Abstract
Adam Smith is respected as the father of contemporary economics for his work on systemizing classical economics as an independent field of study in The Wealth of Nations. But he was also a significant moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its characteristic concern for integrating sentiments and rationality. This chapter considers Adam Smith as a key moral philosopher of commercial society whose critical reflection upon the particular ethical challenges posed by the new pressures and possibilities of commercial society remains relevant today. The discussion has three parts. First, I address the artificial separation between self-interest and morality often attributed to Smith, in which his work on economics is stripped of its ethical context. Second, I outline Smith’s ethical approach to economics, focusing on his vigorous but qualified defense of commercial society for its contributions to prosperity, justice, and freedom. Third, I outline Smith’s moral philosophy proper as combining a naturalistic account of moral psychology with a virtue ethics based on propriety in commercial society.
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Notes
- 1.
For a succinct account of the scholarly deficiencies of “the Adam Smith problem,” see the excellent introduction to The Moral Sentiments by Raphael and Macfie ([11], pp. 20–25).
- 2.
A point mirrored in TMS ([11], VI.ii.2.3)
- 3.
Of course, government was still left the rather ambitious and substantial tasks of providing national defense, legal justice, and public goods.
- 4.
- 5.
See ([12], I.i.11) for an evocative description of the distributed production of goods in commercial society.
- 6.
In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (according to his students’ notes), Smith suggested a direct correspondence between the human propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange” in argument and in the market. “The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest” ([13], vi.56). As the eminent Smithian scholar Charles Griswold puts it, “Life in a market society is an ongoing exercise in rhetoric” ([2], p. 297).
- 7.
Rules do play an important role in Smith’s account, but they have the character of action guiding maxims rather than themselves being reasons on which to base moral conclusions. They are produced by reflection on our experiences and observations (enhanced by encountering and thinking through the moral issues portrayed in drama and literature) and, as commitments, can help us to keep to what the impartial spectator would approve of at times when it would be easy to allow momentary temptations and passions to distort our judgment.
- 8.
The hierarchy of Smith’s virtues is contended. For example, Deirdre McCloskey considers prudence Smith’s central virtue [6], Patricia Werhane considers it to be justice [14], Ryan Hanley beneficience (active benevolence) [4], and Raphael and Macfie take the stoical interpretation that it is self command [11].
- 9.
For an extended analysis of Smith’s oikeiōsis and its anticosmopolitan orientation, see [1].
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Wells, T. (2013). Adam Smith on Morality and Self-Interest. In: Luetge, C. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1494-6_26
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