Adam Smith on the Death of His Friend David Hume: How Smith Revealed Himself to be a Skeptic and the Last Esoteric Writer

                                                          David Hume's Tomb in Edinburgh

The best objection to my claim that Adam Smith proposed a liberal moral anthropology that does not depend on a transcendent moral theology is that Smith sometimes invoked God as the ultimate enforcer of the moral law by punishing the bad and rewarding the good in the afterlife.  In some previous posts (here, here, and here), I have answered this objection by arguing that Smith shared the atheism or skepticism of his best friend David Hume, but that to avoid persecution, Smith engaged in esoteric writing to hide his skepticism from his Christian readers.

The best evidence for this is in Smith's letter on the death of Hume--the Letter to William Strahan of November 9, 1776--in which he publicly and explicitly endorsed Hume's skepticism by praising him as a wise and virtuous man, indicating that religious belief was not indispensable for morality, and suggesting that he no longer saw the necessity for esoteric writing, because he lived in a society that was liberal enough to tolerate freedom of thought and speech for philosophers like Hume and himself.  He thus became the last esoteric writer and signaled the success of the liberal Enlightenment in making esoteric writing unnecessary and undesirable.  (On Smith's esotericism, see Klein 2021 and Klein and Merrill 2021.)

Previously (here, and here), I have written about the Straussian account of how philosophers have had to employ esoteric writing to protect themselves from persecution.  But I have also noted that Leo Strauss and the Straussians contradict themselves on this when they concede that the success of the liberal Enlightenment--beginning around 1800--has freed philosophers and scientists from the need for esoteric writing.  I have also argued (here) that contrary to the Straussians, the philosophic friendship of Adam Smith and David Hume shows how a liberal commercial society promotes freedom for the philosophic life.

Now I want to indicate how Smith's Letter to Strahan confirms all of this.  My thinking about this has been stimulated by my reading of Dennis Rasmussen's The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2017).

By January of 1776, Hume's health had become so poor that he foresaw that he would have only a few months to live.  His symptoms indicate that he was probably suffering from ulcerative colitis and colon cancer.  He drew up his will, and he named Smith as his literary executor.  He asked that Smith oversee the posthumous publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  Hume had worked on the Dialogues since the early 1750s, and he made a few final changes in 1776.  Smith refused to carry out his friend's request, saying that he did not want the book to be published during his lifetime.  Some scholars have wondered whether Smith's denial of his friend's dying wish tarnished their friendship.

The primary theme of the Dialogues is debating two arguments for the existence of God.  First, there's the argument from design--that the order of the world implies the existence of God as the supremely wise, powerful, and benevolent designer.  Second, there's the argument for a first cause--that everything in the world must have a cause, and if we trace back the string of causes, we must arrive at the First Cause of the universe, which must be God.  One of the leading characters in the dialogue--Philo--is a skeptic who presents seemingly devastating refutations of these arguments, although at the very end of the book, Philo seems to accept a very limited version of the arguments from design and first cause as suggesting that "the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence."  But this "remote analogy to human intelligence" doesn't look like the Biblical God, so this appears to be some kind of Deism (Hume, Writings on Religion, edited by Antony Flew [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992], 291).  

Philo suggests that this debate reaches an impasse in the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation.  To the question of why nature exists or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers.  We can say this is a brute fact of our experience: that's just the way it is!  Or we can move beyond nature to nature's God as the cause of nature, but then we cannot explain what caused God, or why God is the way He is.  Thus, it seems that in looking for ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.  Why is there something rather than nothing?  Well, why not?  We might say that God caused something to come out of nothing.  But this is nonsensical, because surely God is something not nothing!  (Hume, Writings on Religion, 57, 103, 222-24, 241-42).  (I have written about this in some previous posts, and I have written about Hume's religion.)

When this book was finally published in 1779, three years after Hume's death, it was widely condemned for promoting atheism and thus denying the religious beliefs in immortality in the afterlife with divine rewards and punishments that provide the essential support for morality.  One reviewer warned that according to Hume's teaching, "the wicked are set free from every restraint but that of the laws; the virtuous are robbed of their most substantial comforts; every generous ardor of the human mind is damped; the world we live in is a fatherless world; we are chained down to a life full of wretchedness and misery; and we have no hope beyond the grave" (quoted in Rasmussen, 193).

Anticipating that Hume's book would provoke this kind of popular denunciation explains why Smith did not want to be associated with its publication.  Smith said that he was "uneasy about the clamour which I foresee [the Dialogues] will excite." He said that the Dialogues "tho' finely written I could have wished had remained in Manuscript to be communicated only to a few people" (quoted in CAS, 211).  After all, even Hume must have seen this problem, because he refused to have this book published during his lifetime, to avoid the "clamour" its publication would excite, while circulating the manuscript privately among a few of his friends.

After Smith refused to publish the book, Hume asked William Strahan, his publisher, to take on the work of seeing it through to publication after Hume's death.  Hume changed his will to give the manuscript of the Dialogues to Strahan, but he also stipulated that if Strahan did not have the book published within two and a half years of Hume's death, the manuscript would be passed to Hume's nephew, David, who would have the duty of having it published.  Hume wrote to Strahan that "I often regretted that a Piece, for which I had a particular Partiality, should run any hazard of being suppressed after my Decease."

As an extra security, Hume asked Smith to hold a copy of the manuscript for safe keeping: "It will bind you to nothing, but will serve as a Security."  He also observed to Smith: "On revising them (which I have not done these 15 Years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written.  You had certainly forgotten them."  That Hume saw his text as "cautiously" and "artfully written" probably indicates that Hume thought that having Philo accept a Deistic theology at the end of the book was enough to soften the harshness of Philo's skepticism for Christian readers.

Philo concedes that "the whole of Natural Theology" might be reduced to one simple proposition: "That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence" (Writings on Religion, 291).  But the reader should note that this "remote analogy to human intelligence" must be very remote, because Philo has pointed out that all intelligent designers (human and animal) of our experience are embodied intelligences (230).  We have had no direct experience of how a disembodied divine intelligence designs a universe.  This is the sophistical equivocation at the foundation of all "intelligent design theory"--the equivocation in "intelligent design" that infers divine intelligent design (of which we have no experience) from our experience of human intelligent design.  I have written about this as the problem in Stephen Meyer's intelligent design argument.

Apparently, Smith did not think that Hume's Philo was "artful" enough to hide Hume's teaching from readers who would see it as blasphemous atheism or at least skepticism.  Strahan must have agreed with Smith, because after Hume's death Strahan decided he could not supervise the publication of the book.  So the manuscript was passed to Hume's nephew, who had it published in 1779.  And just as Smith foresaw, it provoked a "clamour."

