Instilling Duties above Instilling Rights: Two Features of Adam Smith's Talk of Justice and Liberty.

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.

I suggest that two features of Adam Smith's talk of justice and liberty reflect a priority on instilling duties, as opposed to instilling rights. The first feature has to do with his manner of talking "justice"; I distinguish between calling loudly and proffering coolly. The second feature is Smith's refraining in his two great works from using "liberty" in expansive senses of the term. I treat each feature in turn.

Calling Loudly

In Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Adam Smith writes of "loud" calls and objections (TMS 71.5, 73.2, 74.4, 84.2, 105.2, and 131.33). (1) Loudness constitutes a disturbance, a demand on other people's attention. In the opening pages, he writes: "If we hear a person loudly lamenting his misfortunes, which, however, upon bringing the case home to ourselves, we feel, can produce no such violent effect upon us, we are shocked at his grief; and, because we cannot enter into it, call it pusillanimity and weakness" (TMS 16.6). Already in the second chapter he insinuates pusillanimity and weakness for those who neglect duties.

But Smith clearly sees a place for loudness. In the "most sacred laws" passage about justice among equals, he says violations of person, property, and promises-due "call loudest for vengeance and punishment" (TMS 84.2).

In policy matters, Smith sometimes calls loudly, or somewhat loudly, as when he writes of:

* "an evident violation of natural liberty and justice" (Wealth of Nations (WN) 157.59), "an act of such violent injustice" (WN 326.100),

* "evident violations of natural liberty, and therefore unjust" (WN 530.16),

* "contrary to all the ordinary principles of justice" (WN 826.6),

* "In both regulations the sacred rights of private property are sacrificed to the supposed interests of public revenue" (WN 188.27),

* "a plain violation of this most sacred property" (WN 138.12),

* "the most sacred rights of mankind" (WN 582.44),

* the rebuke of the slave trade in TMS (206-207.9).

These cases speak of violations of person, property, or promises-due. There are other moments where Smith's sentiment is warm, if not loud, such as the famous "equity, besides" passage (WN 96.36). That passage says that all people, including those "who feed, cloath, and lodge the whole body of the people," are to be accorded equal dignity, equal rights, and equal moral worth in an accounting of the common good. As Christopher Martin (2015, 2021) shows, Smith's policy orientation toward the poor was quite consistently (2) along the lines of the liberal plan of allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way (WN 664.3).

Proffering Coolly

Fonna Forman-Barzilai writes: "[Ijmpartiality requires a sort of cool distance." In TMS, Smith abundantly used "cool" to signify calm or composed, as when he speaks of "the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator" or of "the cool hours" (2010, 159). (3)

I beg pardon for mixing metaphors: The "loud" decibels metaphor would suggest an opposite in quiet, while the "cool" temperature metaphor of would suggest an opposite in warm, fervent, or ardent. However, to echo Smith's verbalisms, I propose: calling loudly versus proffering coolly. Proffer means to propose something, and connotes calmness and quietness, as opposed to the verb to call, which connotes loudness. The proffering we mean is proposing an idea or an estimation of an object, such as a position on an issue of government policy.

In WN, whenever Smith's justice talk does not involve his objecting to a violation of "mere" justice (TMS 82.9), he proffers coolly (e.g., WN 815.4-5, 827.7, 834.20, 944.88, 946.92). Smith seems to suggest that when we talk about what is "just" in government policy and we are not protesting violations of "mere" justice, we should proffer coolly. It is a duty not to call loudly. That duty is elevated over the assertion of supposed rights that supposedly call for redress. That is the first of the two features of Smith's talk. Now we turn toward the second.

An Asymmetry

A group of scholars has elaborated a tri-layered understanding of justice in Smith: commutative, distributive, and estimative. (4) Commutative (or "mere") justice is not messing with other people's stuff, namely, their person, property, and the promises due to them as by consent and contract. Distributive justice "consists in proper beneficence, in the becoming use of what is our own" (270.10). Estimative justice is estimating objects properly, including pursuing them and treating them with corresponding ardor. Smith explained that the rules of commutative justice are like grammar, in that they are "precise and accurate," whereas the rules of distributive and estimative justice are "loose, vague, and indeterminate," like the rules of criticism or aesthetics (175-176.11, 327.1-2).

Smith talks justice beyond commutative justice (Klein 2021). In the governor-governed relationship, commutative justice has a flipside, called liberty. Now we come to the second feature of Smith's talk. It is natural to ask: If Smith practices beyond-grammar-like justice talk, does he also practice beyond-grammar-like liberty talk?

The question makes sense insofar as, beyond commutative justice, we consider distributive justice. Justice concerns duties. In the cases of commutative justice and distributive justice, duties involve obligations--bearing on our man Jim, say--to particular sets of people. A duty on Jim's side implies a kind of right on their side, however loose or vague that right might be. In the Lectures on Jurisprudence (9), Smith opens by acknowledging how the correlative notions of duty and right can, in "a metaphoricall sense," be loosely construed in...