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.

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).

The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Darwinian Liberal Moral Theory

 In the middle of July, I will be in Bogota, Columbia, for the 2022 Conference of the International Adam Smith Society.  I will present a paper entitled "The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Darwinian Liberal Moral Theory."  Here is a short summary of a long paper:

          I have argued that we should see Charles Darwin, Edward Westermarck, and Edward O. Wilson as the three waves of Adam Smith’s Darwinian liberal theory, because each of them initiated a new turn in the evolutionary moral psychology that has confirmed and deepened Smith’s liberal theory of the moral sentiments.

          I have identified this as a liberal moral theory for three reasons.  It assumes a liberal individualism that recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  It asserts the liberal no-harm principle of justice as a “negative virtue” that hinders individuals from any unprovoked harming of others.  And it employs the liberal idea of society as a largely self-regulating and spontaneous order arising from the social interaction of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.

          I have defended this as an empiricist moral anthropology that arises from the coevolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.  This revives an ancient Greek liberal evolutionary tradition that is set against the traditional Platonic idea that moral order must conform to some transcendentalist moral cosmology of a cosmic God, a cosmic Reason, or a cosmic Nature. 

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith did often invoke the transcendentalist moral cosmology of a moral divinity enforcing a divine moral law through eternal rewards and punishments.  But as Smith made clear in his praise of Hume as “a perfectly wise and virtuous man,” Smith was an esoteric writer whose public teaching of religious morality had concealed from most of his readers his philosophic teaching that irreligious skeptics like Hume could be wise and virtuous.

I have shown how evolutionary moral psychology supports Smith’s theory of moral sentiments through seven ideas:  the four grounds of evolutionary morality, the evolutionary roots of morality in primates, the expression of the instinctive moral sentiments in human children, the moral psychology of the impartial spectator in evolutionary game theory, the evolutionary science of the universal moral rule condemning incest, the evolutionary morals of markets, and the evolutionary history of trade as expressing the natural human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.”

I have replied to the two most common objections to evolutionary ethics.  One objection is that evolutionary moral psychology is ultimately nihilistic in promoting the idea that morality is a fictional creation of the human mind that does not conform to any eternal reality of moral facts inscribed in the cosmic order of the world.  My response to this objection has been to argue that while an evolutionary sentimentalist morality is created by the human mind, that does not make morality arbitrary or fictional.  The human morality of the natural moral sentiments is real:  although it is not an eternal reality, it is an enduring reality that will endure for as long as our evolved human nature endures. 

The second objection is that evolutionary ethics commits the “naturalistic fallacy” by assuming that moral values can be inferred from natural facts.  My reply has been to argue that there is no fallacy in understanding moral judgments to be factual judgments about the species-typical pattern of moral sentiments in specified circumstances:  it is natural for human beings that certain moral feelings of approbation or disapprobation tend to be aroused by certain facts, and the experience of such feelings is the only ground for our moral judgments.

          From all of this, we can see that a Darwinian liberal theory of the Smithian moral sentiments offers us one way of understanding our human place in nature.  We are neither mindless machines nor disembodied spirits.  We are animals.  As animals, shaped by our natural evolutionary history as primates, we display the animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness.  We move to satisfy our desires in the light of our awareness of the world.  We are a unique species of animal, but our distinctively human traits—such as symbolic speech, practical deliberation, and conceptual thought—are emergent elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals.  Our powers for habituation and learning allow us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are emergent extensions of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals.  So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.  We have not been thrown into nature from some place far away.  We come from nature.  It is our home.

Aristotelian Liberalism (5): Adam Smith's "Moral Sociology"

Since Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue for an Aristotelian defense of liberalism, one might expect that they would find common ground with Adam Smith, who promoted liberalism and developed a theory of the moral sentiments that he thought largely coincided with Aristotle's moral theory.

Contrary to this expectation, Rasmussen and Den Uyl criticize Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. They write:

". . . Although this work appears to offer a moral theory, that theory is marred by an insoluble dilemma: the 'impartial spectator' who makes the final judgment about moral propriety must either make that judgment on the basis of his sentiment or not. If so, what justifies that sentiment over the others being observed in the actions considered? If not, a standard other than sentiment is being used, which seems disallowed by the theory itself and would require its own justification. Nevertheless, it is possible to ignore this problem and treat this work as expressing a theory of moral sociology. If we do this, the actions of the impartial spectator can be considered as descriptive of moral attitudes rather than justificatory, and the work as a whole could be regarded as an account of how moral attitudes and norms are generated in a free society.

