Manners of Justice Talk: Calling Loudly versus Proffering Coolly

Abstract

A group of scholars, including myself, have elaborated a tri-layered understanding of justice in Adam Smith (commutative, distributive, and estimative). Here I go beyond the matter of Smith’s understanding of justice, to ask: How did he discourse about justice? Does he instruct us in the manner in which we should talk “justice”? I distinguish between calling loudly and proffering coolly. Smith’s teachings and example guide us on how—aside from when we object to violations of commutative justice—to talk distributive or estimative justice, when discussing political matters before a mixed group: Proffer coolly. Don’t call loudly. In such matters, although Smith proffers such “justice” talk coolly, he refrains from talking of a correlative notion of liberty. In Smith’s justice/liberty semantic practices, therefore, there is an asymmetry. The reason might be an aim to educate us in our duties (justice) and to quell our selfish impulse to assert supposed rights (liberty). In modern, complex society, we must assume and promote duties which do not clearly correlate to distinct rights of other people. We have duties to truth, to importance, to right, to good, to God. The asymmetry in Smith’s discourse arises from the danger of neglecting such duties and of unleashing “rights” claims. That danger stems in part from knowledge problems, which grow more acute the further we get from the primeval band.