The New Index: Adam Smith, Part 2
Adam Smith
Adam Smith, perhaps the most influential political thinker produced by Britain in modern times, was born in 1722, a posthumous child of a customs collector from Aberdeenshire. Smith’s interests in his early years were largely literary and classical, and his family had destined him for the Anglican clergy, though at some point he gave up both the career and religion of a Christian minister. He studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University and came strongly under the spell of Hutcheson’s anti-rationalist common sense philosophy that emphasized benevolence. He proceeded from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent seven years. He was eventually invited to teach logic at Glasgow and was elected professor of moral philosophy, and his course of lectures eventually produced The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the work that first earned him a reputation. We know that he was also taking up questions of jurisprudence and economics in his lectures.
In 1763 the philosopher Smith was invited to accompany the Duke of Buccleugh on an extended trip to France, and there he made the acquaintance not only of the so-called Physiocrats—economists like Turgot who opposed mercantilist restrictions on trade—but also less savory representatives of the French Enlightenment D’Alembert and Helvétius. He also, so he reveals in a letter to the Edinburgh Review, conceived an enthusiastic admiration for Diderot and his Encyclopedia and laments the fact that an over-suspicious government for no good reason has from time to time interrupted this great work. The fruits of the Encyclopedia would only be fully known in the French Revolution, but anyone who had studied the work, as Smith claims to, would have quickly discerned that the authors were determined to overthrow the monarchy and the social order, to destroy or transform the Christian religion, and to liberate enlightened men and women from moral restraint.
Theory of Moral Sentiments: The Sense of Propriety (Section I)
Smith accepts the basic teachings of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury that man has innately a sense of compassion for others. However, he was equally attracted to Bernard Mandeville’s opposite view, that man was a self-regarding creature whose pursuit of his individual self-interest led to public good, but in this section he is content to sketch out in general terms the idea that our moral sense—whatever that may mean—derives from our ability to enter into the feelings of others. There is an obvious flaw in the argument. This sense of compassion, though certainly well-developed among civilized people, seems almost absent among peoples who do not consider it wrong to cheat someone from a neighboring village and may kill a stranger with impunity. Like most of the privileged terms of Enlightenment thought, compassion is more of a moral goal than a universal phenomenon, and we can now look back at the 18th century and see how limited they were in not gushing buckets of tears over commercially raised poultry or the victims of the bloodlust of American hunters.
Smith says (Section I.3-4), and he is certainly correct, that we approve or disapprove of other people’s passions insofar as they are consonant with our own. Since social concord depends on an agreement about which passions in which degree are appropriate, it is important to gain an objective perspective on our own passions. To this end he introduces the notion of spectators who can pass judgment on their appropriateness: “In order to produce this concord, as nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators." (Again, this is certainly true of some people in our own society, but such people are increasingly rare.)
Society is made up of people forever switching places and perspectives from spectators to concerned parties. This is how moral consensus are formed. In chapter 5, the somewhat cold-blooded rationalist informs us that we only approve of mild and benevolent sentiments or passions under control, but unchecked anger disgusts us—I suppose that is why so many people flock to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. A “noble and generous indignation” is admired, because it is precisely the level of indignation called forth in the impartial spectator; “which allows no word, no gesture, to escape it beyond what his more equitable sentiment would dictate.” Thus an objective and rational self-restraint, in matters of vengeance and other passions, is admired, because the individual does not push his feelings for himself beyond what he would allow in others. This is the common basis of social morality.
Smith has certainly described one of the hallmarks of a English gentleman of the late 18th century, but I leave it to you to wonder if, at this point, he has made his case that a self-limiting regard for the opinions of other people is really a universal basis for morality, or, indeed, if there is anything in the world like Smith’s moral sense.
Another question should occur to readers less gullible than American libertarians. Most ancient moral systems ask the question: What is the goal of human life? The answer, happiness/blessedness, leads to the second question: How should we live in order to be happy? Smith seems to begin by asking how we come to consider what is proper and what improper and then deduces a theoretical moral code from those intuitions of the moral sense. This seems to beg a great many questions: First, whether this sense is universal, in all people in all societies; second, whether a merely natural basis for the moral sense is sufficient; third, whether the virtue of restraint or measure is inconclusive: Are there not some occasions when we admire extreme courage or love, and isn’t this business of turning down the volume of our passions a rather base and mechanical account of virtue?