Abstract
In An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith is concerned, among other things, with “the order” by which the wealth of a nation “is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of men in the society,…”. We can look at this order as a decision procedure in the way in which flipping a coin or playing a game are decision procedures. The decision procedure is itself not value-neutral, and its continuous use over a period of time produces results that are anything but value-neutral. The decision procedure is best suited to self-interested individuals determined to do as well for themselves as they can, and among its predictable results are certain character traits that are less than fully praiseworthy and economic inequalities that, given those traits, grow significantly worse as the process continues.
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Notes
- 1.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, eds. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, & W. B. Todd (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981), p. 11.
- 2.
Smith, Op cit., p. 24. Smith assumes in this quotation that in becoming civilized, a nation does not thereby produce a great disparity between the rich and the poor. Time has shown him mistaken in that assumption.
- 3.
It is not an accident that the example chosen is a game, but it is not essential to Wittgenstein’s method of language games that it be a game, only that the example satisfies the description given, taken as we would ordinarily understand it. H. L. A. Hart makes use of this method when he proposes that John Austin’s description of a legal system more properly describes the mafia – where an order becomes “law” because a penalty is attached to not following it (H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)). David Hume makes use of the method when he proposes, as I argue, that Adam satisfies the conditions Descartes requires for knowledge – a mind completely clear of all the experience that makes us believe such things as that a bowl is empty when it looks to have nothing in it or that air weighs nothing because we do not have to push against it to move about the world (see my “Hume and the Experimental Method of Reasoning,” Southwest Philosophy Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 29–37 and “Hume’s Other Writings,” in The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise, ed. Saul Traiger, an anthology on David Hume ed. Saul Traiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 26–39).
- 4.
Robert Nozick handles this issue by putting it off, saying that rectification theory is another matter entirely from his theory of justice as transfer. The thrust of this example of an extended game of Monopoly is that it is not a separate matter, but a necessary feature of any theory of justice which makes the history of transactions instrumental to determining justice. With such a theory, none but Adam and Eve – and perhaps not even Eve – start off equally situated, and all owe their positions in life to the histories of those who came before. For an extended discussion of the issue rectification raises for any theory of justice that relies on the history of transactions, see my “Monopoly With Sick Moral Strangers,” in B. Minogue et al., Reading Engelhardt: Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 95–112.
- 5.
David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), p. 262.
- 6.
One issue of no small importance concerns which characteristics, if any, are innate and which must be learned. If it should turn out that only some individuals are born with the characteristics that make for success in the capitalist system, that would have serious moral import. It would mean that a system for distributing wealth and income, and opportunity as well, would favor those with the innate characteristics making for success in the system and so be unfair: some would be born into the real opportunity of wealth and some into the real opportunity of poverty because of features they have which they have no control over and because of features of the capitalist system in which they find themselves, through no choice of their own. It is worth noting that some recent research suggests that some innate abilities differ among children. See, for example, Melissa E. Libertus, Lisa Feigenson, Justin Halberda, “Preschool acuity of the approximate number system correlates with school math ability,” Developmental Science, first published online 2 August 2011 at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01080.x/abstract, accessed 8.13.11.
- 7.
See Barry Meier, “Defective Heart Devices Force Some Scary Medical Decisions,” New York Times, June 20, 2005 and “Repeated Defect in Heart Devices Exposes a History of Problems,” New York Times, October 20, 2005 as well as the Report of the Independent Panel of Guidant Corporation, March 20, 2006, p. 33, available at www.softwarecpr.com/…/download.asp?File=/guidantpanelreport0306.pdf, accessed 8.14.11.
- 8.
Tara Parker-Hope, “A Hollywood Family Takes on Medical Mistakes,” New York Times, March 17, 2008; the quotations come from the “60 Minutes” report on the issue of medical mistakes of March 16, 2008. For the article and a link to the 60 min report, see http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/a-hollywood-family-takes-on-medical-mistakes/, accessed 8.14.11.
- 9.
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, Ltd., 1897), 202–3. Quoted in Colin Heydt, “Narrative, Imagination, and the Religion of Humanity in Mill’s Ethics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2006), 100.
- 10.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John B. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), Vol. XXI, 253. Quoted in Colin Heydt, op. cit., 100.
- 11.
Thus, the sense of entitlement that much too often accompanies great wealth is only partially appropriate – if at all. Those who have amassed wealth through the free enterprise system have played the system well, presumably – although we must leave inherited wealth out of the mix here – but they have succeeded only because the system is a cooperative enterprise and others cooperate in making the conditions for wealth possible. The tax – and political – implications are perhaps too obvious to state.
- 12.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwells, 1958), §§84 ff.
- 13.
This cartoon is by P. C. Vey and originally appeared in the New Yorker. You may find it at http://www.cartoonbank.com/2009/these-new-regulations-will-fundamentally-change-the-way-we-get-around-them/invt/132597/, accessed 8.17.11.
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Robison, W.L. (2013). Adam Smith’s Order for Distributing the Wealth of Nations. In: Stacy, H., Lee, WC. (eds) Economic Justice. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4905-4_10
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