Some scholars have said that since Smith was a Christian or at least a believer in a natural theology in which God is the "Author of Nature," he must have been offended by Hume's skepticism, and for that reason Smith refused to supervise the publication of the Dialogues.  But that cannot be true, because if it were true, there would be no way to explain the deep intellectual friendship of Smith and Hume and the fact that Smith never expressed any disagreement with Hume's views of religion.  Moreover, Smith's Letter to Strahan is his most emphatic public endorsement of Hume's life as a skeptical philosopher.

Hume's reputation for being an infidel who denied the immortality of the soul, the eternal afterlife, and divine providence made his declining health and approaching death a matter of general curiosity, because religious believers assumed that he would become so anxiously fearful of death and eternal judgment that he would be forced to repent of his infidelity and ask for divine forgiveness.  Hume was aware of this, and he was determined to show that a skeptic could face death with calm equanimity.  

In the last eight months of his life, up to his death on August 25, 1776, at the age of 65, he had jovial conversations and parties with his friends, he played his favorite card game whist, he traveled around England, and he worked on revising his collected writings.  He also wrote a short autobiography My Own Life that he wanted published after his death as the preface of his collected works that would be his final message to his readers.  In all of this, he wanted to show the world that a philosophical skeptic could live and die well.

Smith offered to reinforce this message by composing a letter to Strahan that would give an account of Hume's last days that would be published after his death along with Hume's My Own Life.  Smith asked Hume's permission to do this.  In Hume's final letter of his life, written two days before his death, he gave Smith "entire liberty" to write whatever he wished about Hume's life.  His last words in that letter were "Adieu My dearest Friend" (CAS, 208).

In a letter to Alexander Wedderburn, on August 14, eleven days before Hume's death, Smith wrote: "Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God."  He added: "Since we must lose our friend, the most agreable thing that can happen is that he dyes as a man of sense ought to do" (CAS, 203-204).

Smith seemed to have liked the word "whining" as describing Christians.  In his sixth and last edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published only weeks before his death on July 17, 1790, Smith added some references to "whining" Christians, references that had not appeared in the previous editions.  He identified "those whining and melancholy moralists, who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness," and he mentioned Pascal as an example (TMS, 139, 283).  

After Hume's death, Smith wrote his Letter to William Strahan, with the date November 9, 1776, which began: "It is with a real, though a very melancholy pleasure, that I sit down to give you some account of the behavior of our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume, during his last illness" (CAS, 217-221).  The theme of friendship begins with this first sentence.  Hume is described as engaged in frequent conversations with his friends.  The word "friend" appears 17 times in this six-page letter.

Even as his symptoms became violently painful, and as the approach of death became ever more certain, Hume is said to have "submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency and resignation."  After he returned to Edinburgh from a trip to England, Hume's "cheerfulness never abated, and he continued to divert himself, as usual, with correcting his own works for a new edition, with reading books of amusement, with the conversation of his friends; and, sometimes in the evening, with a party at his favourite game of whist."

Smith relates that Hume had been rereading Lucian, an ancient Greek writer who satirized ancient superstitions and religious practices.  He had read Lucian's account of Charon, the Greek mythic ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the river Styx to the world of the dead.  Hume said he was imagining what excuses he could give Charon to delay his transport to Hades.  One excuse was "Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public.  If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition."  But Charon would retort: "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.  Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term?  Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue."

Actually, Smith toned down Hume's attack on religion in this story.  In his letter to Alexander Wedderburn of August 14, 1776, Smith recounted Hume's story this way: "at last I thought I might say, Good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business; but Charon would reply, O you loitering rogue; that wont happen these two hundred years; do you fancy I will give you a lease for so long a time?  Get in the boat this instant" (CAS, 204).

Was this Hume's jocular way of suggesting that the Humean Enlightenment of the people, so that the churches would be shut up would take at least 200 years to succeed?  Has that prediction proven true, at least in many parts of Europe today, where most of the churches are either shut up or mostly empty?

The last paragraph of Smith's Letter to Strahan was elegant, perhaps one of the best passages in all of Smith's published writing:

"Thus died our most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion.  His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known.  Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity.  It was a frugality founded, not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency.  The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind, or the steadiness of his resolutions.  His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeale source of what is called wit in other men.  It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight, even those who were the objects of it.  To his friends, who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities, which contributed more to endear his conversation.  And that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive.  Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

Rasmussen says that last sentence was "one of the most fateful sentences he ever wrote" (220).  There is an echo here of the last sentence of Plato's Phaedo in which Phaedo finishes his eulogy for Socrates after his death: "Such, Echecrates, was the end of our friend, a man who, we may fairly state, was of all those we know in our time the most virtuous, and on the whole the wisest and most just" (118).  Like Hume, Socrates was accused of atheism and skepticism.  But unlike Hume, Socrates died not from natural causes but from being sentenced to death by the Athenian Assembly.  (Despite the execution of Socrates in Athens, I have written about the argument that Athens was remarkably liberal in the freedom of thought and speech that it gave to philosophers.)

In this last sentence of his letter, saying that Hume conformed to "the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man," Smith identified him as achieving what Smith had understood to be the peak of human perfection in the moral and intellectual virtues (see TMS, 246-48; LJ, 338-39).  This was Smith's public challenge to the claim of religious believers that religious belief was indispensable for moral conduct--that one could not be good without God--and that a skeptic like Hume could not possibly live a good life or face death without fear of eternal damnation.  

This was also a clear indication that when Smith spoke in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of how religious belief in God, immortality, and eternal judgment supported morality, he was writing esoterically to hide his true teaching that while religious belief might enforce morality among many people, it was not necessary for "wise and virtuous men" like Hume.

Here then in his Letter to Strahan, Smith was no longer writing esoterically, perhaps because he thought that the liberalism of the modern commercial society in Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century was reaching the point where there could be freedom of thought and expression for philosophers without their fearing persecution.

Nevertheless, the Letter to Strahan, and particularly the last sentence, did provoke widespread public denunciation of Smith.  For example, John Ramsey of Ochtertyre wrote that the Letter to Strahan "gave very great offence, and made [Smith] henceforth be regarded as an avowed skeptic, to the no small regret of many who revered his character and admired his writings" (Rasmussen 223).  Smith was denounced by some of the most prominent people of his day, such as Samuel Johnson and John Wesley (the founder of the Methodist movement).  They all argued that an atheist or skeptic like Hume could not possibly be truly virtuous and free of guilt in facing death; and therefore they accused Smith of lying because surely Hume could not have lived and died well as Smith claimed--surely Hume in his last days must have felt anguish, fear, and remorse as he faced the eternal judgment of God in the afterlife, although he might have hidden this from those who visited him.

