Abstract

Jeffrey Young

Justice, Property and Markets:  Economics as Moral Philosophy

In this paper I trace Smith’s accounts of justice, the emergence of property rights, and the division of labour.  I hope to show that the institutional constituents of economic life arise first in the early and rude state as a result of the process of moral judgment and the formation of the rules of justice explained in TMS.  This, then, becomes the basis of Smith’s theory of property rights, while the division of labour receives its initial impetus at the same time as the result of the practice of gift-giving among neighbours.  Market phenomena emerge first as informal conventions, which govern not only conceptions of possession and reciprocity, but also the terms of trade themselves.