legal-theoretical concern with community cannot assume that the existence of any particular community is a good thing. But the social phenomenon of community - the existence of social relations based on mutual interpersonal trust - is valuable in itself, because social life in any stable and rewarding sense is impossible without it. In contemporary law and morality, responsibility usually attaches to individuals. The virtue of imposing liability on a state or a corporation is that, in both cases, this expresses corporate but not collective responsibility. The rationalization of law addressing social relations of instrumental community implies a national community of instrumental relations to be unified, integrated and harmonized. A comparable idea of global traditional community would be one that sees the world as a single shared environment of coexistence. And global instrumental community as an aspiration would emphasize, for example, worldwide economic and technological cooperation and mutual benefit.
