ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Adam Smith’s theory of justice
Author: CREMASCHI Sergio Volodia
Adam Smith’s ethical theory was a kind of post-sceptical anti-realism. His normative ethics was virtue ethics. Some recent literature notwithstanding, his ethics was anti-Stoic and anti-rationalist. Justice played a special role, due partly to the role it played in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian tradition, partly to the post-sceptical distinction between exact and probable knowledge, or grammar and rhetoric, that provides a framework for locating justice on the one hand and the other virtues on the other. Justice was thus Adam Smith’s sovereign virtue, located at the centre of a pattern made of five virtues, where three private virtues are matched with three public virtues, as follows: Prudence Benevolence Justice Liberty Equality. This is enough to suggest: (i) a strong continuity between Adam Smith’s private ethics and his public ethics, or his political doctrine; (ii) a strong subordination of the role of self-interest to the role of justice as providing the framework within which interplay of interests takes place; (iii) heavy ethical preconditions to possibility of spontaneous emergence of order; (iv) a role for justice in economic theory almost opposite to the one admitted of by Utilitarians and harmony-of-interests theorists
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