EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adam Smith's growing concern on the issue of distributive justice

Rudi Verburg

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2000, vol. 7, issue 1, 23-44

Abstract: According to the accepted view, Smith carved out distributive justice from his concept of justice and argued that distributive justice would follow in the wake of natural liberty. In recent contributions, however, it is emphasized that a system of natural liberty will only generate beneficent distributional outcomes if the rules of commutative justice safeguard natural liberty and mirror community standards of justice. In this paper it is argued that Smith increasingly came to question whether commercial society could meet this requirement. Given their subservience to sectional interests, rules of justice neither safeguard natural liberty nor conform to community standards. Moreover, the inherent strain in commercial society to corrupt man's moral sentiments erodes community standards of justice. In the development of Smith's views his growing concern for distributive justice is reflected.

Keywords: Commutative Justice Distributive Justice Natural Liberty Community Standards Of Propriety And Justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096725600361843 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:7:y:2000:i:1:p:23-44

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/096725600361843

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:7:y:2000:i:1:p:23-44