Later, in a letter he wrote in 1780, Smith said: "A single, and as, I thought a very harmless Sheet of paper, which I happened to Write concerning the death of our late friend Mr Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made [in The Wealth of Nations] upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain" (CAS, 251).

Even if he was troubled by this "abuse," Smith never answered any of his critics, probably because he knew that he was living in a new liberal era of history in which philosophers who wrote openly in favor of skepticism might be criticized, but they would not be coercively persecuted.  

Later, in 19th century Victorian England, as the new liberalism of Charles Darwin and his friends gained influence, the freedom to publicly debate the most controversial topics--including reason versus revelation--became ever more pervasive, as English culture moved from "confessional values" to "liberal values."  That reason/revelation debate manifested the same problem of ultimate explanation identified by Philo in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: the proponents of reason assumed the uniformity of nature, while the proponents of revelation assumed the reality of supernatural miracles, and thus both sides begged the question at issue: Is the ultimate ground of explanation uncaused nature or uncaused God?  (I have written about this here and here.)

I have written about death and immortality here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

REFERENCES

Klein, Daniel, and Thomas W. Merrill. 2021. "Adam Smith, David Hume, Liberalism, and Esotericism." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 184: 712-716.

Klein, Daniel. 2021. "Reading Between the Lines in Adam Smith." AdamSmithWorks, April 7.  www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/daniel-klein-reading-between-the-lines-adam-smith.

Rasmussen, Dennis. 2017. The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Adam. 1987. The Correspondence of Adam Smith. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Adam Smith and the Darwinian Evolution of Unintended Order

The revival of Darwinian social science that began with the publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology has stimulated almost four decades of theoretical and empirical research in the biological roots of human social behavior.  Research across many disciplines--including evolutionary biology, animal behavior, evolutionary anthropology, social neuroscience, evolutionary game theory, and behavioral genetics--is now coming together into a general framework for the behavioral sciences founded upon Darwinian science.  Applying this new Darwinian social science to the history of political philosophy supports one general conclusion:  Adam Smith was right.

That conclusion has been suggested both by some of the new Darwinian social scientists and by some of the scholarly interpreters of Smith.  Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (MIT Press, 2005) is a collection of papers by researchers contributing to the new Darwinian social science edited by Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr.  In their introduction to the book, the editors present this research as belonging to the tradition of Smith: "The ideas presented in this book are part of a continuous line of intellectual inheritance from Adam Smith and his friend and mentor David Hume, through Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Emile Durkheim, and more recently the biologists William Hamilton and Robert Trivers" (3).  Indeed, the title of their book--Moral Sentiments and Material Interests--points to the two themes predominant in Smith's two books published in his lifetime: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.  Simultaneously, some of the scholarly commentators on Smith's writings have in recent years indicated that this new Darwinian social science can be seen as confirming Smith's teaching.  For example, this is suggested in James Otteson's book Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and in Michael Frazer's book The Enlightenment of Sympathy (Oxford University Press, 2010).

But if this new Darwinian science supports Adam Smith, we might wonder which Adam Smith does it support?  The scholars of Adam Smith have long debated the Adam Smith Problem--the problem that Smith apparently contradicts himself by assuming in The Wealth of Nations that human beings are moved only by self-interest, while arguing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that human beings are moved by their concern for others to act virtuously so that they can enjoy a mutual sympathy of sentiments.  Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, and Fehr indicate that while the research in their book supports the view of moral cooperation in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, "Smith's legacy also led in another direction, through David Ricardo, Francis Edgeworth, and Leon Walras, to contemporary neoclassical economics, that recognizes only self-interested behavior," as seems to be the teaching of Smith's Wealth of Nations.  Similarly, Bowles and Gintis in their book A Cooperative Species (Princeton University Press, 2011) argue that in explaining the Darwinian evolution of altruistic cooperation (particularly, what they call "strong reciprocity"), they are supporting "the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments" as opposed to "the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations" (1, 199-200).

Insofar as Darwinian social science has been identified with "Social Darwinism," it has been seen as in the tradition of the selfish competitiveness of Smith's Wealth of Nations.  But insofar as the new Darwinian social science emphasizes the evolution of social cooperation, it seems to follow in the tradition of Smith's account of the social nature of human beings in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

I will argue, however, that the new Darwinian social science overcomes the Adam Smith Problem by supporting the fundamental idea running through all of Smith's writing--the evolution of unintended order--and in doing that, it supports Smithian liberalism, or what Smith calls "the system of natural liberty."  This is a remarkable outcome for people like Bowles and Gintis who started out their careers as neo-Marxists, and who originally seemed to be adopting a Darwinian science of cooperation as a way of arguing for a new Darwinian left.  In recent years, one can see how the research in Darwinian science has pushed people like Bowles and Gintis towards a Darwinian liberalism that vindicates Adam Smith.

That the evolution of unintended order is the unifying theme of all of Smith's writing has been well stated by Otteson.  He argues that Smith applies a "market model" to explain the origin, development, and maintenance of all extended human institutions as unintended orders.  What he calls "unintended order" is what Michael Polanyi and Friedich Hayek call "spontaneous order" and what Vernon Smith and others call "emergent order."  Otteson defines "unintended order" as "a self-enforcing, orderly institution created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals who desire to satisfy their own individual wants" (270). 

An unintended order is contrasted with an intentional order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned purpose.  The contrast between these two kinds of order underlies a fundamental debate in social theory between the constructivists and the evolutionists: between those who think that a good social order must be deliberately and rationally designed for some foreseeable end-state and those who think a good social order arises through a process of free exchanges between individuals acting for individual ends with no overall end in mind.  Since the success of unintended order depends on individual liberty constrained only by rules of justice protecting life, liberty, and property, the idea of unintended order is the fundamental idea of classical liberalism in the Smithian tradition.

