Smith Perfects British Moral Sense Theory, Which Becomes a Social/Ethical Foundation for Wealth of Nations

Historians never tire, of course, of reminding us that Adam Smith is best known for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Wealth of Nations), overshadowing his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Moral Sentiments). Eventually that will cease to be true if every time they mention Wealth of Nations they mention Moral Sentiments!

But such ironies aside, Adam Smith’s place in history both as philosopher and economist cannot be fully understood without considering that he represents the climax of the British Enlightenment. That, in turn, requires understanding that in Britain and France, and America there were different “Enlightenments.” Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, author of The Roads to Modernity, argues that the French Enlightenment (1715-1815) emphasized—almost adulated—reason. It did so in contrast to faith, particularly the Catholic Church, urging that reason could grasp all that was “natural”—that is, everything—and faith, especially in the hands of the clergy, with its claims to privileged knowledge of the supernatural, was the darkness (superstition) that must be enlightened. The French philosophes including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean la Rond d’Alembert, Baron de Montesquieu, Nicholas de Condorcet, Thomas Paine, and other leading and lesser lights were atheists (admitted or not) or strict deists. Likewise, the philosophes were persistent opponents of the monarchy, which for its part censored, condemned, burned, or banned their books and punished them with exile or imprisonment.

The British enlighteners, too, upheld reason, emphasized the natural over the supernatural, and advocated limits on the power of the crown and enlargement of decision-making by parliament. But, Himmelfarb points out, the British leaders of the Enlightenment were tolerably comfortable with the established Church if it tolerated other sects and did not so much oppose the government as advocate its reform. In contrast with France, the Enlightenment in Britain focused on making the case for a secular justification and explication of morality. In Britain, the enlighteners were “moral philosophers,” who proposed and developed throughout the century the non-religious theory of a “moral sense.”

If the French identified with the British Enlightenment, it was with three great seventeenth-century precursors: Issac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke. And in the eighteenth century, French philosophes and British moral philosophers did have many cordial interactions. As we will see, Smith got to know the French physiocrats and their thinking. Nevertheless, two different philosophical themes were played out in the two countries and interaction of ideas was limited.

In Britain, the work of the eighteenth century began with Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who introduced a system constructed on the concept of a “moral sense” that exerted a century or more of influence on British, French, and German thought.

The transition from seventeenth to eighteenth century philosophy takes a personal turn, here. Locke was a lifelong friend and philosophical mentor of Shaftesbury. He lived for some years in the household of Anthony’s grandfather, the 1st Earl, as his physician, and supervised a governess in teaching a daily curriculum that Locke developed for Anthony and the other children of a chronically ill, debilitated father, the 2nd Earl.

Anthony had completed his education, taken the young British nobleman’s “Grand Tour” of Europe, and returned to England to take his father’s seat in Parliament, in the House of Commons when he began his first work of philosophy, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit. Thus, he launched the thesis that would shape the Age of Enlightenment in Britain. The philosophy he spent his life explicating and promoting expressed a view directly contrary to that of his friend and mentor, Locke. Shaftesbury began by rejecting one of Locke’s defining positions, opposition to “innate ideas,” thus advancing Aristotle’s view of man’s mind as tabula rasa, a ‘blank slate.” The blank slate implied, of course, absence of any inborn idea, “sense,” or attitude toward morality.

Nature had endowed mankind with a capacity to experience pleasure or pain, happiness or distress, and that capacity alone determined his choices, which he then called “right” or “good” if they were productive of pleasure/happiness and “wrong” or “bad” if productive of pain/distress. This view of Locke’s comported with the earlier philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who dismissed religious moral precepts as “nonsense” and said that man acted solely on “selfish” motives, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.

Shaftesbury was having none of it. He offered what British intellectuals since Hobbes had demanded: a satisfactory rejoinder to Hobbes’s advocacy of selfishness, which Locke, in his own way, had affirmed. Shaftesbury responded that indeed we can answer Hobbes and Locke if we think of moral goodness as analogous to beauty. We all have a “sense of beauty,” responding, for example, to visual harmony and proportionality. This universal sense responds not to content but to form.

Man’s moral goodness likewise can be grounded in objective features of the world, not arbitrarily but in an empiricist framework. Moral beauty is the harmony and proportionality of our choices and actions with what advances and preserves the life of creatures of our species—the life of man qua man, man living as man. We know that is true empirically, by observation and analysis. As moral agents, we are attracted to choices and actions that advance life as man. Capable of free choice, we can be attracted to virtue for its own sake, for its harmonious rightness for life—not virtue directly arising from self-interest.

