A missing touch of Adam Smith in Amartya Sen’s account of public reasoning: the man within for the man without

Sen claims that his 2009 theory of justice is based in part upon Smith’s idea of the ‘impartial spectator’. His claim has received criticism: some authors have responded that his interpretation of Smith’s concept is unfaithful to the original; others, focussing on internal features of Sen’s analysis, critique his use of the Smithian impartial spectator, arguing that it is a weak point in his comparative theory of justice. In this paper, we address both sets of criticisms. While agreeing with commentators that Sen’s reading of Smith is somewhat unfaithful, we reiterate that his aim in The Idea of Justice is not to provide an exegesis of Smith but rather to build his own comparative theory of justice by ‘extending Adam Smith’s idea of the impartial spectator’ (IJ: 134) to his own project. After clarifying their distinct approaches to the concept of the impartial spectator, we draw upon our account of these differences to evaluate Sen’s own use of the concept. Despite significant divergences, we show that Sen’s version of the impartial spectator is not inconsistent with Smith’s analysis. Though it does not correspond to Smith’s concept, that is to what the Scottish philosopher sometimes calls the ‘man within’, it is reminiscent of another figure from Smith’s moral philosophy: the ‘man without’. Beyond this analogy, there are further connections between Smith’s imaginary figure of the ‘man within’ and Sen’s account of ‘common beliefs’—both notions are ways of representing our beliefs regarding what is moral or just. But whereas Smith’s moral philosophy offers an analysis of the process by which the ‘man without’ influences the ‘man within’, nothing of that kind is to be found in Sen’s conception of public reasoning. And it is here that Smith’s famous concept of ‘sympathy’ can supplement Sen’s theory, in a way that furnishes an answer to Shapiro’s (2011) criticism regarding the possibility of spontaneous change of beliefs towards greater impartiality.

The Motional Effector

According to the second law of thermodynamics every spontaneous change, or process, is associated with an increase in entropy. Although the probabilistic distributions of particles and energy give the possible direction of a process, its occurrence is enabled by the motional energy of the particles. Even particles, however, are subjected to constraints of motion that slow down the attainment of some possible changes and thereby reduce their probability of occurrence, especially if alternative pathways to increase entropy are possible and can be accessed faster. Kinetic restraints are therefore key determinants of which processes are activated among the different possible ones.

En los albores de un cambio lingüístico: factores condicionantes y fases en la inserción del artículo en relativas oblicuas del siglo XVIII

Based on a corpus of ego-documents (mainly private letters) from the 18th century, we offer the results of a variationist analysis about the insertion of the article in relative clauses headed by preposition («la casa en (la) que...»). The data show that, despite the remarkable vitality that still enjoys the form without the article (almost categorical in the Golden Age Spanish), several contexts begin to favor the diffusion of the innovative variant in that seminal period. As usual in early stages of language change, the explanatory hierarchy begins with structural factors, several among which are selected as significant by the regression analysis. Nevertheless, the selection of time as well as some distributions in the social and stylistic axes of variation allow us to guess the existence of various phases in this incipient change. The first one, developed throughout the first half of the century, is set up as a spontaneous change from below, at the request of the subaltern classes, the younger people, and the most spontaneous contexts. However, towards the end of the century, this change seems to have been stabilized and even reversed in some way, driven now by the privileged classes, who favor the return to the old variant.