". . . the free society undoubtedly allows for the free-flowing of the passions, or sentiments. Assuming that people are guided more by their passions than anything else, it is plausible to conclude that the most common personality of such a society would reflect the most common passions. . . .

". . . Smith's TMS was predictive of moral discussion in a free society. . . . We can, for example, criticize wealth by pointing to the presence of the poor and imagining ourselves in their place. Indeed, the anticapitalist literature is filled with images appealing to sentiments: 'sweatshops,' 'greed,' 'selfishness,' 'exploitation,' 'price-gouging,' and numerous others could be cited. And political battles are generally won or lost today on the basis of how appealing or evocative the issue in question can be made to the general public. In essence, moral discourse has resulted in what Smith describes in his opening chapters: simply putting oneself in another's place and reflecting upon one's feelings. Feelings are decisive; rational analysis serves to clarify, not justify, the sentiments" (LAN, 214-15).

Rasmussen and Den Uyl worry that although Smith's "correspondence of sentiment" is true sociologically, it will not provide normative stability in a pluralistic society, because it will lead to "the abandonment of an objective theory of value" (LAN, 216-17). They suggest that the only escape from this outcome is to see the truth in Plato's Allegory of the Cave--"the self-conceptions and values of a culture are largely dependent upon the beliefs of the intellectual class." Philosophers have a duty to shape popular culture to conform to their rational understanding of the truth. Philosophers must take responsibility for shaping the souls of their fellow citizens (LAN, 218-29).

Rasmussen and Den Uyl write:

"We agree with Adam Smith that we are largely other-oriented from the beginning, or at least as much other-oriented as self-oriented. . . . our real problem is one of learning how to develop the self, and what that means is that we need to figure out how to bring the other into the self--that is, finding ways to integrate our other-orientation into our own nexus. The Smithian position of developed sentiment is not a solution. We never integrate others into ourselves by sentiment even if they 'correspond.' This is why Smith must employ the device of the 'impartial spectator' as a deus ex machina of ethical integration to get it to work. In our view, the integration can only come through practical reason or practical wisdom of the agent as applied to the agent's own project of eudaimonistic flourishing" (NOL, 316-17).

But I would say that what Rasmussen and Den Uyl suggest in this last sentence--integrating others into ourselves through practical reasoning--is exactly what Smith suggests. Smith's "impartial spectator" is not totally disinterested. When Smith lays out "the order in which individuals are recommended by nature to our care and attention," he makes it clear that each individual is "first and principally recommended to his own care." With oneself at the center, one can move outward in an ever expanding circle to care for family members, friends, fellow-citizens, one's country, and even all of humanity. But that care and concern become weaker as one moves farther out (Theory of Moral Sentiments, Liberty Classics, 219-27). That's why Smith rejects Stoic cosmopolitanism as contrary to human nature. The "impartial spectator" moderates but does not deny our partiality for ourselves (TMS, 292-93).

This expansion of one's care for oneself to embrace care for others arises from our nature as social animals, and it requires a combination of reason and sentiment. Rasmussen and Den Uyl object to Smith's appeal to moral sentiments. But, oddly enough, they concede that Smith is accurately describing what happens in a free society governed by "the free flowing of the passions, or sentiments." Like Plato, they imply that philosophers can become purely rational beings, free from the passions or sentiments that move other human beings, and these purely rational philosophers have the duty to shape the souls of those less rational than they are. But doesn't this contradict what Rasmussen and Den Uyl say about the necessary union of reason and desire? Are philosophers purely rational beings, or are they moved by an erotic desire for intellectual understanding?

Smith's account of the moral sentiments arises from a rhetorical tradition of thought that began with Aristotle's Rhetoric, particularly Aristotle's study of the moral emotions in Book 2. Smith thought he was continuing the teaching of Aristotle and the other ancient philosophers who thought that each virtue was rooted in some "sentiment of the heart" (TMS, 271, 328). This same rhetorical moral psychology of the sentiments continues today in the Darwinian understanding of the moral emotions.

The appeal to moral emotions is inescapable. For example, Rasmussen and Den Uyl use the example of a starving man stealing food to illustate an "emergency situation." Here we might judge the starving man to be acting morally, even though he violates the moral property rights of those from whom he steals. In such a case, we must allow for the discretion of judges, who see that "rights of any kind do not apply" (LAN, 144-50). This is an example of "moral tragedy." But isn't this a case where we judge that the starving man has done no wrong, because his theft doesn't elicit any emotion of moral disapproval? Doesn't every assertion of a natural right make some claim upon our moral emotions?

