The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [12]
15 The importance of scrutinizing “comprehensive outcomes” (including the processes involved), as opposed to only “culmination outcomes,” is discussed in my “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason,” Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2000), and The Idea of Justice (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, and Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009), especially chapter 10.
16 On the distinction involved see Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On related subjects see also Christopher Berry, “Adam Smith and the Virtues of Commerce,” in John W. Clapham and William A. Galston, eds., Nomos XXXIV: Virtue (New York: New York University Press, 1992); M. J. Calkins and P. H. Werhane, “Adam Smith, Aristotle, and the Virtues of Commerce,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 32 (1998).
17 Moral Sentiments, VII.ii.Introduction.1-4; in this edition, p. 317.
18 Moral Sentiments, VII.iii.2.6; in this edition, p. 376.
19 Smith notes that the word “justice” has “several different meanings,” though “there must be some natural affinity among these various significations.” We follow here the most general use of the idea of justice that can be found in Smith’s writings. This interpretational issue is discussed in my The Idea of Justice (2009).
20 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); see also his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
21 See Raphael and Macfie, “Introduction,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 31.
22 Moral Sentiments, III.1.2; in this edition p. 133.
23 An analysis of the contrasting views on this subject between Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts, on one side, and Justice Ginsburg, on the other, is discussed in my Idea of Justice (2009), chapter 18.
24 Moral Sentiments, V.2.15; in this edition pp. 245-46.
25 Moral Sentiments, VII.iii.2.7; in this edition, pp. 376-7.
26 The Wealth of Nations, I.ii.4, p. 120.
27 The presumption of equal potentiality of all human beings supplements Smith’s ethical belief on the priority of the interests of the poor in public policy: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” (The Wealth of Nations, I.viii, p. 181.)
28 The Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.50-4, p. 371.
29 For references to Smith’s remarks cited here, and to many other remarks on similar lines, see Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” in Knud Haakonssen ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
30 The Wealth of Nations, I.ii.11.i, p. 265.
31 Even during the Irish famines of the 1840s (half a century after Smith’s death), grossly mishandled by London, Charles Edward Trevelyan, the Head of the Treasury, would include among his reflections on the famine: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.”
32 Smith’s knowledge of other towns was mainly confined to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London (other than Oxford, which he largely hated, not least for its high-brow parochialism), and his foreign travels were confined to one visit to France and Switzerland in 1764-66.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Adam Smith once told his students that to be “an ancient” was to “have commentators.” By that standard, few are more ancient than Smith. The scholarship on him is immense; what follows is merely a brief guide to some of the most helpful introductory and most essential scholarly works.
Smith’s quiet life, coupled with his deathbed insistence that all his papers be destroyed, has rendered him a challenging subject for biographers. The authoritative biography is Ian S. Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995). A brief and lively account can be found in James Buchan, The Authentic Adam Smith (Norton, 2006). And still valuable is a short essay by Walter Bagehot,