Amazon’s threefold injustice

The book The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, appeared in 2018.

It explained trends that have remade much of American life, like safetyism, cancel culture, and identity politics. It reached number eight on the New York Times bestseller list.

The book has been made into a movie, which appeared in theaters earlier this year to strong reviews. On October 17, 2024, the online release took place at the major streaming services Google Play, Apple TV, and—harrumph—not Amazon Prime.

The director of the movie, Ted Balaker, explained that “our team had long been assured” that the movie would release on Amazon on October 17. But the promise was not kept. Balaker wrote, “Amazon still hasn’t given us a specific reason for this massive screw up.”

Five days after the promised release date, Amazon relented. Balaker followed up to thank his readers for “berating Amazon with emails.” Now the film is available on Amazon.

Amazon conducted itself unjustly. It has done so many times, often much more gravely. But let’s consider this concrete case to explore three senses of justice.

Justice Unpacked by Adam Smith

What do we mean, that Amazon’s conduct was unjust?

Three things, actually, according to the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759, he exposited and worked with three meanings of justice.

The most abstract justice is estimative justice. Amazon’s conduct revealed that it estimates certain objects improperly. The objects are, for example, Amazon’s own integrity, a sense of fair play, and the general principle of keeping promises. Those are objects. An idea counts as an object when we take up the perspective of estimative justice.

If you estimate an object less than it deserves, you are said to do that object less than justice. If you estimate an object more than it deserves—such as a bad moral or political idea— you do it more than justice. Both misestimations are forms of estimative unjustness.

Distributive Justice

Second, by promising to release the film on October 17 and not doing so, Amazon made an unbecoming use of what is its own—namely, its own platform, enterprise, effort, and attention. Those are resources that belong to Amazon, and it made a bad distribution of its resources. The kind of justice involved here is distributive justice. Smith said that a man fulfills distributive justice when he makes a becoming use of what is his own. Otherwise, he acts in a way that is distributively unjust.

Commutative Injustice

Whereas distributive justice is about what you do with your stuff, the third sense of justice has to do with what you do to other people’s stuff. And it is the one that we most associate with justice in private law. It is the one adumbrated by centuries of natural jurisprudence writers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson.

This virtue tells you: Don’t mess with other people’s stuff.

This virtue makes for a social grammar. Unlike the prior two senses (estimative and distributive), whose rules are “loose, vague, and indeterminate,” this one, commutative, has rules that are “precise and accurate,” as Smith put it.

Here is how Smith expressed this sense of justice: “The most sacred laws of justice…are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions; and last of all come those which guard what are called his personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises of others.”

Later in the book, Smith distinguished this sense of justice as commutative justice. One way to think about that term is to think about commuting, as in traveling from point to point. Commutative justice concerns the grammar-like rules that should govern conduct part to part, as opposed to part to whole. Just as grammar is not about how to make your writing beautiful, commutative justice is not focused on making your conduct beautiful.

Amazon’s promise was clear: To release the film on October 17. Everyone can see that Amazon violated the agreement. That is because the rules of promise-keeping are precise and accurate. Like the rules of grammar.

Precision and accuracy help to make the rule self-enforcing, because violations lead to clearcut outrage and denunciation in gossip and hits to one’s reputation.

What also makes promises self-enforcing is that the violator’s identity is always known to the victim, which is not the case if someone steals your patio furniture during the night or dons a mask and mugs you. You may not know who it was that stole from you or knocked you on the back of the head, but you know who broke his promise to you.

Amazon’s Unjustness Was Threefold

Funny that a company so concerned with justice itself failed to act justly, and in three senses. Amazon estimated objects improperly, distributed its own resources in an unbecoming way, and messed with other people’s stuff, specifically the filmmakers’ promises due. Amazon conducted itself unjustly estimatively, distributively, and commutatively.

Smith wrote of resentment and the punishments that follow as “the great safeguards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty.”

Let us chastise the guilty. And rally a Streisand Effect for Coddling the American Mind, the movie!

(For further guidance on Smith’s tri-layered justice, see chapter 1 of my book here.)