According to Adam Smith, the answer is clearly ‘no.’
Don’t hurt people; don’t take their stuff.
This popular libertarian slogan reflects a particular conception of justice and rights: namely, a negative one. That is, so long as we do not invade our fellow man’s life, liberty, or estate—what John Locke refers to as “Property” in the Second Treatise—then our behavior is above reproach.
We hear quite a different moral standard propounded nowadays: “Silence is violence,” “bystanders are oppressors,” and similar wailing. These breathless moralists would have you believe that existing while not working against some great evil is a violation of the laws of justice.
Should we buy it?
Adam Smith adamantly argues against.
To Smith, a moral philosopher by training, not an academic economist—he spawned the profession, after all—justice is a negative virtue. Beneficence is a positive virtue, one of Smith’s amiable virtues described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. While such virtues are laudable—they’re virtues, after all—they are supererogatory: above and beyond the call of duty. Justice, by contrast, is not optional; it’s required.
Justice is “the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice of civilization,” while beneficence is an “ornament which embellishes… the building” (TMS, II.ii.3.4). A lack of the former “must utterly destroy [society]” (II.ii.2.1), but society may persist with the latter, albeit “not in the most comfortable state” (II.ii.3.4).
What is entailed by the belief that beneficence is morally incumbent to practice? What is the result of elevating charity to the moral prominence of justice?
A logical contradiction.
If you believe that some are entitled to other’s property, then you cannot hold negative rights as inviolable. The great French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the incompatibility between entitlements and liberty in response to Mr. de Lamartine, who argues on the grounds of fraternité for mandatory redistribution:
“The second half [fraternity] of your program will utterly destroy the first [liberty].” In fact, it is impossible… to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.
Not only can you not respect liberty while coercively redistributing property, but the charity afforded by such legal plunder is false philanthropy, Bastiat argues. After all, the virtuous is the chosen; and nobody chooses to pay his FICA taxes.
Those “melancholy moralists, who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery” (TMS, III.iii.3), should practice the virtue they preach: charity.
Self-flagellation, calling attention to one’s own guilt for being better off than others, is self-aggrandizing vanity. To add insult to injury, the moralists’ asceticism is inconsistent with their purported aims: the happiness and flourishing of mankind, not its misery and suffering.
Rather than helping the worse-off, the moralists indulge in masochistic guilt.
John Stuart Mill sharply rebukes such pointless acts of self-denial:
All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. (Utilitarianism, Chapter 2)
Even worse is when moralistic masochism turns into sadism, as often happens with revolutionary movements that appeal to a utopian end as justification for monstrous means. (Check out my video for Shinji’s Hard Drive, “The Catastrophic Danger of Caring,” for more on this!)
Beneficence is a dual virtue that aids its recipient and profits the soul of its practitioner. Justice is a moral requirement that enjoins us from harming another’s life, liberty, and estate. Masochism is neither mandatory nor supererogatory, but deleterious.
And sadism is plain evil, no matter the intended end.
