This paper reassesses the controversially “narrow” (or “thin”) views of justice in David Hume and Adam Smith, evaluates their differences, and defends them against objections arising from contemporary concerns for social justice. Despite lingering textual polysemy, Hume infamously narrows justice down to the functional role of respecting property, promises, and contracts – let us call this the...
In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith advances a unique version of the natural right to punish, what he calls the “right to exact punishment.” On the usual construal, the natural right to punish is held equally by all and consists in a permission to physically inflict punishments. Smith’s right to exact punishment, by contrast, consists in a special claim of victims to demand or forgive...
The paper I’m proposing for the 2025 conference in Lecce continues the work I presented at the St Andrews conference on the connections among sovereignty, justice, and the passion of resentment in TMS. I have been interested in the way that Smith’s division of the impartial spectator into an ideal and an empirical principle of virtue allows for social and political critique when one relies on...