Moral judgment, then, becomes our reflection on our own actions and those of others. We have motives and can reflect on them—the only species able to do so. And, in reflecting, we can feel moral approval or condemnation. Because we can recognize the comportment of our motives with what is harmonious with life as lived as the kind of species we are.

In summary, says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “The moral sense” in Shaftsbury:
 
“Shaftesbury calls this capacity to feel second-order affections the ‘Sense of Right and Wrong’ or the ‘Moral Sense’... There is little evidence that [Shaftesbury] thinks the moral sense is a distinct psychological faculty... Nevertheless, Shaftesbury does think that the moral sense (whether one faculty or a less bounded disposition) is that which produces in us feelings of “like” or “dislike” for our own (first-order) affections. When the moral sense is operating properly...it produces positive feelings towards affections that promote the well-being of humanity and negative feelings towards affections that detract from the well-being of humanity.”

In other words, affections that the “moral sense” enables us to affirm as right or wrong are those motivating us to advance our society. The good, then, is cast in terms of that purpose. The best evidence seems to confirm that Shaftesbury believes our ability to know the good of our society, and our reflective approval of our motivation to serve this good, are innate human capacities.

The moral philosophers who followed Shaftesbury agreed that not reason but “affect” is primary in morality. Our moral sense is an affection for actions and motives harmonious with how we live with our fellow men in society. Reason could not be primary because among other things it is far too “slow” to account for our instantaneous reactions of affection. But reason comes into the picture in understanding the motives upon which we are acting and formulating rules that define the category of actions consistent with the kind of choices and actions of which we approve or disapprove.

Shaftesbury brought together his important writings in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. It ran to three volumes, dealing not only with ethics, but psychology, politics, esthetics, history, and much else. After revising this work one last time, Shaftesbury died, in 1713, and the next year Characteristicks was republished with its final changes. It rivaled Locke’s Second Treatise (chiefly on politics) as a top-selling book, going through 10 editions in the eighteenth century and setting the course of the British Enlightenment.

The same year as the definitive version of Characteristicks appeared, Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician who spent his life in England, reissued his impassioned attempt to turn back the momentum of “moral sense” defined as serving the public good. He had published the poem, The Fable of the Bees, in 1705, as a cheap pamphlet. It relates the story of a society, a hive of bees, where everyone is a knave and where knavery is essential to prosperity and happiness. Mandeville was dead serious: “...every part was full of Vice/Yet the whole mass a Paradise.”

Now, in 1714, he republished the poem with an introductory essay, “The Origin of Moral Virtue,” and extended remarks, elaborating his thesis that primary selfishness—all Shaftesbury deemed immoral and despicable—in fact best served everyone.

The book shocked England, including its new moral philosophers, but like many literary shocks it became a sensation. In the end, however, it did not take hold and did not stem the momentum of Shaftesbury’s ideas.

Just a couple years after the expanded version of the Fable, Frances Hutcheson joined the debate with An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Its subtitle made explicit his defense of Shaftesbury’s thesis against Mandeville. Hutcheson here gets credit for first enunciating the principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” The formulation would have a rich and extended future well into the nineteenth century as the philosophy of utilitarianism advocated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill. But whereas the utilitarians rooted it in supposed rational calculations, Hutcheson reaffirmed the path tread by Shaftesbury, deducing the idea from morality, the “moral sense,” and man’s innate benevolence toward his fellow men.

Hutcheson agreed that reason could not be primary in morality:

“Notwithstanding the mighty reason we boast of above other animals, its processes are too slow, too full of doubt and hesitation, to serve us in every exigency, either for our own preservation, without the external senses, or to direct our actions for the good of the whole, without this moral sense.”

Himmelfarb writes:

“‘Benevolence,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘sympathy,’ a ‘natural affection for others’—under one label or another, this moral sense (or “sentiment,” as Smith preferred) was the basis of the social ethics that informed British philosophical and moral discourse for the whole of the eighteenth century.”

Thomas Reid formulated the idea that “common sense” not reason was the special quality of the “plain man.” In fact, had men been endowed only with reason they would be extinct. What made the difference was that reason was complemented by “benevolent affections” as active in our preservation as are the appetites of hunger and thirst.