The importance of unintended order for explaining economic markets in Smith's Wealth of Nations is generally recognized.  But what is not generally recognized is how this same idea runs throughout Smith's writing.  Otteson presents this as a "market model" with four elements, which he applies not only to The Wealth of Nations but also to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith's essay on the origin of languages, his Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his essay on the history of astronomy.  In the following schema, I am using the language of Otteson for the first three texts and the language of Gavin Kennedy (in the first edition of his Adam Smith: A Moral Philosopher and His Political Economy [Palgrave Macmillan, 2008]):

1.     Motivating Desire

(i)                TMS:  the “pleasure of mutual sympathy” of sentiments (TMS, 13 and passim)

(ii)              WN: the “natural effort of every individual to better his own condition” (WN, 540; see also WN, 26-27, 341, and 343)

(iii)            “Languages”:  the desire to make “mutual wants intelligible to each other” (LRBL, 203)

(iv)            LJ:  protection of property, perfect and imperfect rights, punishment of offenders

(v)              “Astronomy”: desire to discover the connecting chains of intermediate events (EPS, 42)

2.     Rules Developed

(i)                TMS: standards of moral judgment and rules determining propriety and merit

(ii)              WN: the “laws of justice” (WN, 687), including in particular protocols protecting private property, contractual agreements, and voluntary exchanges

(iii)            “Languages”:  rules of grammar, pronunciation, and so on;

(iv)            LJ:  codified laws, due process, Habeas Corpus, presumption of innocence, verdict by peers, sentence by judge

(v)              “Astronomy”:  rules for the testing and debate of successive explanatory systems

3.     Currency (i.e., what gets exchanged)

(i)                TMS: personal sentiments and moral judgments

(ii)              WN:  private goods and services

(iii)            “Languages”:  words, ideas, and wants

(iv)            LJ:  argument, persuasion, judgment, and condign punishment

(v)              “Astronomy”:  hypotheses, ideas, and speculation

4.     Resulting Unintended System of Order

(i)                TMS: commonly shared standards of morality and moral judgment

(ii)              WN: economy (i.e., large-scale network of exchanges of goods and services)

(iii)            “Languages”:  language

(iv)            LJ:  relatively orderly living environment under imperfect but stable government and the rule of law

(v)              “Astronomy”:  “Introduction of order into the chaos of jarring discordant appearances” (EPS, 43-49)

 I will have more to say in future posts about how this structure of unintended order arises in Smith's writing and how the new Darwinian social science confirms it through a Darwinian view of the evolution and psychology of human social cooperation.

Here I will just make two points.  First, notice that each unintended order expresses a motivating desire.  This assumes that the good is the desirable, and thus the natural desires constitute the natural goods for human life.  Thus, these unintended orders are rooted in an implied hypothetical imperative:  if you want to live a desirable life, a happy life, then you should participate in those unintended orders that help you to do that.  Understood in this way, these unintended orders have no transcendental claims to conform to any cosmic order or to instantiate any categorical imperative.

My second point is to note that Otteson is not satisfied with this.  He wants to find some cosmic normativity in Smith's teaching.  But this creates a big problem in Otteson's interpretation of Smith's "marketplace of life."  While Otteson presents the evolution of unintended order as the pervasive theme in Smith's explanation of social order--including morals, markets, languages, laws, and the sciences--Otteson argues that Smith does not extend this kind of explanation to cosmic nature or human nature, which require explanation through intelligent design by God.  The very possibility of unintended order presupposes a certain constitution of human nature and certain recurrent circumstances of social life--such as the dependence of children on adult care.  This presupposes an order of nature, including human nature, that cannot itself be explained as unintended order, because, Smith suggests, it shows evidence of intentional design by an intelligent, benevolent, and omnipotent God.  Otteson can supply plenty of textual evidence for this from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because Smith often refers to God, the Deity, or the Author of Nature as ordering nature to His benevolent ends.

Otteson thinks this intelligent-design theology serves two purposes for Smith's account of morality.  People are more likely to obey the most important moral rules if those rules are regarded as sacred duties.  And if morality is understood as rooted in divine commands manifested in the cosmic structure of nature and human nature, then morality takes on a transcendent character, because it is based not just on hypothetical imperatives but categorical imperatives.

Otteson acknowledges that many scholarly interpreters dismiss Smith's theological language as a rhetorical appeal to popular religious beliefs that Smith himself does not share.  Otteson rejects this position by pointing to the language of moral theology in The Theory of Moral Sentiment.

But while this textual evidence does seem to support Otteson's interpretation, I think Otteson is wrong to ignore the evidence from Smith's intellectual friendship with David Hume and the threat of religious persecution that has led many scholars to conclude that Smith largely agreed with Hume's skepticism, but he thought that he could not risk provoking religious believers the way Hume had. 

When Hume was dying, there was intense public interest in the possibility that the great atheist--who had denied the immortality of the soul and the judgment of souls in the afterlife--would show his fear of death and divine judgment.  Smith wrote a long letter to William Strahan (November 9, 1776) describing Hume's illness and death and presenting him as facing death with tranquillity.  He concluded: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit." 

This provoked a great controversy in the press, and Smith was denounced as an infidel.  A few years later, in a letter to Andreas Holt (October 26, 1780), Smith lamented:  "A single, and as, I thought a very harmless Sheet of paper, which I happened to Write concerning the death of our late friend Mr. Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain."

Before his death, Hume asked Smith to take the manuscript of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and supervise its publication.  Smith promised to preserve the manuscript, but he did not want it to be published in his own lifetime, presumably because he feared the persecution it would provoke.

In the Dialogues, Hume wrote the most devastating attack on the reasoning for natural theology that anyone has ever written.  He also suggested that the apparent design of the universe could be explained by undesigned, unintentional processes of nature, and some of what he said looks remarkably like what Darwin would develop later as his theory of evolution.

Otteson insists that while Darwin's evolutionary theory might provide an alternative to intelligent-design theology, this Darwinian theory was not available to either Hume or Smith.  While it is certainly right that neither Hume nor Smith were able to elaborate anything like Darwin's theory, Hume did clearly foreshadow the theory in the Dialogues; and even Smith has a few passages in The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he speaks of species as naturally adapted for survival and reproduction (77, 142, 219), and this looks like at least a vague  foreshadowing of Darwin.

Darwin agrees with Smith about how religious belief can be important for reinforcing moral conduct.  But he also thinks that religious belief is not absolutely necessary for morality, which can stand on its own natural ground as rooted in our evolved human nature.  This position is important for liberalism, because religious liberty--including the liberty of atheists and skeptics--can be defended only if we see that there can be a common natural morality that does not require that religious belief be coercively enforced.

Darwin also agrees with Smith that the mystery of the origin of the laws of nature leaves an opening for religious belief in a Creator as First Cause.  But even so, Darwin would argue, we do not need special miraculous interventions by the Creator to explain the origins of species, including the human species.

