Key Arguments in Each Chapter

By
Beneficence and Justice are two virtues. Beneficence involves the appropriate experience of certain social passions; justice involves the appropriate experience of one particular unsocial passion, resentment. How Smith understands resentment, its relationship to punishment, and their relationship to justice, is crucial to his understanding of justice itself. Chapter I involves a comparison and contrast of the two virtues. It is also the chapter in which Smith articulates the appropriate role of the state as restraining injustice, but also, in carefully delimited cases, as commanding beneficence (“Mutual good offices”). Chapter II contains Smith’s initial account of the appropriate interplay between justice and “the race for wealth,” in particular his account of the role of appropriately shaped sentiments of justice in structuring our participation in the race for wealth. Chapter III has two parts. The first is Smith’s argument that although beneficence is necessary for a flourishing society, justice, the sentiment, is necessary for individuals to function in society at all. Interactions of persons motivated only by self-love will be collectively self-defeating (“Man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions”). Only such interaction constrained by justice will be mutually beneficial. The second part distinguishes the efficient cause of acting justly from the final cause of acting justly. The efficient cause of the watch is the gears that turn; the final cause of the watch is its purpose, the purpose for which the watchmaker designed it. Smith is using this distinction to make a point about the reasons that motivate us to act justly (the efficient cause) rather than only from self-love, as opposed to the result achieved through such just interaction (final cause). It is these themes in Chapters II and III that most clearly resonate with arguments we have already encountered in Gauthier, Blackburn, and Hobbes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Livia: Táíwò and Economic Success in the Global South

By
  Reconsidering Reparations by Professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò illuminates the large extent to which racism and colonialism played in creating the current global economic structure, in which the global north dominates the global south. Additionally, this book highlights how current policies implemented by global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have further strengthened and reaffirmed this positioning. Taking into account this global historical perspective, we can better understand how “consequences flow from some other parts of the world to other parts, often across national borders, and in ways that complicate geographically and politically narrow ways of thinking about reparations” (24). Thus, some sort of international obligation of social justice must be exist. Táíwò’s emphasis on the role that slavery and colonialism played in establishing the current economic order makes me think about the signal which this sends to the Global South in the development of their p...
Read more

Carlos: Response to Henry's Conclusion

By
I've spent way too long trying to argue against Henry's point because it just seems wrong to conclude with "there is no current social framework by which we might call their lasting effects socially unjust–at least under the political conception of justice". Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I had to agree with Henry's argument regardless of how strange it felt to do so. Still, I did have a few ideas as I was thinking of how to refute Henry's conclusion: -------------------------------------------- 1) With the hypothetical situation Henry provides, if we were to fully extend its logic to our current world, I think Prof. Hurley would have also created a division between the A and B group that would have maintained even into Tuesday. I think were that division were to have taken place, even after Prof. Hurley disbanded the government, the division would have remained and the hierarchy of power would continue into the rest of the week. It seems fa...
Read more

Smith, Locke, Harris, and Justice

By
 On page 79, Smith writes, "the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons," and thus it is a virtue that, unlike beneficence, warrants resentment if we fail to fulfill it. Upon reading this, I immediately thought, well how are you defining justice?  It became very clear in the following pages that Smith's conception of justice is nearly identical to Locke's Law of Nature. On page 80, he writes, "Among equals each individual is naturally, and antecedent to the institution of civil government , regarded as having a right both to defend himself from injuries, and to exact a certain degree of punishment for those which have been done to them." He continues to say that justice is only those transgressions which spectators would have the right to, and would be compelled to, punish whoever commits them. After this, he explains that no one has a right to advance their own happiness at the expense of someone else's...
Read more