Sympathetic liberalism: Recent work on Adam Smith

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 139-164

  Darwall, Stephen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0002216554     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1999.00139.x     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. As Charles Griswold points out, the only exception is a reference to the Wealth of Nations in the advertisement prefixed to the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
2. See, e.g., A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson, eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
3. and some of the essays in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
4. The definitive Glasgow editions of Smith's works are available in inexpensive paper versions from Liberty Classics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (originally published, 1776), 2 vols., R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1976. (Hereinafter: WN)
5. Correspondence of Adam Smith, E. C. Mosner and I. S. Ross, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty-Classics, 1987).
6. Essays on Philosophical Subjects, W.P.D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, eds. (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1982).
7. Lectures on Jurisprudence, R. L. Meek and D. D. Raphael, eds. (Indianapolis: LibcityClassics, 1982). (Two sets, designated A or B.)
8. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, J. C. Bryce, ed. (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985).
9. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (originally published, 1759), A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael, eds. (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1982). (Hereinafter: TMS.)
10. Most prominent here has been Annette Baier. See various of the papers collected in her Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),
11. especially "Hume, the Women's Moral Theorist" and "Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant," pp. 51-75, 268-93.
12. A rare exception to the dearth of contemporary ethical thought deriving from Smith is Gilbert Harman, Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator, the Lindley Lecture (Lawrence: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 1986).
13. I briefly compare Hume and Smith on sympathy in "Empathy, Sympathy, Care," Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 261-82.
14. Robert M. Gordon, "Folk Psychology as Simulation," Mind and Language 1 (1986): 158-71;
15. Robert M. Gordon, "The Simulation Theory: Objections and Misconceptions," Mind and Language 7 (1992): 11-34;
16. Robert M. Gordon, "Sympathy, Simulation, and the Imparial Spectator," Ethics 105 (1995): 727-42:
17. Alvin I. Goldman, "Interpretation Psychologized," Mind and Language 4 (1989): 161-85
18. (also in Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences [Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1992]);
19. Alvin I. Goldman, "In Defense of the Simulation Theory," Mind and Language 7 (1992): 104-19
20. Important on this point is Gilbert Harman, Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator.
21. Hume frequently uses 'moral beauty' to refer to virtue. See, e.g., A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 465, 479, 484.
22. Although Hutcheson distinguishes beauty from virtue, he sees both as corresponding to an observer's sense. See An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725).
23. On the differences between Hutcheson and Hume see my "Hume and the Invention of Utilitarianism," in M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright, eds., Hume and Hume's Connexions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 58-82.
24. See also the chapters on Hutcheson and Hume in my The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
25. Smith distinguishes between propriety and beauty, specifically citing Hume's account of beauty at TMS.187-88.
26. Of course, these are not the only differences between Hume's sentimentalism and Smith's. Unlike Hume, Smith does not hold that moral distinctions derive from, or are evident to, sentiment as opposed to reason. Like Butler, Smith sometimes identifies "the great judge and arbiter of our conduct" with "reason" (TMS.137).
27. Smith also holds, of course, that these feelings can also be held improperly and, moreover, that "we ought always to punish with reluctance, and more from a sense of the propriety of punishing, than from any savage disposition to revenge" (TMS.172, see also 160-61).
28. Inquiry, III.viii. Scholars generally agree that this is the first statement of the greatest happiness principle in English. Joachim Hruschka argues that Leibniz first formulated it ("The Greatest Happiness Principle and Other Early German Anticipations of Utilitarian Theory," Utilitas 3 [1991]: 165-77.)
29. Inquiry, VII.i.
30. "Sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation which attends that virtue [justice]." Treatise, pp. 499-500.
31. See also, Treatise, p. 498.
32. discuss how Hume's account of justice relates to his theory of moral obligation in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', pp. 284-318.
33. In the introduction to their edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Raphael and Macfie point out that Smith could, in his "Letter to the Editors of the Edinburgh Review" of July 1775, "describe, from his own reading, . . . Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality" (TMS.10).
34. There are, of course, important matters of detail here also. For many kinds of moral judgment, at least, Hume does hold that we can fix on an appropriately general point of view for evaluating a trait or motive "by sympathy with those, who have any commerce with the person we consider" (Treatise, p. 583).
35. But what Hume means by sympathy is quite different from the imaginative projection into the other's standpoint that Smith is talking about. Humean sympathy is a psychological mechanism that takes an idea of another person's feeling or passion and transforms it into "the very passion itself" (Treatise, p. 317). As Smith frequently emphasizes, however, what is in view from the other's standpoint is not his own feeling, but the situation to which it responds. Humean sympathy operates from an observer's standpoint, not by any imaginative identification with the other.
36. The full passage from the Enquiry, however, is: "Compelled by these instances, we must renounce the theory, which accounts for every moral sentiment by the principle of self-love." David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, reprinted from the 1777 edition with an introduction and analytical index by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed., with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 219.
37. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Ibid., p. 169.
38. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Ibid., p. 270.
39. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, pp. 155-78.
40. Hume, "The Sceptic," in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1987), p. 162,
41. quoted by Griswold, Adam Smith, p. 161n.
42. Kant's views are well known. I discuss Shaftesbury, including this aspect of his thought, in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', pp. 176-206.
43. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 11, Ak. p. 398). We should note, by the way, that Hume also distinguishes between "amiable" and "awful" virtues (at Treatise, pp. 607-8), although he does not tie the latter especially to self-command.