The new Darwinian social science would support Darwin on both of these points, I think.  Darwinian science can explain the evolutionary psychology of religious belief, but this by itself cannot refute the possiblity that such belief is true.  Darwinian science can also recognize the role of religion in the evolution of morality, but without denying the naturalness of morality even for those who are not religious believers.

On all of these points, Darwinian social science supports the core of Smith's teaching about the evolution of unintended order and thus supports the classical liberal tradition that grows out of that teaching.

On the Question of Religion and Ethics, Adam Smith Was the Last Esoteric Writer

Daniel Klein has written an essay on "Adam and God" published at the website for the American Institute for Economic Research.  He notes that the scholarly interpreters of Adam Smith have disagreed about whether God, or a being like God, is crucial for Smith's ethics.  He argues that "yes, a God-like being plays a central role in Smith's ethics."  In making that argument, he believes that he is in agreement with a long list of Smith scholars, and I am on that list.

Whether I agree with Klein depends on resolving the ambiguity in his claim that "a God-like being plays a central role in Smith's ethics."  This is ambiguous in two ways.  First, does the "God-like being" exist independently of the human mind, or does it exist only as an anthropomorphic projection of the human mind?  Second, must this religious belief "play a central role" in the ethics of all human beings, or is this religious belief necessary for the ethics of some human beings, but not all?

If Klein means to say that God as an anthropomorphic projection of the human mind plays a central role for some but not all human beings in Smith's ethics, then I agree.  If some Smith scholars do not see this as Smith's teaching, it's because they fail to recognize that Smith was the last esoteric writer, and so they fail to distinguish Smith's surface teaching from his secret teaching.

Like David Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Smith explains religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience onto the universe, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own (see, for example, TMS, 163-64).  And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions.  In this way, religion sanctions morality as divine law, and thus provides supernatural support for a natural sense of moral duty.  A philosopher like Smith might then conclude that moral rules are "justly regarded" as divine laws.  Even if he thinks this is only a noble lie, he thinks that it is good for us if most of us believe it to be true.

Klein rightly points to a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (p. 215) where Smith speaks of the "man within the breast" as the "representative of the impartial spectator," and the impartial spectator is understood to be a single universal being, which, according to Klein but be a superhuman or God-like being.

But the thought in this passage is elaborated in another passage, where Smith says that human beings must consult "this inmate of the breast, this abstract man, the representative of mankind, and substitute of the Deity, whom nature has constituted the supreme judge of all their actions" (130).  Notice here the equivalence between "the representative of mankind" and the "substitute of the Deity," and the suggestion that it is natural for human beings to imagine the Deity as the anthropomorphic projection of mankind.

In some previous posts, I have shown how Darwin and modern evolutionary psychologists have confirmed this insight of Smith and Hume that believing in God is a natural, almost inevitable, consequence of the innate propensities of the human mind as shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history. 

Smith is also like his friend Hume in thinking that some human beings can be good without God--they can recognize moral law as enforced by natural human sanctions without having to believe this is a divine law enforced by supernatural divine sanctions.  This supports Smith's liberal moral anthropology that does not depend on a transcendent moral theology.

The best evidence for this is in Smith's letter on the life and death of Hume--the Letter to William Strahan of November 9, 1776--in which he publicly and explicitly endorsed Hume's skepticism by praising him as a wise and virtuous man, indicating that religious belief was not indispensable for morality, and suggesting that he no longer saw the necessity for esoteric writing, because he lived in a society that was liberal enough to tolerate freedom of thought and speech for philosophers like Hume and himself.  He thus became the last esoteric writer and signaled the success of the liberal Enlightenment in making esoteric writing unnecessary and undesirable. 

Prior to this letter in 1776, Smith was an esoteric writer.  But after this letter, he became more open in his writings, saying things publicly that shocked religious believers, but without suffering violent persecution.

All of these points have been elaborated in previous posts.

Adam Smith's Natural Teleology: Divine Design or a "Fatherless World"?

At the recent Republican National Convention, many of the speakers concluded by invoking God's blessings on the United States.  Some of the speakers (like Senator Marco Rubio) insisted that what makes America "exceptional" is the belief that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights--that rights are therefore God-given.  Moreover, it was said that God exercises providential care over the world in enforcing his moral law. 

By contrast, we can expect that we will not hear this kind of political theology at the Democratic National Convention.  Sometimes President Obama will say that the American creed rests on the belief that "all men are endowed with rights."  But he usually omits the phrase "by their Creator" as it appears in the text of the Declaration of Independence. 

This difference in rhetoric between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party points to a fundamental issue in moral and political philosophy.  Is a healthy moral and political order impossible without some belief in a cosmic teleology of divine design, as many Republicans believe?  Or is it possible for a healthy moral and political order to be rooted in a purely human order of human nature, human culture, and human judgment?

On the one hand, the Declaration of Independence invokes a cosmic teleology of divine providence.  On the other hand, the Constitution of the United States makes no clear reference to God or cosmic teleology, and the "no religious test" clause suggests that no religious belief is necessary for the constitutional order.

One of the most common objections to my argument for Darwinian natural right is that if Darwinism denies cosmic teleology, it must therefore collapse into nihilism.  That's the objection often made by the Straussians.  Of course, as I have indicated in some previous posts, the Straussian position on this is confusing, because it often seems that the Straussians do not actually believe that cosmic teleology is true, although it might be a noble lie.

Similarly, my religious critics argue that the only escape from nihilism is some religiously based cosmic teleology; and if Darwinism denies that human beings were created in God's image, and thus denies the cosmic teleology of Biblical religion, Darwinism leads to the sort of nihilism manifested in the Nazi movement.  That's what Richard Weikart identifies as the line of influence "from Darwin to Hitler."

This issue comes up in the interpretation of Adam Smith, who influenced the thinking of the American founders (Madison and Hamilton, for example) as well as Darwin.  In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith often invokes God as the "Author of Nature," who has designed the universe to serve his cosmic ends and ultimately to promote human happiness.  But in The Wealth of Nations, Smith says nothing about God, and he speaks about religion as a social institution, without any profession of his faith. 

Many readers have assumed that Smith was an atheist or skeptic, rather like his friend Hume, and that Smith's theological language is merely a concession to popular religious beliefs that he did not personally share.  But in recent years, some scholarly commentators on Smith have argued that he assumed a theology of natural teleology as foundational for all of his work. 

For example, James Alvey has argued this in a book--Adam Smith: Optimist or Pessimist? (2003)--and in an article that is available online -- "The Secret, Natural Theological Foundation of Adam Smith's Work," Journal of Markets and Morality 7 (Fall 2004): 335-61.  As Alvey indicates, he is reviving an argument made by Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order (1972).

