The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [6]
As our most solid judgments, therefore, with regard to right and wrong, are regulated by maxims and ideas derived from an induction of reason, virtue may very properly be said to consist in a conformity to reason, and so far this faculty may be considered as the source and principle of approbation and disapprobation.18
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE
I turn now from moral to political philosophy, though the two are closely related, particularly so in Smith’s analysis. I will concentrate first on the kind of theory of justice that we can find in the Moral Sentiments, and examine it in light of mainstream theories of justice as they have emerged in recent centuries.19
There are two basic, and divergent, lines of reasoning about justice among leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the Enlightenment. There is, first, the “contractarian” approach, led by the work of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and followed in different ways by such outstanding thinkers as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. In its rudimentary version, this approach concentrates on identifying “just” institutional arrangements for a society, which would yield a corresponding—hypothetical—contract. The demands of justice are, then, seen in terms of those institutional requirements, with the expectation that people would behave appropriately to make those institutions entirely effective.
The approach has two distinct features. First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice; it tries to identify social characteristics that cannot be transcended in terms of justice, and is aimed at identifying the nature of “the just”—rather than at finding some criteria that would allow us to decide whether an alternative is “less unjust” than another. Second, in searching for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on getting the institutions right, and it is only indirectly concerned with the societies that would ultimately emerge. The nature of the society that would emerge from any given set of institutions must, of course, depend on many non-institutional factors, such as actual behaviors of people and their social interactions. The traverse from institutions to social outcomes is handled by this approach with the assumption that people’s behavior would be exactly what would be needed for the proper functioning of the chosen institutions.
In contrast to the social contract approach, a number of other Enlightenment theorists took a variety of comparative approaches that were concerned primarily with removing identifiable injustices in the world—such as slavery, or bureaucracy-induced poverty, or cruel and counterproductive penal codes, or rampant exploitation of labor, or the subjugation of women. The focus is on what actually happens to the lives of people, and the judgments are comparative—for example, how the world would improve if slavery were abolished. The approach of comparative realizations, as we may call it, was pursued, in different ways, not only by Smith—who was its most powerful proponent—but also by the Marquis de Condorcet (the founder of the mathematical discipline of social choice theory who was greatly influenced by Smith), Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, among others, all of whom were admirers of Smith and were clearly influenced by him, to varying extents.
As it happens, it is the first tradition—that of transcendental institutionalism—on which today’s mainstream political philosophy largely draws in its exploration of the theory of justice. The most powerful and momentous exposition of this approach to justice can be found in the work of the leading political philosopher