Adam Smith (1723-1790)

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Adam Smith (1723-1790)

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Adam Smith

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Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

• Smith considered The Moral Sentiments as
  important as Wealth of Nations.
• Continued to revise throughout his life (last
  sixth edition, 1790)
• TMS Message
• How may a society freed from the fetters and
  controls of feudalism and the church achieve
  moral order?

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Social rules and codes of behavior

• It is thus that the general rules of morality
  are formed. They are ultimately founded upon
  experience of what, in particular instances, our
  moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and
  propriety, approve, or disapprove of. We do not
  originally approve or condemn particular actions
  because, upon examination, they appear to be
  agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general
  rule. The general rule, on the contrary, is
  formed, by finding from experience, that all
  actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a
  certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.
  (p. 109-110)

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self-command

• The man who acts according to the rules of
  perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of
  proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly
  virtuous. But the most perfect knowledge of those
  rules will not alone enable him to act in this
  manner his own passions are very apt to mislead
  him sometimes to drive him and sometimes to
  seduce him to violate all the rules which he
  himself, in all his sober and cool hours,
  approves of. The most perfect knowledge, if it is
  not supported by the most perfect self-command,
  will not always enable him to do his duty. (p.
  143)

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Tendency to admire the rich

• Not only self-deceit but a tendency to admire and
  worship the rich corrupts the moral sentiments
• This disposition to admire, and almost to
  worship, the rich and the powerful, and to
  despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor
  and mean condition, though necessary both to
  establish and to maintain the distinction of
  ranks and the order of society, is, at the same
  time, the great and most universal cause of the
  corruption of our moral sentiments. (p. 86)

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Maintenance of order and rank

• It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize
  more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow,
  that we make parade of our riches, and conceal
  our poverty. (p. 78)
• tendency to sympathize more with those higher in
  the social hierarchy. (pp. 86-87)
• this tendency is related to the acquisitive drive

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Invisible hand

• The produce of the soil maintains at all times
  nearly that number of inhabitants which it is
  capable of maintaining. The rich only select from
  the heap what is most precious and agreeable.
  They consume little more than the poor, and in
  spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity,
  though they mean only their own conveniency,
  though the sole end which they propose from the
  labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be
  the gratification of their own vain and
  insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the
  produce of all their improvements. They are led
  by an invisible hand to make nearly the same
  distribution of the necessaries of life, which
  would have been made, had the earth been divided
  into equal portions among all its inhabitants,
  and thus without intending it, without knowing
  it, advance the interest of the society, and
  afford means to the multiplication of the
  species. (pp. 122-123)

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Higher and lower levels of prudence

• Even if it does pay off for the individual, they
  are industrious and achieve some level of
  affluence, it is only deserving of cold esteem
  (p. 135)
• Prudence, in short, when directed merely to the
  care of the health, of the fortune, and of the
  rank and reputation of the individual, though it
  is regarded as a most respectable and even, in
  some degree, as an amiable and agreeable quality,
  yet it never is considered as one, either of the
  most endearing, or of the most ennobling of the
  virtues. It commands a certain cold esteem, but
  seems not entitled to any very ardent love or
  admiration. (p. 135)

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greed is good?

• So proper self-regardself-interested behavior
  moderated by self-command and a sense of duty, as
  well as the socially responsible adherence to
  social rules and obligationscan be socially
  beneficial under certain conditions. It is not
  the higher level of prudence, but it is a kind of
  prudence.

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Self-interest or sympathy?

• That whole account of human nature, however,
  which deduces all sentiments and affections from
  self-love, which has made so much noise in the
  world, but which, so far as I know, has never yet
  been fully and distinctly explained, seems to me
  to have arisen from some confused misapprehension
  of the system of sympathy. (TMS, Part 7, Section
  3, Paragraph 7)