The purpose of this essay is to argue that in Adam Smith, the right to subsistence is a natural right and that the reasons why it failed to reach the statute books are predominantly political. The concentration of political power in the hands of property owners and the various forms of economic dependency created by economic developments have generated, in Smithʼs view, a discrepancy between positive law and natural justice. It is upon this discrepancy that the difference of opinion lies with regard to the more general question of whether distributional matters are part of Smithʼs notion of justice. At the heart of Smithʼs analysis of all aspects of society stands the socially conditioned individual agent. The effi ciency of natural liberty as well as its morality rests on the prudent behavior and tempered attitudes of agents. The invisible hand of The Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests that the presence of private property, or more broadly stated, that of wealth inequality, does not necessarily deprive anyone of lifeʼs
This paper provides further evidence to the argument that Smith's theory of justice did not follow the natural justice school and that subsequently the ethical position on acquiring private property is not independent of the effects which such acquisition may have on the property-less individuals. I will show that the justification for private ownership is based on "reasonable expectations" which owners of assets have with regard to the fruits of the asset. The expectation to subsist through the use of one's natural assets is equally reasonable. This is not to say that Smith believed that society should equally distribute income. But it does mean that the acquisition of private property must not interfere with the rights of individuals to subsist. Consequently, distribution is clearly an important part of Smith's conception of justice.
In spite of the numerous occasions on which Adam Smith expresses his reservations regarding the morality of commercial societies, there seems to be an agreement that he believed such systems to be fundamentally just. To some, this is so because they attribute to Smith a concept of justice which is narrowly confined to the ‘right to have [one's] body free from injury, and [one's] liberty free from infringement’ (Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 401). In a world where people have an interest in the fortune of others regardless of how selfish their motives for action might be, injuring someone else's body or restricting someone else's liberty is unlikely to be the behavioural norm.To others, natural liberty in the sphere of economic activity is just not only because individuals behind the system naturally comply with justice in its commutative sense, but also because the system itself generates justice in the distributive sense. Such arguments are based on either the working of the invisible hand — which produces the ‘same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants …’ (TMS, p. 185) — or on the approval of the ‘impartial spectator’ of the distribution which is associated with the natural price (Young, 1986).
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