Justivus: A Holiday to Celebrate Adam Smith’s Three Kinds of Justice

In a Seinfeld episode, George Costanza’s father, frustrated with the commercialization of the end-of-year festivities, creates a new holiday called “Festivus,” celebrated on December 23. Its aim: to recapture the true spirit of the holidays. The episode was such a cultural phenomenon that Festivus made the improbable jump from fictional holiday to real holiday.

With Festivus as the mold, I am taking my own shot at creating a new holiday. I am calling this holiday “Justivus.”

Justivus is against commercial expressions of justice that have emerged in much social justice talk. The holiday is intended to rediscover a more coherent framework of justice, one that may better judge the goodness of ourselves, others, and the policies which bring us (or throw us) together as a “society.”

The celebration of Justivus, like Festivus, proceeds in three stages. Each stage corresponds to a justice in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757), and is aided by the reading of that text by Dan Klein.

The Bare Thing of Justice

Seinfeld’s Festivus begins with the erecting of a bare aluminum pole. It is aluminum because of its strength-to-weight ratio; it is bare because tinsel is a distraction.

There is a justice which is the metaphorical aluminum-pole-of-all-justices. It is called commutative justice (CJ), or the justice of ownership, exchange, and promises due.

CJ has long been treated as having a special nature. For Smith, it is that plain sense, that “mere justice,” a violation of which “calls out the loudest for vengeance and punishment.”

CJ is achieved simply through each of us “abstaining from what is another’s.” Or as Klein writes, CJ is “not messing with other people’s stuff.”

This justice is the most “precise and accurate” of justices, the least contentious. Any given society can coalesce to a workable sense of CJ as it does to a sense of grammar.

CJ is like the Golden Rule. Murder, physical harm, false imprisonment, and slavery are all messing, as are actions which happen through the economic market: theft, fraud, cartel and government manipulation of prices, and the prohibition of voluntary exchange, et cetera. Each violates the potential of “person, possession, and promises” in the pursuit of plans, hopes, and dreams.

The origin story of civilization is wrapped up in CJ, as are the rebirths of nations. CJ consists of the “self-evident” truths in the pronouncement heard around the world for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Justivus erects the aluminum pole of CJ.

The Airing of Grievances

The second stage is the “airing of grievances.” Here Smith’s second justice will be of service.

Smith’s second justice is distributive justice (DJ). Smith describes it as “proper beneficence, the becoming use of what is our own…to those purposes either of charity or generosity.”

DJ occurs when we let flow from our person that which is good for humanity. DJ charges us with showing compassion, energy, attention, love, knowledge, approval, voice, charity, et cetera. DJ is the charge of being truly social in society, of offering social capital—something beyond labor or human capital.

To fail to use properly what we have is to fall short in DJ. For example, to stay silent when we have special knowledge is to fall short. To acquiesce to worrisome social trends does the same. Therefore, Justivus allows us to air grievances where they may be helpful.

The perennial first grievance of Justivus is a simple one: our aluminum pole has become the “forgotten justice.” CJ trends toward obscurity while a thing called social justice (SJ) has risen into the general education requirements of our universities. “Social justice” is now uttered 185 times as frequently as “commutative justice.” Yet, as will be seen in stage 3, SJ cannot be sensible without CJ.

The Feats of Strength

The third stage is the “feats of strength.” In Seinfeld it involved family members wrestling.

Here we add Smith’s third justice. We may call it estimative justice (EJ).

EJ is the proper estimation, or assessment, of things. Smith’s overt example is art. One generates EJ for oneself and for the object (and for the object’s maker) by appreciating it. To appreciate the magnificence of the world rewards the self and the other; it encourages more. To condemn the horrors is to discourage their existence.

EJ is the act of wrestling with the merits and demerits of things—to include claims of acts of justice. And thus the feats of strength take place when we come together, assess with EJ, and debate the merits of acts throughout the year.

EJ starts by assessing the nature of the justices themselves.

Adding DJ to CJ is very unlikely to create any great threat. Adding charity and kindness, for example, to security of possessions is apt to make for a better world (but maybe not always). DJ tends to be additive, Pareto improving.

EJ is tricky. It can be beneficial…