Justice, Equity, and Distribution: Adam Smith’s Answer to John Rawls’s Difference Principle

Jeffrey Young

Abstract

John Rawls essentially dismissed Smith as having relevance for his Kantian, non-utilitarian, theory of justice. However, there is a considerable body of opinion that Smith’s moral theory was actually not utilitarian. Furthermore, Smith has not usually been seen as having cared much about distributive justice, distributive equity being outside the scope of his concept of justice. Distributive equity in the form of the Difference Principle is one of the main things Rawls asserts would be agreed to in the original position by rational agents. However, building on previous work this article shows this view of Smith to be erroneous, and, that Smith did have a more extensive and more practical approach to the problem of distributive equity than is found in Rawls’s work.

Justice, Equity, and Distribution: Adam Smith’s Answer to John Rawls’s Difference Principle

From the book New Perspectives on Distributive Justice

Abstract

Chapters in this book (36)