This article puts forward that according to Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, justice must be understood as a moral virtue of a natural kind among human beings, or as a matter of species regarding them; not as an artificial or a conventional virtue, which is a product of human collectivities or a matter of sociability in human beings. However, the article proposes as well that in his reflections on justice, Thomas Reid held an arguable notion of property, as the ownership of (...) riches basically distributable or apportionable, but not as one of the goods that are mainly produced or generated, as his contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith stated it. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher of Enlightenment Thomas Reid outlined a rich and complete notion of human nature which concluded that this is quite especial. Althought it was possible that this nature had evolved in a biological and psychological way, being so peculiar, its evolution could have taken place in an especial way as well; one which plausibly propitiated the gene-culture coevolution so vindicated by contemporary researchers of human nature. Reid is, by all means, a definite forerunner of theories about such coevolution.