Alvey was originally a student of Richard Staveley at the University of Queensland in the mid 1970s.  Under Staveley's influence, he eventually went to the University of Toronto to get a Ph.D. in political science, specializing in political theory, and writing a dissertation on Smith that became his book.  I mention this because I have often been impressed by Staveley's remarkable influence in directing many of his students to the study of political theory.  Some of these students have become students and friends of mine.

I agree with Alvey that Smith does assume a natural theology in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  My objection, however, is that Alvey does not consider the possibility that what he identifies as Smith's "trimmed-down version of natural theology" (345) could be affirmed by both Hume and Darwin. 

In Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo criticized the traditional reasoning for God as the intelligent designer of the universe.  Philo also suggested that the emergence of complex order in the physical and living world could be explained as the result of a process of natural selection of accidental variations in the history of the world.  And thus he anticipated Darwin's theory of natural evolution.  Philo also indicated, however, that the ultimate first cause of everything remains a mystery, which leaves an opening for believing in a Creator as something like a Cosmic Mind.

Similarly, Darwin argued against the traditional theory that the forms of life arose by divine special creation of each species, and he argued for a theory of natural evolution that looks a lot like what Philo had suggested in Hume's Dialogues.  And yet Darwin also indicated that the ultimate first cause of life and the universe was a mystery that left open the possibility that something like a Divine Mind might be posited.

But even as Hume and Darwin left an opening for religious belief in a Creator, and even as they agreed that this religious belief could reinforce morality in some ways, they also agreed that morality could stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief.  Alvey doesn't take seriously the possibility that this was Smith's position as well.

Remarkably, Alvey says almost nothing about either Hume or Darwin, and thus he never considers Smith's fundamental agreement with Hume or Smith's anticipation of Darwin.  Without thinking through the line of thought linking Hume, Smith, and Darwin, it is impossible to understand the place of natural teleology in the modern world.  (One could also stretch this line of thought back to Lucretius and Cicero in the ancient world.)

Hume's blunt criticisms of Christian theology gave him an infamous reputation as an atheist or infidel.  Not being as blunt as Hume, Smith did not suffer from the same bad reputation.  But Smith's friendship with Hume and some of his writing led some of Smith's readers to suspect that he was as much of an infidel as Hume.  Smith had to be cautious to avoid persecution.  For example, he refused to help Hume get a professorship at the University of Glasgow, because he feared the unfavorable reaction of the public.  When Hume was dying, he asked Smith to secure the publication of the Dialogues after Hume's death.  Smith refused to do this, apparently because he did not want his reputation soiled by association with Hume's attacks on natural theology in that book.  And yet Smith arranged for the publication of his letter to William Strahan describing Hume's cheerful attitude in the face of death without any belief in an afterlife.  He concluded: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."  This exposed Smith to denunciations from Christians.  After the publication of the Dialogues in 1779, Smith never indicated any disagreement with Hume's attack on traditional natural theology.

In explaining Smith's teleology, Alvey identifies five or six ends of human life: self-preservation, reproduction, the order of the human world, the perfection of human nature, the happiness of human nature, and perhaps liberty as an implicit end.  Collectively, Alvey suggests, we could see all of these ends as contributing to "human flourishing" understood as "ease and tranquillity" (339).

But notice that none of these ends is supernatural.  None of these ends require redemption of human beings in an afterlife.  All of these ends belong to a purely natural, this-worldly, secular life.  Consequently, this immanent teleology of human nature is fundamentally contrary to the Christian teaching that there can be no "ease and tranquillity" in this world, because what human beings really need to be happy is heavenly salvation.

Of course, the Christian teaching requires not only eternal salvation in Heaven for the redeemed but also eternal punishment in Hell for the damned.  Smith does say in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that the belief in an afterlife with eternal rewards and punishments is "deeply rooted in human nature."  But he also indicates that the "virtuous man" might well doubt those standards of eternal judgment that are contrary to our moral sentiments--for example, the eternal punishment of pagan philosophers because they were not Christians (TMS 132-34).  Here Smith seems to agree with Darwin that the eternal punishment of unbelievers is a "damnable doctrine."


Smith seems to say that the universal benevolence of the "wise and virtuous man" requires belief in the cosmic teleology of divine providence:

This universal benevolence, how noble and generous soever, can be the source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe, the meanest as well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and protection of that great, benevolent, and all-wise Being, who directs all the movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of happiness.  To this universal benevolence, on the contrary, the very suspicion of a fatherless world, must be the most melancholy of all reflections; from the thought that all the unknown regions of infinite and incomprehensible space may be filled with nothing but endless misery and wretchedness.  All the splendour of the highest prosperity can never enlighten the gloom with which so dreadful an idea must necessarily over-shadow the imagination; nor, in a wise and virtuous man, can all the sorrow of the most afflicting adversity ever dry up the joy which necessarily springs from the habitual and thorough conviction of the truth of the contrary system. (TMS, 235)
 

Here it seems that the "wise and virtuous man" would never embrace "the very suspicion of a fatherless world."  And yet, the only man Smith ever identified as approaching "the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man" was Hume, and Hume did apparently entertain the suspicion of a "fatherless world." 

Smith himself was a fatherless child, having been born a few months after the death of his father.  Could he have suspected that the whole world was fatherless?  If so, then he might have thought that the universe does not care about us or for us, but we care for ourselves, and through sympathy we extend our care to others.  This could have led Smith to believe that even if our moral sentiments cannot be grounded in a cosmic God or cosmic Reason, they can be grounded in human nature, human culture, and human judgment.  Would that have been enough for him?

If Adam Smith's work has a "natural theological foundation," as Alvey contends, then why is it that in The Wealth of Nations, Smith never mentions God, treats religious groups as purely secular institutions for popular education, and condemns the corrupting effect that theology has had upon moral and natural philosophy (WN, 764-74, 788-814)?  Is the world of The Wealth of Nations a "fatherless world"?

I wish that Alvey had probed some of these questions.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Esoteric Atheism of Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator

 In July, 11-13, I will be in Bogota, Columbia, for a conference of the International Adam Smith Society.  I will present a paper on "The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Sociobiological Morality of Liberalism."

Adam Smith needed Charles Darwin, I will argue, because beginning with his book The Descent of Man in 1871, Darwin showed how evolutionary biology could support Smith's theory of moral sentiments.

Smith also needed Edward Westermarck.  Because beginning with his book The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas in 1906, Westermarck elaborated this Smithian and Darwinian account of the biology of the moral sentiments, particularly in explaining the evolutionary psychology of the moral universals such as the incest taboo.

