On being lovely
Adam Smith's Three Justices, Part 2, Distributive Justice
In last week’s essay I addressed the first of the three justices that make up Adam Smith’s system of justice, commutative justice (CJ). This week I want to move on to discuss the second of the triumvirate, distributive justice (DJ).
Adam Smith’s Three Justices:
Commutative Justice: Not messing with other people or their stuff, and not breaching contracts.
Distributive Justice: A becoming use of one’s own.
Estimative Justice: Accurately evaluating relative importance and worth.
Consider the following set of hypotheticals:
Leslie, a retired insurance executive, volunteers 10 hours each week as a math tutor at the local junior high school.
Sam makes an annual cash donation to the local soup kitchen which is significant to Sam’s budget, but will not cause Sam to have financial challenges.
Pat shows early on an uncanny ability to play soccer, and over the course of many years eventually makes it to the European professional leagues.
Consider a second set of hypotheticals:
Leslie, a retired insurance executive, plays golf six days each week.
A homeless person asks Sam for some food. Sam refuses.
Pat shows an uncanny ability to play soccer, but instead chooses to play video games because practice is hard.
Let’s compare the two variations on these individuals. Leslie1 has free time and uses to to help kids get ahead. Leslie2, from the second set of hypotheticals, uses the same free time to indulge in a personal passtime. Leslie1 demonstrates the virtue of generosity. Leslie2 does nothing punishable - there is nothing wrong with engaging in leisure - but there is nothing praiseworthy about it, either. Playing golf for pleasure is a perfectly acceptable use of one’s time and resources, but no one will remember Leslie2’s actions as elevated. Sam1 has excess resources and chooses to share them to help people who are less fortunate. Sam2 has excess resources, but refuses the request for food. While it might be questionable what a person asking for money might do with it, and therefore present a moral quandary, to me someone asking for food is morally plain. Pat1 and Pat2 both have the same gifts of talent, but Pat2 chooses not to pursue that talent because it’s hard. Pat2 fails to demonstrate the virtue of hard work, and fails to fulfill her gifts. What I have hoped to demonstrate with these two sets of hypotheticals is the principle of distributive justice (DJ), a becoming use of one’s own. In each of the first set of hypotheticals, the person did something virtuous with their resources; in the second set, the person did nothing punishable (no violatoins of commutative justice), but also nothing worthy of approval or approbation.
As I discussed last week, commutative justice is the necessary, but not sufficient condition for living a virtuous life. It is, according to Smith, “but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbor” (TMS, p. 82). Commutative justice is “precise and accurate” because it does not require considering your relationship with another individual. Obedience to commutative justice is the bare minimum necessary to be allowed to participate in society (and not be locked away in prison), but it is not grounds for praise. In fact, Smith says: “the observance of the rules of that virtue seems scarce to deserve any reward.” Commutative justice covers things that are right or wrong in general. Violence, theft, and fraud, are all wrong. There are a few exceptions - self defense for violence, for example. But these are exceptions to a general rule. This is the major difference: commutative justice is governed by general rules with limited exceptions; distributive justice is entirely relational and relative.
Smith defines distributive justice as that
which consists in proper beneficence, in the becoming use of what is our own, and in the applying it to those purposes either of charity or generosity, to which it is most suitable, in our situation, that it should be applied. In this sense justice comprehends all the social virtues. (TMS, p. 327; emphasis mine)
I particularly like that phrase, the becoming use of what is our own. As I have written before, I think of us all as possessing certain gifts. Those gifts may be talents, abilities, capacities, knowledge, networks, or other resources. Distributive justice is simply about how we use those gifts in a way that makes us worthy of approbation and praise. Smith refers to them as social virtues which would include generosity, kindness, politeness, and so forth. Under Smith’s system, none of these can be forced: “Even the most ordinary degree of kindness or beneficence, however, cannot, among equals, be extorted by force” (TMS, p. 80). He goes on to talk about the relationship between a son and his father and vice versa, saying that while “filial affection” would be commonly expected, it cannot be compelled.