Hutcheson, Reid, and a third moral philosopher, Adam Ferguson, who deemed “fellow-feeling” and our humanity as a “characteristic of the species,” all were intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment, that improbable assemblage of brilliance in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and collectively, as moral philosophers, constituted the Scottish school of common sense.

David Hume, too, was of the Scottish Enlightenment, and, despite his notoriously unsentimental take on human nature, believed in “sentiment,” a “moral sense,” a “moral taste”—all common to all men. It all built on Shaftesbury, with variations, as did Hume’s take on reason. Hume’s final book, A Treatise of Human Nature, stated his position in the opening section entitled “Moral distinctions not derived from reason.” And the section that followed was “Moral distinctions derived from a ‘moral sense.’”

As it happened, Smith, one of Hume’s closest friends, published what Himmelfarb calls “The most nuanced statement of this creed [moral sense], and the most influential...” The Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759 went through four editions before the later Wealth of Nations reached readers in 1776. The Wealth of Nations did not eclipse the earlier work in Smith’s mind. He devoted the last year of his life to revising and expanding Moral Sentiments.

Although Smith published Moral Sentiments when he was 36 and did not published the Wealth of Nations until 17 years later, at 53, Moral Sentiments must in no sense be viewed as a typical “early work” or “young man’s” work. The book is a brilliantly, systematically argued philosophical exposition, at length, of Smith’s thesis, its logical and psychological foundations, its implications for almost every conceivable area of human concern and conduct, and its context in the history of philosophy especially from Hobbes and Locke forward. Smith’s exposition is commendably logical and clear, but his style rises well above serviceable prose to elegance, verbal color and imagination, and many moving passages.

His premises and conclusions, stated at the outset, are not exceptionally complex, but once laid down are reiterated and refined in application after application, demonstrating the reach and subtlety of his theory.

Smith had no doubt he was doing science, empirical science, as well as philosophy. In establishing every key idea, every connection, and every application he appeals to observation and experience. There is one might say a radical absence of “rationalism.”

Individuals indeed are motivated by self-interest, nature ensures that we “look after ourselves,” and Smith labels that “prudence.” But we are also by nature social animals, endowed with a natural “sympathy” (all commentators tell us to read that as “empathy”) toward others. We feel happy or distressed as we observe those feelings in them. And they, of course, respond in kind.

We learn from childhood (characteristically, Smith devotes a chapter to this) what expression of our feelings, with what intensity and in what circumstances, others will approve, and we learn thereby what Smith calls “self command” over our emotional expression.

We do not need to calculate morality. In our empathy for others in all life’s situations and contexts, and in learning when such empathy is appropriate—worthy of approbation and how much—and in our command of our own feelings and their expression—we become social creatures who are moral. Here, a fundamental distinction is made. In our conduct related in any way to actively harming others, and in commanding our response to harm done to us, we are involved with the virtue of “justice.” It is the virtue crucial above all for the survival of human society from the most rudimentary to most highly civilized levels.

In all other walks of life, we are dealing with the other virtues and vices, which involve acting with “propriety,” “beneficence”—appropriate in our reactions of happiness, admiration, grief, courage, condemnation, anger, and hate. We learn all reactions and are greatly shaped by our relationships with others, but that is not the perfection of morality. To a greater or lesser extent, we come to understand the perspective of the “impartial spectator,” “the man within our breast,” Smith’s model or construct of a person not in the grip of our emotions, not affected by the pull of our self-interest, and how that person views the conduct of others and ourselves.

To listen to the impartial spectator is to consult conscience, our mind and emotions above life’s fray, so to speak, in reacting to the conduct of others and ourselves. This, then, is the final arbiter of morality, never wrong when honestly consulted, and our source of ideal beneficence towards others and self-command of ourselves—moral perfection.

Our lifelong striving to cultivate appropriate responses to others, and self-command of our own emotions and their expression, applies both to justice and other virtues. The fundamental difference, however, is that justice—our conduct toward the law, jurisprudence, our absolute care to harm no man—is the “grammar” of morality. It is about unambiguously defined rules of behavior carried out as it were by rote. All other virtues, which relate to our conduct, to “propriety,” in every realm, are more like guides to rhetoric—always a matter of interpretation, requiring a striving after improvement, always approaching the personal mastery of our best.

If morality originates not in reason and logic, but in experience and learning, beginning in observation of what evokes sympathy in us and others, or evokes its contrary such as condemnation and anger, that does not mean reason has no major role in morality. In learning by making judgments of countless actions of every type, we come to formulate rules of conduct. We have moral standards to guide us.

