Imagination, Affirmation, and Interaction: Reasons for Reading Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy.

• Author: Heath, F. Eugene
• Position: Reflections

Adam Smith is known chiefly for his economic treatise The Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1981). Relatively few appreciate his moral philosophy. Even fewer recognize that Smith did not regard himself as an economist. In fact, toward the end of his life he asserted that his earliest work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759-90] 1982), whose first edition was published in 1759, when he was thirty-six, was his best (Romilly 1840,1:403, cited in Phillipson 2010,274). Perhaps Smith had it right. There are certainly important reasons for reading Smith's book on morals, and they bear relevance to a society riven by social and political faction. Smith's volume enlivens our moral imaginations and assures us that ethical challenges can be overcome. Moreover, it encourages us to engage with those who differ and to employ our imaginations to conceive the world from perspectives we might be reluctant to embrace. In so doing, we move away from faction and from a self-deceit that flatters us as it diminishes others.

That Smith's moral treatise might incorporate such resonant themes, among many others, may surprise those who think of him only in terms of commerce and trade. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is itself rather astonishing. Both theoretical and practical, the work incorporates an explanation of how societies come to share a moral consensus, but it also sets forth a set of virtues--benevolence, justice, prudence, and humanity--relevant for modern life. (1) In his remarkable combination of explanation and counsel, Smith indicates how isolation among the like-minded not only encourages self-deceptive judgments of virtue but diminishes respect for others. To sustain a culture of free and decent individuals, we must cultivate our imaginations and encourage interaction with others.

Reasons to Read Smith

Smith is part of a great efflorescence of culture in eighteenth-century Scotland. The Scottish Enlightenment included philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, Smith's teacher, and David Hume, his great friend, as well as Thomas Reid, his successor at Glasgow. Within the same period, one encounters William Robertson, the historian; Joseph Black, the chemist; James Hutton, the geologist; and Robert Adam, the architect--not to mention James Watt, the inventor; Robert Burns, the poet; James Boswell, the biographer and lawyer; and Sir Walter Scott, the novelist. Like Hume, Smith found inspiration in Isaac Newton's endeavor to systematize via a few principles the varied phenomena of the natural world. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is part of a larger project that Smith envisioned--not only a science of humanity, to include his treatises on economics and morals, but also a study, never completed, of the humanities (language, philosophy, and art) and of jurisprudence.

For Smith, a science of morals undertakes two questions: What is virtue? And what is the power or faculty in human nature that provides the basis for living virtuously? (Smith [1759-90] 1982,265). (2) Smith responds to the first question by detailing virtues such as justice, benevolence, prudence, self-command, and "humanity," or the capacity and willingness to consider the circumstances of others. However, it is the second question that occupies Smith and animates his account of the psychological features that make moral life possible. In delineating these qualities, he paints an extraordinarily acute landscape, a phenomenology, of the moral life--what we experience when we approve, doubt, assess, award, encourage, reprove, chasten, or punish either self or others. This picture is itself a reason to read the Moral Sentiments, but there are more particular reasons, too.

The inspiration for these reasons draws from the reasons that Smith advances for not reading a certain set of books, those of late medieval thinkers, the casuists, who sought to reach moral judgments by applying principles to particular circumstances. Of their works, Smith declares that they are "as useless as they are commonly tiresome" and that their style fails "to animate us to what is generous and noble." He adds, importantly, that their pretense of exactitude encourages us to "chicane with our own consciences" and to "authorize evasive refinements with regard to ... our duty" (339-40). These reasons work against the casuists, but they serve as clues to why we should read Smith's treatise. The Moral Sentiments is not tiresome or useless but engaging, and if the work is not intended to inspire, it conveys nonetheless an animating or affirming message. Finally, Smith seems aware of how self-deceit, a "chicane [of the] conscience," is a threat to the moral life, but he also reminds us how via continual interaction we might avoid this chicanery.

An Engagement of the Imagination

Many works--literary, philosophical, historical--are engaging, but Smith's volume fascinates in a unique way: it explores how the imaginative capacity to create or utilize ideas, images, hypotheses, and metaphors forms a basis for moral judgment. in so doing, Smith's method and substantive insights have catalytic effects on the reader's imagination.

In the Moral Sentiments, Smith offers few arguments and scarcely any definitions. His method is to employ examples, allusions, and...