Adaptive Justice in the Chinese Context: Law versus Commonsense

Under certain circumstances, law may come into conflict with commonsense, which by definition refers to “popular conceptions of right and wrong”, a conflict to which rescue comes a mechanism I conceptualise as “adaptive justice”, as it aims to adapt the law, in balance with other non-positive, but equally universal rules, to the circumstances at hand. It follows two propositions: (1) When law encounters or engenders difficulty during its legislation, application or interpretation, certain non-positive, universal rules will have to be introduced in order to make flexible the rigidity of written law; (2) the solution is an adaptive application of legal rules, rather than adherence to a literal reading of legal texts. In the context of the libertarian-communitarian debate on justice, this notion of adaptive justice may offer us a new angle, as it has an in-built focus on “methodological relationalism”, which by definition uses interpersonal relationship as the basic unit of analysis to decode human behaviour and values.