The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [2]
First, even though Smith was, in many ways, the pioneering analyst of the need for impartiality and universality in ethics (the Moral Sentiments preceded the better-known and much more influential contributions of Immanuel Kant, who refers to Smith generously), he has been fairly comprehensively ignored in contemporary ethics and philosophy.
Second, since the ideas presented in The Wealth of Nations have been interpreted largely without reference to the framework of thought already developed in the Moral Sentiments (on which Smith substantially draws in The Wealth of Nations), the typical understanding of The Wealth of Nations has been constrained, to the detriment of economics as a subject. The neglect applies, among other issues, to the appreciation of the demands of rationality, the need for recognizing the plurality of human motivations, the connections between ethics and economics, and the co-dependent—rather than free-standing—role of institutions in general and free markets in particular in the functioning of the economy.
THE MORAL SENTIMENTS AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
Not only are Smith’s two books related, but his ideas in them also had something of a common origin. Smith had been appointed to the professorship of logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751, but he moved to the chair of moral philosophy the following year and held that position until 1764. His lectures on the subject not only contained the material on which the Moral Sentiments would draw, but as one of his students—John Millar, who later became professor of law at Glasgow—noted, the last part of his four-part lecture series also “contained the substance of the work he afterwards published under the title of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
Given the pervasive interdependence of these two books, it is amazing that many Smith commentators have been inclined to see a huge dichotomy between the two. Indeed, there is quite a voluminous literature on what has been called the “Adam Smith problem,”1 the common element of which is the fanciful belief that there is an inconsistency between Smith’s arguments presented in the Moral Sentiments, which “attributed conduct to sympathy,” and in The Wealth of Nations, which allegedly saw behavior as “being based on selfishness.” A recurrently asked question has been: Why did Smith abandon his earlier approach when he came to write The Wealth of Nations?
In fact, Smith never abandoned what he presented in the Moral Sentiments. Rather, he continued to advance that perspective, with many additional illustrations, even as he was engaged in presenting The Wealth of Nations.2 The first version of the Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, was revised in the second edition in 1761, in the third in 1767, and in the fourth in 1774. Then, five years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, came the fifth edition of Moral Sentiments, followed by a final—and much extended—edition, the sixth, in 1790, shortly before Smith’s death the same year. It is interesting to note that Smith’s first book, the Moral Sentiments , was also his last, in the form of the much-expanded sixth edition, with The Wealth of Nations coming in between.3 Indeed in the “Advertisement” to the final edition of Moral Sentiments, Smith recollected the promise he had made in the earlier editions “to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society.” He went on to say that in The Wealth of Nations, “I have partly executed this promise.”
In each book Smith talks about a variety of human motivations, including both sympathy and self-love, and also many other concerns that drive human beings.4 If self-love is of special relevance in seeking some particular explanation