44. Another stoic resonance in Smith's thought is that Smith seems to accept a stoic view of the normativity of nature and appears, moreover, at certain points to rest the authority of morality on it. To be sure, Smith has lots of resources elsewhere in his system to establish reasons to be moral. Much of what is most attractive in Smith concerns his deeply perceptive, sophisticated, and complex moral psychology. We humans want not just praise, but also to be worthy of it (TMS.114-18, 127). And we strongly desire to be in sympathy with others as well, so much, indeed, that wrongdoers may be sufficiently haunted by "the avenging furies" of an "affrighted conscience" to confess to those ignorant of their crimes so that they can ultimately be brought back into sympathy with them (TMS.118-19). As important as these motives are, however, they sometimes seem to Smith either too external (like the pains of alienation or self-accusation) or insufficiently directive (like the sense that one is not worthy of esteem) to ground morality's authority. (Compare here Mill's distinction between "internal" and "external" sanctions of morality and the principle of utility in Chapter III of Utilitarianism.') Neither "love of our neighbour" nor "love of mankind" can direct conduct in the way morality requires (TMS.137). For that we need "conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct" (TMS.137). But why should we follow conscience? What gives judgments of propriety their authority? Here Smith follows closely Butler's idea that conscience's authority is tied up with the ancient (stoic) doctrine that virtue "consists in following nature" (Joseph Butler, Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Preface, §13, in Five Sermons, Stephen L. Darwall, ed. [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983], p. 13).
45. It "cannot be doubted," Smith writes, that our "moral faculties . . . were given us for the direction of our conduct in this life" and "were set up within us to be the supreme arbiters of all our actions" (TMS.165). By fashioning us in this way, nature (or God) promulgates the rules these faculties recognize, including prominently the rules of justice, as "laws." Conscience is God's "viceregen[t] . . . within us," so its "torments" inherit God and nature's authority (TMS.166). I have argued that there are actually two conflicting elements in Butler's argument for the authority of conscience, a "teleological- functionalist" picture like that just suggested, and an "autonomist internalist" account, on which according authority to conscience is required for the very possibility of free moral agency. (See The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', pp. 244-83.) Although Smith does say things such as that there is no way of judging propriety except through conscience, he doesn't locate conscience as firmly as a presupposition of autonomous moral agency as Butler does. It is this latter element that makes Butler, as I read him, an important figure in an autonomist internalist tradition that also includes Cudworth and Shaftesbury and that looks forward to Kant.
46. For a careful and illuminating treatment, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
47. See James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, "Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland," in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue, pp. 73-87.
48. In a very fine article that discusses various ways in which Smith anticipated and perhaps influenced Kant, Samuel Fleischacker notes several related parallels, but not, I believe, the similarity of language discussed in this paragraph. See his "Philosophy in Moral Practice: Kant and Adam Smith," Kantstudien 82, no. 3 (1991): 249-69, esp. p. 262.
49. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, general introduction by Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 199-200;
50. Immanuel Kant, in Practical Philosophy, 5:73-74.
51. Immanuel Kant, in Practical Philosophy, Ibid., p. 202; 5:77.
52. The terms "recognition respect" and "appraisal respect" are my own. For a discussion of this distinction, see my "Two Kinds of Respect," Ethics 88 (1977): 36-49.
53. Reprinted in Ethics and Personality, ed. John Deigh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 65-78.
54. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 37-43, Ak. 4:429-35.
55. Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. III., Pt. II, esp. pp. 477-501.
56. Treatise of Human Nature, Ibid., pp. 499, 533.
57. discuss Hume's theory of justice in connection with his account of obligation in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', pp. 284-318.
58. Smith makes this claim in Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 143-46.
59. "Whenever commerce is introduced into any country, probity and punctuality always accompany it." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 538.)
60. See also, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 47-48.
61. Smith is not, however, so egalitarian in the case of women. He cites the education of women as evidence that private education avoids "useless, absurd" and "fantastical" elements that frequently characterize public education. "(P]arents or guardians" teach their daughters only what is "necessary or useful for them to learn": i.e., "to improve the natural attractions of their persons, or to form their mind to reserve, to modesty to chastity," and so on!
62. I say "at least" because if the judgment concerns merit or demerit, including injustice, then it will require both a judgment of the propriety both of the agent's motive and the affected parties' reactions. In this case, we need three projections: first-person-plural standpoint, agent's standpoint, and the patients' standpoints.
63. On this point, see especially TMS.188.
64. Consider in this connection what Smith says about those who feel guilt for having unjustly injured others. Even when their victims are ignorant of the crime, the guilty may be moved to confess their guilt and submit "themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-citizens," in the hopes of some form of reconciliation (TMS.118-19).
65. Annette Baier, "Moralism and Cruelty," p. 281.
66. George Berkeley, Alciphron: Or, the Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion against those who are called Free-thinkers, 1st ed. (London: 1732), 3rd ed. (London: 1752),
67. in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, The Works of George Berkeley (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1949), v. iii. These passages are from Alciphron III.13.
68. Ibid., II.a; William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1785), facsimile edition (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978), I.ii, p. 2. Compare Smith's related distinction in The Wealth of Nations between "loose system[s]" of morals that are "more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion," and the "strict or austere" system, more "generally admired and revered by the common people" (WN.794).
69. One of Smith's four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, benevolence, and self-command (TMS.237). This is Smith's crucial addition to the ancient theory of virtue that I mentioned above.
70. I use 'contractarian' to refer to a view like Gauthier's and 'contractualism' to refer to a view like Rawls's or Scanlon's. Smith's ideas do bear some resemblance to Scanlon's formulation of contractualism in terms of rules that no one could reasonably reject. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
71. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971);
72. T. M. Scanlon, "Utilitarianism and Contractualism," in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).