Smith also needed Edward O. Wilson.  Because beginning with his book Sociobiology in 1975, Wilson showed how the growing biological science of social behavior could deepen the empirical science of morality supporting a Smithian theory of moral sentiments, which has become, over the past fifty years, a new intellectual movement for studying evolutionary morality.

These are the three waves of Adam Smith's sociobiological morality.

This is a liberal morality because it rests on the fundamental idea of liberalism that society is a largely self-regulating unintended order--a largely self-enforcing spontaneous order that emerges from the social interactions of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.  Smith elaborates this liberal view of morality in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  

This breaks away from the traditional Western idea that moral order must conform to a transcendental cosmic order--the moral law of a cosmic God, a cosmic Reason, or a cosmic Nature.  Instead of this transcendental moral cosmology, liberal morality is founded on an empirical moral anthropology, in which moral order arises from within human experience.  Darwinian science supports this liberal moral anthropology by showing how it arises from the coevolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.

One objection to my argument is that Smith's theory of moral sentiments does seem to depend on a transcendent divine law insofar as Smith often invokes God as the "Author of Nature" and the "Great Judge of the World," who will be the ultimate enforcer of the moral law by punishing the bad and rewarding the good in the afterlife.  

In answer to this objection, I have suggested in some previous posts (here and here) that there is plenty of evidence that Smith shared the atheism or skepticism of his friend David Hume, but Smith had to be more cautious than Hume in hiding this so that he could avoid persecution.

Here I will point to some of the evidence for this in what Smith says about the "impartial spectator" as the standard for moral judgment in two chapters of The Theory of Moral Sentiments-Part III, chapters 2 and 5.  I will cite the page numbers of the Liberty Fund edition of 1982, which is the sixth and final edition of Sentiments, originally published in 1790.  I will also cite the page numbers of the Liberty Fund edition of The Wealth of Nations.

If morality is rooted in our desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, and if we judge ourselves to be good when those around us approve of our conduct, then it would seem that morality depends on the judgment of our fellow human beings.  Sometimes, however, the social judgment of our conduct can be unfair or misinformed, and then we must appeal to a higher court--to the court of our own conscience, to our imagined impartial and well-informed spectator, who can see that our conduct is praiseworthy even when we are not actually praised by other people.

But when the imaginary praise of our conduct by the impartial spectator is contradicted by the real blame of our conduct by the actual spectators in our lives, it is hard not to be thrown into despair.  "In such cases," Smith observes, "the only effectual consolation of humbled and afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgments can never be perverted" (TMS, 131).  Thus, our happiness in this life is often dependent on our belief in a life to come after death, when God will reward the good with eternal bliss and punish the bad with eternal suffering.

Immediately after speaking about this religious doctrine of eternal judgment, however, Smith observes "that the virtuous man who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it" (TMS, 132).  The virtuous man doubts this doctrine because some of the most zealous believers in the doctrine have described a divine distribution of rewards and punishments "too frequently in direction opposition to all our moral sentiments."  For example, Christians have often asserted that all of the virtuous pagans--all of the heroes, the statesmen, the poets, the philosophers, and other benefactors of humanity in the ancient world--will be condemned to eternity in Hell.  This is contrary to our moral sentiments, to our natural sense of the praiseworthiness of such virtuous people (TMS, 133-34).

(I have written a series of posts on life after death here, here, here, here, and here.)

Elsewhere in Sentiments, Smith warns that "false notions of religion" can grossly pervert our moral sentiments (156, 170, 176).  And he observes that some thoughtful people might entertain the "suspicion of a fatherless world" (235).  In The Wealth of Nations, he laments that in the medieval Christian universities, both moral and natural philosophy were corrupted by being made subservient to Christian theology (771).  Comments like these have convinced some readers of Smith that he was not a sincere religious believer, but that he had to feign religious belief to avoid being persecuted or being offensive in a society where Christian orthodoxy was pervasive.

Smith has a chapter on "the influence and authority of the general Rules of Morality, and that they are justly regarded as the Laws of the Deity" (TMS, 161).  Notice that Smith does not say that the rules of morality truly are the laws of God, but that they are "justly regarded" as the laws of God.  He says that this "opinion" is "impressed by nature" on the minds of human beings.  He explains:

"Men are naturally led to ascribe to those mysterious beings, whatever they are, which happen, in any country, to be the objects of religious fear, all their own sentiments and passions.  They have no other, they can conceive no other to ascribe to them.  Those unknown intelligences which they imagine but see not, must necessarily be formed with some sort of resemblance to those intelligences of which they have experience. . . . They could not fail, therefore, to ascribe to those beings, for the excellence of whose nature they still conceived the highest admiration, those sentiments and qualities which are the great ornaments of humanity, and which seem to raise it to a resemblance of divine perfection, the love of virtue and beneficence, and the abhorrence of vice and injustice.  The man who was injured, called upon Jupiter to be witness of the wrong that was done to him. . . . These natural hopes and fears, and suspicions, were propagated by sympathy, and confirmed by education; and the gods were universally represented and believed to be the rewarders of humanity and mercy, and the avengers of perfidy and injustice.  And thus religion, even in its crudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy.  That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches" (TMS, 163-64).

Here, like Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Smith explains religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience onto the universe, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own.  And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions.  In this way, religion sanctions morality as divine law, and thus provides supernatural support for a natural sense of moral duty.  A philosopher like Smith might then conclude that moral rules are "justly regarded" as divine laws.  Even if he thinks this is only a noble lie, he thinks that it is good for us if most of us believe it to be true.

In some previous posts (here and here), I have shown how Darwin and modern evolutionary psychologists have confirmed this insight of Smith and Hume that  believing in God is a natural, almost inevitable, consequence of the innate propensities of the human mind as shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history. 

For Smith, religious belief is both supportive and subversive of our moral sentiments.  The religious belief that God shares our natural moral sentiments can strengthen our morality, but religious fanaticism can promote violence and intolerance that corrupt our morality.  What we need, then, Smith argues in the Wealth of Nations, is "that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established" (793).  This could be achieved if government dealt equally and impartially with all religious sects, and everyone was free to choose his own religion.  There might then be a free marketplace of religions, with hundreds or thousands of different religious sects; and if no sect was allowed to use violent coercion against any others, the competition for believers would induce "philosophical good temper and moderation," such as one sees in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers have established religious liberty, and the law does not favor one sect over others.  Thus does Smith embrace John Locke's policy of religious toleration, but unlike Locke, Smith does not deny toleration for atheists.

