Abstract
This article is part of a symposium (in Society) on a target article by Amitai Etzioni. Using that article as a point of departure, I take the opportunity to elaborate a reading of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy that sees it as quite non-foundationalist. Whereas foundationalism’s metaphor is a block or pillar, as non-foundationalism’s metaphor I suggest a spiral. I claim that non-foundationalism and Smithian liberalism dovetail.
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Notes
The expression “doing-duty” seems apt for the motivation highlighted by Amitai. He describes it as “the sense one has after doing something considered to be a moral duty,” and “attempting to live up to moral commitments.” He proceeds to give as appellation for such motivation “affirmation.” It seems to me that doing one’s duty, avoiding disappointment, is what Amitai describes; it would be yet another step (though, admittedly, a small, natural step) to reflecting on one’s duty and doing-duty to experience affirmation (see Klein 2012, 270–271). So I refrain from using Amitai’s appellation (“affirmation”) and instead use “doing-duty.”
Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al,” 1986.
Numerous 18th and 19th century commentaries on TMS are contained in Reeder (1997), and several make “relativism”-related criticisms, including Thomas Reid (81–82, 87), Thomas Brown (152–156), James Mackintosh (164–166), Theodore Jouffroy (177, 180, 190, 198, 200), and James Anson Farrer (219–230). Cropsey (2001) holds that “Adam Smith’s explicit doctrine is that each man will act virtuously when he wins the approbation of his conscience, of ‘the man within the breast’” (21), which is wrong, I think. Similarly, see Prior (1949, 91), who seizes upon a passage in Smith (at 117.7, “Nature…what he himself approves of in other men”) that does, alas, lend itself to the interpretation that Prior gives it. Melzer (2001) criticizes Smith’s antifoundationalism, saying that Smith’s theory “tries to use the principle of manners to explain morals” (153).
Smith writes of life in society as “the great school of self-command” at TMS 145.22 and 146.25.
On the idea that the word should evolved from (or with), and may be understood as, (would) have been schooled to, and likewise for ought and owed, see Klein 2014.
Smith affirms the organon at 17.3, n* on 46; 110.2 (“some secret reference”), 163-65.4-5, 193.12 (final sentence), 306.21 (final sentence), 325.14 (last three sentences). He also does so in the Correspondence, p. 49.
On the wonder, surprise, and admiration evoked by those who impress us by the “uncommon and unexpected acuteness and comprehensiveness” of their sentiments, and the emulation of such exemplars, see 20.3, 75.3,114.3,192.11, 323.10, and 336.24.
See entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the Online Etymological Dictionary suffices (http://www.etymonline.com/). The common roots of holy and whole remain clear in Swedish today: One would translate “the holiness of the whole” as heligheten av det hela or helhetens helighet.
Going beyond humankind certainly makes sense; Smith speaks of “all rational and sensible beings” (237.6).
Smith speaks of an impartial spectator being well informed at 130.32 and 294.94.
I think that a subtle way in which Joy differs from any human being is that, outside of her interests deriving from the pleasures she finds in our good living, she has no other interests, or, if she does, they would have to pertain to matters off on another planet, as it were, with no connection to our good living. The following quotation about the Deity would, it seems to me, go also for Joy: “Benevolence may, perhaps, be the sole principle of action in the Deity, and there are several, not improbable, arguments which tend to persuade us that it is so” (305.18). But man, even when he is as virtuous as Adam Smith, “must often act from many other motives.”
Incidentally, there is a curious feature of Part IV of TMS. Smith represents Hume as holding that “our whole approbation of virtue” comes from “the appearance of utility” (188.3, see also 179.2, 188.5, 327.17, as well as the title of Part IV, and of its chapters). Hume, however, in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, distinguishes between utility and agreeableness—utility meaning useful to some further aim, agreeableness meaning immediately pleasurable (like in eating chocolate ice cream)—and Hume plainly, schematically holds that both utility and agreeableness go into moral approval, not just utility. (I should note that at 188.3 there is one sentence in which Smith indicates that agreeableness, too, is part of Hume’s theory.)
I write overall propriety because, it seems to me, Smith uses propriety both with respect to an aspect of one’s conduct and with respect all aspects considered more holistically. The latter, described by Smith at 202.5, is what I mean by overall propriety, and it seems to be the sense Smith means in Part IV.
Further Reading
Burke, E. 1990. In A. Phillips (Ed.), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coase, R. 1960. The Problem of Social Cost. Journal of Law and Economics, 3(October), 1–44.
Cropsey, J. 2001. Polity and Economy: With Further Thoughts on the Principles of Adam Smith. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press.
Durkheim, E. 1915. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. J.W. Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Etzioni, A. 2015. Happiness Is the Wrong Metric.
Fleischacker, S. 2004. On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Forman-Barzilai, F. 2010. Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Griswold, C. 1999. Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haakonssen, K. 1981. The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hayek, F. A. 1989. The Pretence of Knowledge. American Economic Review, 79(6), 3–7.
Hume, D. 1998. In T. L. Beauchamp (Ed.), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klein, D. B. 2012. Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Klein, D. B. 2014. Ought as an Is: On the Positive-Normative Distinction. Studies in Emergent Order, 7, 56–73.
Klein, D. B. 2015. Virtues, Layers, and Lens in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. GMU Working Paper in Economics No.15-06.
Matson, E. 2016. Ms. Humean Reason is a Calm Passion.
Melzer, A. M. 2001. Anti-anti-Foundationalism: Is a Theory of Moral Sentiments Possible? Perspectives on Political Science, 30(3), 151–155.
Prior, A. N. 1949. Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raphael, D. D., & Macfie, A. L. 1976. Introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Raphael & Macfie (Eds.), Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (pp. 1–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reeder, J. (Ed.). 1997. On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith. Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
Rothschild, E. 2004. Dignity or Meanness. The Adam Smith Review, 1, 150–162.
Smith, A. 1976a. In D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie (Eds.), The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, A. 1976b. In R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner (Eds.), The Wealth of Nations (Vol. 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Klein, D.B. Adam Smith’s Non-foundationalism. Soc 53, 278–286 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-0012-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-0012-x