This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

This essay has two purposes—first, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law in England’s legal history. Seeing this enables (...) the essay’s second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith’s account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith’s famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith’s history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume and his wider political theory of modern freedom. (shrink)

Is realism in political theory compatible with utopianism? This article shows that it is, by reconstructing a highly restrictive realist approach to political theory for guiding legislation and public policy, drawn from the work of Adam Smith, and showing how it can accommodate Piketty’s utopian proposal for a global tax on capital. This shows not only that realism and utopianism are compatible; but how realist and utopian political theory can be carried out in concrete cases. This moves debates to more (...) interesting questions of which forms of utopianism are permissible within which forms of realism; contributes to moving the contemporary realism debates from a Methodenstreit to questions of how it can and ought to be done; and contributes to an important contemporary debate about the permissibility of utopian proposals for political and economic reform in general and Piketty’s proposed global tax on capital in particular. (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparative study of the conjectural histories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson, focusing on the convergences in the moral and political ideals expressed and grounded in these histories. In comparison with Scots like Adam Smith and John Millar, the conjectural histories of Ferguson and Rousseau follow a similar historical trajectory as regards the development and progress of commercial, political and cultural arts. However, their assessment of the moral progress of humanity does not, or in a much (...) more limited way than in Smith and Millar, correlate with this trajectory. Rousseau and Ferguson see a candour and vigour in savage and barbarian societies that is much less easily supported by the complex socio-economic framework of modern, commercial societies. It is argued that the convergences in their conjectural histories arise from a similar fusion of these histories with Stoic and republican perspectives. While Rousseau and Ferguson do not see history as cyclical, they think that the forces that push towards moral decline are strong and can, on the political level, only be countered by firm republican policies. Furthermore, their shared Stoic ideal of the life lived according to nature informs their solutions for modern societies. (shrink)

This paper affirms the central role of religion in Adam Ferguson's practical thought by offering a new reading of his view on the interrelations between true religion, science, moral progress, and immortality. Fergusonian true religion, it is shown, originates in the understanding of wise, benevolent Providence which the physical and moral sciences offer when they become comprehensive. This understanding, in turn, grounds a neo-Stoic religious ethic. Having true religion then means: knowing the providential order, and virtuously acting upon a proper (...) understanding of one's place, potential, and limits in this order. For Ferguson, it is argued, it is each individual's own responsibility to morally progress on the basis of true religion. The paper thus opposes interpretations of Ferguson's view of moral progress as the irreversible result of the species’ ever-increasing insight in the details of nature as a providential order. Human societies can only offer a fertile backdrop that enables individuals to live rationally and virtuously. The highest possible degree of human moral-religious progress is to be realized in the afterlife – if the individual has lived sufficiently virtuously on earth so as to merit entrance to the afterlife's progressive scene. Nevertheless, Ferguson's focus remains firmly on religion's value for this life. (shrink)

This article revisits the "harmony doctrine" school of economics and its distinctive understanding of how ethics and economics intersect. Harmony doctrine thinkers staked out a “natural” understanding of economic phenomena that in many ways fused the classical political economy of Adam Smith with the earlier French Physiocratic School. Their metaphysically grounded interpretation was largely eclipsed by the developments of utilitarian and marginalist schools by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet harmony doctrine thinking adhered to a distinct understanding of how (...) ethical processes and outcomes play out within the economic sphere that has to date gone under examined by business ethicists. This paper outlines three characteristics of harmony doctrine views: the belief in curative forces empowered to "heal" the economic order, a dichotomous interpretation of the economic realm that distinguishes the “natural” from the “artificial,” and an overarching belief in a harmonious social order actualized by cooperative interdependencies within economic enterprises. Despite falling into obscurity in the economic discipline, all these ideas found new life in intellectual currents of organizational and political thought at the turn of the twentieth century. After surveying these historical developments, this article concludes by demonstrating how harmony doctrine thinking helpfully illuminates persisting metaphysical dimensions of contemporary business ethics. (shrink)

Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to Hume, Smith (...) and Reid, who have separate Encyclopedia entries. Amongst the topics covered in this entry are aesthetics (particularly Hutcheson's), Moral philosophy (particularly Hutcheson's and Smith's), Turnbull's providential naturalism, Kames's doctrines on divine goodness and human freedom, Campbell's criticism of the Humean account of miracles, the philosophy of rhetoric, Ferguson's criticism of the idea of a state of nature, and finally the concept of conjectural history, a concept especially associated with Dugald Stewart. (shrink)

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a (...) scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work. (shrink)