Adam Smith is commonly portrayed as a champion of market freedom, yet this reading obscures the broader political framework underlying his conception of a free society. This paper argues that Smith's social thought is structured by two complementary principles—subsidiarity and solidarity—which together constitute the normative architecture of modern liberty. Reconstructing Smith’s neglected theory of political society, it shows that the public good cannot be reduced to market prosperity or the aggregation of private interests, but encompasses freedom, opulence, and collective happiness. Subsidiarity is reflected in Smith's account of limited yet active government, while solidarity emerges from his moral psychology of sympathy and his account of human interdependence. Their integration explains why Smith rejects both laissez-faire and paternalism, instead defending a commercial society in which markets, political institutions, and intermediary communities jointly sustain independent agency and human flourishing.
Cristina Bicchieri’s theory of social norms is one of the most influential frameworks for diagnosing and measuring norms in behavioural science. Yet its application and experimental practice has revealed conceptual ambiguities and inconsistent operationalisation. This paper offers conceptual clarifications aiming at methodological extensions of Bicchieri’s account while remaining largely compatible with the framework. I argue that three aspects of her theory require clarification for effective use in economics: (i) the co-existence of four distinct kinds of social beliefs (first- and second-order, descriptive and normative), (ii) the notion of belief consistency, which should be understood in statistical terms, and (iii) the alignment of reference networks as a condition for norm identification. Refining these aspects provides both improved conceptual clarification and practical guidance for experimental operationalisation. By bridging philosophical analysis with methodological considerations, the paper strengthens the foundations for using Bicchieri’s framework to identify and model social norms in economics and the social sciences.
This paper investigates two closely connected Rawlsian concepts: “the sense of justice” and “public reason.” While Rawls assumes that all members of a society are endowed with a sense of justice, which guarantees the emergence of public reason in a well-ordered democratic society, he does not really specify how the passage from a sense of justice at the individual level to public reason at the collective level becomes real and effective. To clarify this issue, we use a particular research method specific to the analytical history of economic thought: text analysis. Via this method, we have made an instrumental use of some of the main concepts of three great authors, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant, in order to shed light on the steps from the sense of justice to public reason.
In a recent paper, Khalil (2025) discusses the scope of rules of justice with some remarkable conclusions. Among others, ‘Two major approaches—namely, the deontological/contractarian and the utilitarian’ are either deficient or non-feasible, and the only alternative, the ‘Average Principle’, being ‘parochial’, ‘cannot amount to a universal moral principle’. Moreover, this ‘scope of justice dilemma has no solution that is universal while, simultaneously, non-deficient and feasible’. This note defends utilitarianism (its impersonal total principle in optimal population size in particular) against Khalil’s arguments that it is non-feasible. If properly interpreted to distinguish between levels of ideal ethics and self-interest, it is feasible.
This paper makes two points. First, García-Portela (2025) is an excellent proposal to address climate injustices and guide climate policy. García-Portela determines climate change related loss and damage by identifying the relevant injustices and linking them to climate change. Her version of the polluter pays principle overcomes relevant objections. She ensures that her proposal is feasible by engaging with attribution science and tort law practice. Secondly, one dimension of rectifying climate injus-tice is nonetheless underdeveloped. Many emissions happen(ed) with an attitude of disrespect for those likely to suffer from climate change. The relations between states responsible for the bulk of emissions and peo-ples likely to be worst affected are often already damaged through colo-nialism. The lack of climate action adds insult to injury. These relational climate injustices require rectification, too. García-Portela’s account is un-successful in grounding these but is well suited to be a part of a pluralist approach.
With respect to climate Loss and Damage, Laura García-Portela adopts both a sufficientarian account of distributional justice and a Polluter Pays Principle whereby historical emissions are the basis for transfers. This paper makes three main claims. First, it argues that the way that García-Portela adopts a Polluter Pays Principle means that her sufficientarianism would be largely otiose for polluters. Second, it argues that her account of harm leaves questions unanswered about how to classify and respond to climate impacts above her threshold. Finally, it argues that, insofar as the basis for transfers are harms defined as falling below a threshold, an alternative account, the “Polluter Pays, Then Receives Principle” has a better practical and theoretical fit.
Laura García-Portela argues that shifting from the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) to the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP) in order to rectify climate injustice is unjustified if based solely on the latter’s ability to address the causation and excusable ignorance objections more effectively. She contends that defenders of the BPP must demonstrate that the benefits used to address losses and damages originate from the same source as the harms to be rectified. However, she deems this requirement unwarranted due to the difficulty of linking climate change to specific extreme weather events. Furthermore, she asserts that the excusable ignorance objection relates to the fairness of imposing unforeseen burdens on agents who emitted without knowledge of future responsibilities. Consequently, the BPP must address this issue in a manner similar to the PPP. Based on her insights, this paper argues that a shift to the BPP is nevertheless justified, especially if the Climate Enrichment Principle is adopted.
This paper critically assesses the theory of loss and damage developed in Laura García-Portela's (2025) Rectifying Climate Reparations. The keystones in García-Portela’s theory are her “minimal capability” interpretation of loss and damage, her “continuity account” of historical responsibility for climate change, and her “adequacy-for-purpose” account of attribution in climate science. In this paper, I focus primarily on the latter two of these elements. I begin by raising a problem of indeterminacy for the continuity account of historical responsibility. Then, I examine some external and internal limits to the adequacy-for-purpose account of attribution science. Finally, I conclude by raising a broader issue about the conception of reparations that figures within García-Portela’s account.
Morgane Delorme PhD in Philosophy and Political Science University of Montreal & Nantes University
This paper reproduces and contextualizes two unpublished lectures by the South African economist W.H. Hutt from 1939 and 1940 in which Hutt analyzes the economic policy of Nazi Germany. Hutt argued that the Nazis’ early success in the war was attributable to their policy of eliminating anti-competitive restrictions on production by labor unions and capitalists. He believed that this provided a model for the Allies to emulate. This analysis of Nazi economic policy was far too generous to the Nazis in its depiction of Hitler as an advocate for ordinary workers and an enemy of monopoly capital. It also broke from the assessments of Hutt’s fellow neoliberal economists—the German Ordoliberals and Austrian economists, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—who were more inclined to classify the Nazis as socialists and collectivists. Hutt’s analysis of Nazi economic policy in 1939 and 1940 contributes to and complicates our understanding of neoliberal economists’ recurring fascination with the possibility of a ‘liberal dictator.’
I present a mechanistic explanation consistent with reduction-ism in economics. I claim that pure individualist explanations are, prima facie, a type of mechanistic reduction in economics or the social sciences. Economists may acknowledge the reality of other entities embedded in their explanations since the external stimuli that impinge on agents’ minds are correlated and, therefore, understandable in terms of agents’ interpretation. Positive reductive explanations enable a unified causal principle shared amongst dissimilar agents to explain macro phenomena and can be applied to theoretical and/or empirical models.