Smith worries that the morals of some of the small religious sects might become "disagreeably rigorous and unsocial."  To avoid this, the government has two remedies.  It can secure the liberty of people to provide popular diversions through the arts--painting, poetry, music, dancing, and the theater--which had been restricted by the Calvinist churches.  The government can also promote the study of science and philosophy, at least among the middle and upper classes, because "science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition" (WN, 796).  Smith foresees that in a modern commercial society, natural science would replace religious superstition in explaining the natural world (WN, 767-68).

Adam Smith's Theology as Secret Writing

Adam Smith's handling of theological ideas in his books is a good illustration of what Leo Strauss called "the art of secret writing."   It also shows the importance of Darwinian science in fulfilling Smith's liberal understanding of social life as a largely self-regulating order created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals seeking the satisfaction of their individual desires.

Smith explains a wide range of social orders--morals, markets, laws, languages, and sciences--as spontaneous orders arising from human actions but not by human design.  As James Otteson has shown, Smith's explanations of these spontaneous orders manifest an analytic model with four elements: a motivating desire, the rules developed, a currency (what gets exchanged), and a resulting unintended system of order. 

Otteson argues, however, that Smith does not extend this kind of explanation to cosmic nature or human nature, which require explanation through intelligent design by God.  The very possibility of unintended order presupposes a certain constitution of human nature and certain recurrent circumstances of social life--such as the natural desires that motivate spontaneous orders and circumstances such as the dependence of children on adult care.  This presupposes an order of nature, including human nature, that cannot itself be explained as unintended order, because, Smith suggests, it shows evidence of intentional design by an intelligent, benevolent, and omnipotent God.  Otteson can supply plenty of textual evidence for this from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because Smith often refers to God, the Deity, or the Author of Nature as ordering nature to His benevolent ends.

There are at least three possible explanations for this theological language in Smith's writing.  First, one could say, as Otteson does, that Smith was a religious believer--perhaps an orthodox Christian, or at least a Deist.  Second, one could say that Smith was not a religious believer, but that he needed to feign religious belief to avoid persecution by religious zealots and to avoid offending the religious believers around him.  Third, one could say that while he was not an orthodox believer in a divinely designed world, he had no alternative explanation for the appearance of design in nature, and so he was forced to use the language of divine design. 

I think the second and third explanations are the most persuasive, and here my thinking has been influenced by two articles--Ronald Coase, "Adam Smith's View of Man," Journal of Law and Economics, 19 (1976): 529-46; and Gavin Kennedy, "The Hidden Adam Smith in His Alleged Theology," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 33 (2011): 385-402.

Kennedy makes a good case for the second explanation--that Smith had to feign religious belief to avoid being persecuted or being offensive in a society where Christian orthodoxy was pervasive.  Kennedy reminds us, for example, that Smith could never have been a professor at the University of Glasgow if he had not signed the the Calvinist Confession of Faith before the Presbytery of Glasgow.  He also reminds us that Smith was deeply devoted to his mother, with whom he lived, and that any public questioning of religious belief would have offended her.  Kennedy shows how, after his mother's death in 1784, and as he was nearing death himself, Smith made revisions to the 6th and final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments that eliminated or muted the more overtly theological passages of his earlier editions.  Moreover, Smith's deep friendship with David Hume, who was notorious for his reputation as an atheist, and his praise of Hume as the most wise and virtuous man suggest that he shared Hume's skepticism, but that he could not be as open as Hume in expressing this in public. 

All of this is evidence that Smith was a practitioner of secret writing--conveying a conventional acceptance of orthodoxy to his popular readers, while suggesting to the few careful readers that his true teaching was subversive of orthodoxy.

And yet even in the 6th edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when the fear of persecution or of offending loved ones was lessened, Smith still has many passages about the divine design of cosmic nature and human nature.  This might require the third explanation, which is suggested by Coase:  although Smith was not a religious believer, and although he preferred to explain the world as a product of purely natural causes, he could see that human nature was well adapted to the circumstances of life in ways that were hard to explain as a purely natural product of spontaneous ordering, and consequently he was forced to use the language of divine design.

Coase notes Smith's preference for naturalistic explanations in The Wealth of Nations, where Smith writes: 

"The great phenomena of nature, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, eclipses, comets, thunder, lightning, and other extraordinary meteors; the generation, the life, growth, and dissolution of plants and animals; are objects which, as they necessarily excite the wonder, so they naturally call forth the curiosity of mankind to enquire into their causes.  Superstition, first attempted to satisfy this curiosity by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods.  Philosophy afterwards endeavoured to account for them, from more familiar causes, or from such as mankind were better acquainted with, than the agency of the gods.  As those great phenomena are the first objects of human curiosity, so the science which pretends to explain them must naturally have been the first branch of philosophy that was cultivated.  The first philosophers, accordingly, of whom history has preserved any account, appear to have been natural philosophers" (V.i.f.24, p. 767-68).
 

The problem, however, as Coase indicates, is that in Smith's day, the science of "the life, growth, and dissolution of plants and animals" had not yet reached the evolutionary theory of Darwin that would explain the origin of species, and thus there was no good alternative to religious belief in the divinely intelligent design of the living world, including human nature. 

Nevertheless, Coase recognizes that in some passages in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith comes very close to the kind of evolutionary explanation that was later elaborated by Darwin.  Smith identifies "self-preservation, and the propagation of the species" as "the great ends which Nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals" (II.i.5.6, p. 77).  He stresses the instinctive bond of parents in caring for their offspring as rooted in mammalian nature (VI.ii.1.5, p. 219).  And he sees how the moral sentiments as based on sympathy are adaptive for the human animal, a fundamental idea for Darwin in explaining the evolution of human morality.

We can conclude from this that in 1859, with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, it became possible, for the first time, to be an intellectually fulfilled Smithian liberal.  Darwin's evolutionary theory made it possible to explain the biological origins of human nature as an unintended order that made possible the largely self-regulating society arising unintentionally from the free exchanges of individuals, which was the fundamental idea of Smithian liberalism.

By showing how all living species--including the human species--could have evolved naturally, without any need for special creation by God, Darwin extended the idea of unintended order to embrace the whole history of life, and thus he allowed for moral order to be understood as free-standing, as rooted in moral anthropology rather than moral cosmology, without any necessary support from a theology of intelligent design.  This then made it safe for governments to tolerate religious pluralism and even atheism without fear that the moral order of society would collapse without a coercively enforced religious orthodoxy.

Related posts can be found here. and here.