This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the (...) way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it. (shrink)

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)

The main contention of this paper is that our ability to embed a consideration of values into business school curricula is hampered by certain normative parameters that our students have when entering the classroom. If we don’t understand the processes of valuation that underpin our students’ reasoning, our ethics teaching will inevitably miss its mark. In this paper, we analyze one of the most prevalent metaphors that underpin moral arguments about business, and reveal the beliefs and assumptions that underpin it. (...) By revisiting the content of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor, we show that the moral content of the metaphor has been significantly misconstrued through its subsequent reception in economic theory. The “Giving Voice to Values” pedagogy aims to enable students to act on their tacit values and address the rationalizations that they may encounter for not acting on these values. We believe our analysis can strengthen the employment of GVV in three ways: understanding tacit blockages to moral action, i.e., how students’ belief in the moral efficacy of the invisible hand could undermine their own sense of moral duty; addressing common rationalizations that may emerge from different assumptions about morally appropriate courses of action in the workplace; and resolving values conflicts on how to act. (shrink)

SummaryToday remembered primarily as an eighteenth-century predecessor of laissez-faire economics, Bernard Mandeville's notorious Fable of the Bees marks the intersection of two modes of thought. On the one hand, Mandeville was a ‘moralist’ heir to the French Augustinianism of the previous century, viewing sociability as a mere mask for vanity and pride. On the other, he was a ‘materialist’ forerunner of economics, concerned to demonstrate the universality of human appetites for corporeal pleasures. The tension between these two modes of thought (...) results in ambivalences and contradictions—concerning the relative power of norms and interests, the relationship between motives and behaviours, and the historical variability of human cultures—that run throughout the Fable. Both traditions, with their attendant difficulties, have a long afterlife in the later history of the social sciences; understanding their origins in Mandeville's thought can help us get a firmer grip on problems that still trouble us today. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between competition and justice in Adam Smith in order to determine to what extent competition can promote and undermine justice. I examine how competition features in two basic motivations for human action, “the propensity to truck barter and exchange,” and “the desire of bettering our condition.” Both can be traced back to the desire for recognition, but they operate in very different ways. The former manifests itself in social cooperation, chiefly commercial exchange and the division (...) of labor, and while it can take a competitive form, competitive success produces benefits for everyone. In contrast, the latter may manifest itself in win‐lose social competition. Commercial society harnesses both motivations, and both have negative as well as positive effects. However, while Smith explicitly addresses the negative effects of excessive specialization in the division of labor, it is less clear how he thinks the negative effects of social competition can be addressed. I argue that competition can undermine justice when (i) it pits people against each other and (ii) leads to psychological corruption. I conclude with some reflections on what a focus on competition adds to our understanding of Smith's work. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Samuel Pufendorf's works on natural law contain a sentimentalist theory of morality that is Smithian in its moral psychology. Pufendorf's account of how ordinary people make moral judgements and come to act sociably is surprisingly similar to Smith's. Both thinkers maintain that the human desire for esteem, manifested by resentment and gratitude, informs people of the content of central moral norms and can motivate them to act accordingly. Finally, we suggest that given Pufendorf's theory (...) of socially imposed moral entities, he has all the resources for a sentimentalist theory of morality. (shrink)