Gift, social capital, and relational goods:

an initial realistic relationalepistemological approach to Family Law

Abstract

This article proposes an approach to Family Law grounded in critical realistic relational epistemology, contrasting it with predominant individualistic and constructivist perspectives. It argues that the family is a relationship with its own identity, defined by the gift paradigm and functioning as a “total social fact” that the State does not create, but can influence either positively or negatively. Utilizing Pierpaolo Donati’s “epistemological quadrilateral”, the text critiques the insufficiency of Miguel Reale’s three-dimensional theory for the observation of the dimension of deep social ontology. It demonstrates that the legal perspective’s failure to attend to relational nature can produce harmful emergent effects, such as the erosion of social capital and the dehumanization of relationships. The use of the AGIL scheme is proposed to enable the legal scholar to develop a second-level reflexivity regarding family relations. The central goal is to recognize the specificity of the family’s “social genome”, distinguishing it from purely economic or political relations. It posits that the relationship is ontologically more fundamental than any oppression that may emerge from it, a reality that a legal perspective respecting the latent dignity of the real must acknowledge. In this way, Law can act as a promoter of relational goods rather than serving merely as a tool of immunitary intervention.