[W]hen a man shuts his breast against compassion, and refuses to relieve the misery of his fellow–creatures, when he can with the greatest ease; in all these cases, though every body blames the conduct, nobody imagines that those who might have reason, perhaps, to expect more kindness, have any right to extort it by force. The sufferer can only complain, and the spectator can intermeddle no other way than by advice and persuasion. Upon all such occasions, for equals to use force against one another, would be thought the highest degree of insolence and presumption. (TMS, p. 81)
Going back to my two sets of hypotheticals above, you probably were coming up with different facts that, if combined with my very simple statements, could have made the second set seem praiseworthy and the first seem not praiseworthy. If you did, you are actually confirming my (and Adam Smith’s) point: the rules of distributive justice are completely circumstantial, or as Smith says, they are “loose, vague, and indeterminate” (TMS, p. 327). Distributive justice is all about fine distinctions. In this situation with this fact set, action 1 is praiseworthy; in this slightly different situation with this fact set where one fact is different, action 1 is now disappointing (though not punishable). Assume a person, presumed homeless, approaches Sam and asks for $10 for food. If Sam believes the homeless person will actually use the money for food and refuses even though she could easily afford to make the gift, that would be disappointing (though not punishable). If Sam believes the homeless person actually intends to use the money to purchase drugs, then refusing to give the money might actually be mildly praiseworthy. But even here one could make an argument in favor of giving the drug-seeker money - perhaps this person’s life is so miserable that giving them money to find a temporary escape actually would be more praiseworthy than refusing. The point is, DJ isn’t governed by grammar-like rules the way CJ is. It’s often hard to tease out what the praiseworthy action is. Indeed, sometimes there are unintended consequences to actions that are intended to be benevolent. If the homeless person approaches Sam asking for $10 for food, and Sam gives the homeless person the money, and then the homeless person overdoses and dies because the drugs the person bought were laced with fentanyl, has Sam done something praiseworthy or blameworthy?
We should always seek to comply with CJ rules. There aren’t that many of them, and they aren’t very hard to discern. But there’s nothing special about not deliberately crashing your car into someone who has cut you off in traffic. Abstaining from violence other than in self defense doesn’t make you a praiseworthy person. We have an obligation to obey CJ rules in order to remain worthy of continuing to be part of a free society. In Smith’s system of justice, we don’t have the same obligation to follow the rules of DJ. Instead, he believes we all naturally want to follow those rules. He says, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love” (TMS, p.113). A mother’s love is unconditional, which is a beautiful thing, but as we grow up, we want people other than our mother to see us as deserving of praise - to be lovely. People who are not related to you do not automatically see you as worthy of admiration. And yet we naturally desire to have other people admire us not for our innate attributes (e.g., physical beauty), but for our actions. Distributive justice is about action, not just being. While you can meet the rules of CJ by inaction (not doing physical violence, not stealing), you can’t really ever truly meet the standards of DJ unless you are acting. To be lovely, you have to do something worthy of admiration. But what that is? What should I do? That’s the hard part. I think this applies even to people we think are despicable - it’s just that their sense of aesthetics is profoundly different than ours.
The majority of my students are young adults these days (I mostly teach in at the undergraduate level), and I will tell you they fret greatly about this question, though they don’t use these words. What should I do with my life that will make me lovely? What should I do with my life that will make me praiseworthy? Indeed, it is one of the things that draws my students to my major (health management and policy) - they see healthcare and public health rightly as generally being in the realm of DJ - of trying to do praiseworthy things. The problem is that at a young age, it is really hard know what we are called to do. Was soccer really the most praiseworthy thing that Pat1 could have done with her life? In becoming a professional soccer player, she took the raw gifts she had an honed them through years of hard work. Now in the pros, she inspires other young girls to pursue their dreams. But maybe Pat1 would have been an even better commercial banker, making loans to small businesses that would have improved the lives of thousands of people in her community. Maybe that is what Pat2 actually does with her life, and as a result, Pat2 actually has a greater impact on the world around her than Pat1. Which Pat is therefore more lovely? It’s beyond human knowledge to know. And the rules of DJ don’t help us solve that problem. It’s all loose, vague, and indeterminate. Indeed, Smith says, that the rules of DJ give us “a general idea of the perfection we ought to aim at”, but they do not “afford us any certain and infallible directions for acquiring it” (TMS, p. 327).
The critical aspect of DJ is that we have a choice. Compelled virtue is not praiseworthy. If I force you to go give money to a social cause, you are not virtuous, even if the cause is good. We have to do something with our own resources in a virtuous way in order to be praiseworthy. If one of my college students, who makes $50/week from a part-time job makes a donation to a homeless shelter of $10, that is a praiseworthy gift. If Mark Zuckerberg makes a $10 donation, that could almost be seen as an insult. If my student makes her donation and then brags about it all over social media, that is not particularly virtuous. Our general idea of perfection is to be the right degree of kind, generous, and hard working. And yet, we are back to the relativity again: generosity taken to an extreme such that you are reliant on other people isn’t virtuous, it’s foolish.
The bottom line is DJ is hard. It’s the worthy pursuit of a lifetime. What it looks like is different for each of us because we have different gifts, and because we are faced at any given time by different sets of circumstances. So what are the takeaways from our discussion of distributive justice?
We all want to be lovely.
DJ is about acting in the world.
DJ is about voluntarily using our own gifts in a manner that is praiseworthy.
DJ doesn’t have hard and fast rules like CJ - everything is relative and circumstantial.
Thanks for hanging with me - I’ll wrap up next week with a discussion of estimative justice.