Adam Smith’s Implicit Theory of Distributive Justice

Adam Smith wrote at a time when new commercial forces were reshaping national politics, pulling people from the countryside into growing towns, and altering the physical, social, and ideological landscapes. He broke with the mercantilist position, which assumed that all that mattered was the wealth of the ruling classes and the state. Smith argued that the best indicator of a country’s success was the prosperity of the workers, created through a commercial system based on natural liberty of self-ownership, equality, liberty, and justice. Although Smith didn’t explicitly develop a theory of distributive justice, he considered the interests of the three main social and economic classes in mid-18th century Britain: workers, owners of capital and landlords. Smith thought of equality as a combination of two ideas that were novel at the time: an account of liberty that was rooted in the nascent discipline of economics and a democratic social ideal of dignity for ordinary people. Grounded in Smith’s moral philosophy that places human equality as its core value, this paper unpacks his theory of economic growth and efficiency, where rents and wages increase as society develops economically while profit and interest rates fall, thus resulting in an overall fall in inequality.