The social order requires such constancy. As we become systematic in following our conscience, the impartial spectator, we move steadily and surely, if not by full conscious intention, toward promoting the happiness of mankind. Yes, the laws and the punishments and rewards by which the government enforces them, aim at that result, too, but, as we shall see below, can never do so as consistently, immediately, or effectively as human conscience and the principles of morality engineered by nature.

Therefore, the virtue of “justice,” crucial for a basic level of conduct, a foundation, is less important by far than the “propriety” (including excelling in “prudence”) that is required at the highest level each of us can attain in all other relationships in our lives.

The clear implication is that what today is called “the public sector”—law and jurisprudence, government—is far less important to society than private morality. Here, Smith can be seen to build toward the theory of political economy in the Wealth of Nations. He tells us in Moral Sentiments that the public sphere, government and its politicians and bureaucrats, too frequently believe that by enlarging their domains and powers they can improve men’s happiness and the good of society. But they cannot—not by over-reaching the bounds of “justice” into the realm of beneficence, where individuals and society, with all its associations and combinations, best serve their own interests.

Smith promises in Moral Sentiments an elaboration on the virtue of justice—and all its implications for politics. In 1763, he delivered a lecture series on “Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms,” obviously a forerunner to Wealth of Nations. And yet, reportedly, he spent more than 10 years taking notes and engaging in discussions that eventually went into that book published 17 years after Moral Sentiments. During this interim, as mentioned, he traveled to Paris as a tutor, a two-year tour during which he spent time in conversation with philosophes such as Voltaire, but especially the “Physiocrats,” the eighteenth-century French economists.

In the Wealth of Nations, Smith began, of course, with opposition to the prevailing mercantilist theory of national wealth as measured by gold and silver in government coffers, with the concomitant view that government must discourage imports (spending) and encourage exports (earning) to increase its specie. Smith made the case unforgettably that wealth is measured by a country’s production of goods and services (what today we call GNP) and that this wealth is increased by foreign trade. (He also argued that “beneficence” should make us happy to see other peoples grow more prosperous.)

Government could encourage production not by restricting trade but by setting the economy free. Wealth-creating capacity rests on the division of labor, with huge efficiencies possible by breaking down production into limited tasks assigned to specialists. The resulting profits make possible a surplus that can be accumulated to invest in new and greater efficiencies, including machinery, which in turn make possible still greater productivity—a virtuous circle.

Government’s role is to encourage production and savings by ensuring individuals’ justice: that their property will be safe from theft and the depredations of invasion and war. Wealth depended upon accumulation and investment of capital (another incentive for domestic enforcement of “justice”) and, once government has funds necessary for the police, courts, and military defense, virtue—and perhaps allowing for building of roads and other infrastructure to facilitate domestic commerce and basic education to promote understanding of justice—no further taxes should be collected. Nor should government accumulate debt that becomes a future drain on capital.

Private individuals making choices in their own interest, with the well-honed virtue of prudence (continually focused on increasing their prosperity), bring about the most efficient adjustments to production by responding to supply and demand, making the system “automatic,” says Smith, with no need for central direction, thank you.

And yet, this will not work without certain virtues of private individuals. Competition and free exchange, purportedly the legitimate demands of business, are threatened, in many cases, by producers themselves who extract from government authorities such privileges such as monopolies, tax preferences, protective tariffs, and discriminatory regulations that impoverish rivals and the poor. The pressure is constant, Smith believed, and in a final edition of the Wealth of Nations he added a chapter on the distinct default on the virtues of beneficence to be found at times among some of the rich who looked with dismissive contempt on other businessmen and the less fortunate.

The entire chain of reasoning begins with the thesis of Moral Sentiments that the greatest happiness of individuals and the greatest good of society result from the private virtues: prudence and beneficence. Government implements the foundational virtue of justice, which requires that those who would inflict harm (crimes of violence and fraud) on others face the prospect, even the “terror,” of swift, certain punishment along with universal public condemnation, contempt, and “hate.”

What we can conclude from consideration of Moral Sentiments in conjunction with the Wealth of Nations is that Adam Smith represents both a culmination of British Enlightenment philosophy (roughly the eighteenth century) and a pioneering of the philosophy of political economy that shaped the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760-1840). With his active career coming toward the close of the Enlightenment and the outset of the Industrial Revolution, he responded with not one but two enduring historical classics that brought the refined wisdom of the former to bear upon the challenge of the latter.