ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Ancient and modern justice in Adam Smith
Author:
Recent scholarship on Adam Smith shows an increasing interest on his thought about justice. A certain amount of conjectural elaboration in the recovering of Smith's thought on the subject is unavoidable, as he did not fulfil his project to write an "account of the general principles of law and government", so there is room for interpretations. For instance, Jeffrey Young's idea that Smith tried in WN to "eliminate the political economy branch of that science (=economics), placing economic science within the justice branch of jurisprudence" seems opposite to the traditional account by Dugald Stewart's of Smith's lectures on political economy as illustrating "those political regulations (.....) which are founded, not upon the principle of justice, but that of expediency". My paper aims at examining this subject under a historical point of view, bearing in mind some recent scholarly contributions. I will read what Smith writes on justice as a moral virtue, with its classical antecedents like the Aristotelian dichotomy between commutative and distributive justice; but I will also point out that in recent studies distributive justice has been sometimes mistaken with a principle of "economic" justice, namely with a fairer distribution of wealth. I'll try to understand of what justice are speaking some scholars who have recently dealt with this issue: whether Aristotelian justice, which underwent a transformation in Scholastic philosophy, but is still part of a moral discourse about justice; or of modern distributive justice which certainly has an economic "flavour", although nobody would affirm today that ethics has nothing to do with it. A great deal of recent discussion on Adam Smith's justice is influenced by the fact that justice is one of the four cardinal virtues, with which recent scholarship (Griswold, Montes, Fitzgibbons, Otteson, Brown and others) tried to identify Smith's prudence, justice, benevolence and self-command. In the recent upsurge of "virtue ethics" as an analytical tool to examine Smith's thought, justice is obviously framed in a moral discourse, and economics itself, being connected with justice, loses part of the independence from morals it had previously enjoyed as the science of expediency.
Registred web users only can download this paper - Go back
Please note that files available for download have not been checked for viruses. These files have been submitted by authors of the conference to this web site. Conference organisers can't accept any responsibility for damages caused to users by downloading such files.