The Darwinian Liberalism of Adam Smith and Edward Westermarck: Another Reply to Antti Lepisto

 Six years ago, Antti Lepisto published a paper criticizing my argument that Edward Westermarck's ethics supported what I called Darwinian conservatism (Lepisto 2017).  At that time, I wrote a reply.  Recently, while writing my paper on "The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Sociobiological Morality of Liberalism," in which I identify Westermarck as the "second wave," I have reread Lepisto's paper; and I decided I should write a second reply.

As I have often said, what I call Darwin conservatism is a very liberal conservatism, because it combines both the Smithian liberal and Burkean traditionalist strands of conservative political thought in affirming the common element of both--the idea of spontaneous order.  Classical liberals follow Smith in stressing the spontaneous order of morality and markets, while traditionalists stress the spontaneous order of customary practices.  Both sides see spontaneous order as the only way in which social order can be achieved in a manner that is compatible with individual liberty.  A Darwinian science explains how that spontaneous order of social life could have emerged through biological and cultural evolution.  Westermarck develops that Darwinian science of social order in his moral theory as confirming Smith's theory of moral sentiments.

The new Darwinian social science supports 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," which allows "every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (WN, 664, 687).  

That the evolution of unintended order is the unifying theme of all of Smith's writing has been well stated by James 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.

Westermarck's intellectual project--particularly, in The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906)--was to provide an empirical test of this Smithian theory of morality as a spontaneous order emerging from the evolution of the moral sentiments.  Westermarck began one of his earliest writings in this way: "That the various predicates of moral judgments are ultimately based on emotions of either indignation or approval seems to me to be a fact which ethical intellectualists have in vain attempted to deny."  That one sentence states the main idea of Westermarck's account of morality.  After thus stating this idea, he immediately identified it as derived from Smith, and he indicated that he wanted to develop a Darwinian theory of morality that would confirm this idea: "A comprehensive study of the moral ideas of various nations and in various ages confirms the ingenious hypothesis set forth by Adam Smith, that resentment and gratitude belong to the root-principles of the moral consciousness--a circumstance all the more satisfactory to the student of psychical origins as anger towards an ill-doer and friendliness towards a well-doer are mental facts easily explicable as results of natural selection" (1900, 184-85).  

Otto Pipatti (2019) has provided a good account of the Smithian roots of Westermarck's moral theory. In one of Westermarck's unpublished lectures on Smith quoted by Pipatti, he said: "I recognize with gratitude that of all moral philosophers or moral psychologists there is none from whom I have learned anything like as much as from Adam Smith" (122).

Amazingly, Lepisto does not attempt to refute my claim that what we see here is Westermarck defending a Darwinian science of morality that will confirm Smith's liberal understanding of how moral order evolves spontaneously as an unintended order from the moral sentiments of evolved human nature.  Lepisto writes: "I will here leave open the question of whether one should call Westermarck a 'spontaneous order theorist' on the basis of his notion of moral norms as arising from emotions rather than from reason alone" (206).  But in doing that, he refuses to challenge my main point!

That Westermarck did indeed embrace Smith's "liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" is especially clear when he affirms the truth "as Adam Smith observes, that 'we may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing,' and that the man who barely refrains from violating the person or estate or reputation of his neighbours so far does justice to them" (ER, 131).  Smith calls this the "negative virtue" of justice that "only hinders us from hurting our neighbour."  This negative virtue of justice can be "extorted by force."  By contrast, the virtue of beneficence "is always free, it cannot be extorted by force, the mere want of it exposes to no punishment; because the mere want of beneficence tends to do no real positive evil."

Smith explains the emotional basis for this distinction between justice and beneficence: "Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only.  It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.  It prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done. . . . But the mere want of the beneficent virtues, though it may disappoint us of the good which might reasonably be expected, neither does, nor attempts to do, any mischief from which we can have occasion to defend ourselves" (TMS, 78-82).

This liberal principle of justice as a negative virtue that leaves people free from coercion as long as they do not harm others was restated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, and Westermarck agreed with this:

"Some degree of reflection should lead to the thought that antipathies are no sufficient ground for interfering with other individuals' liberty of action either by punishing them or subjecting them to moral censure.  Nobody has more vehemently denounced such interference than Stuart Mill.  He insisted on 'liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong'" (ER, 258-59).

For me, this is all part of Westermarck's Smithian and Darwinian liberalism.  But then Lepisto argues that Westermarck does not actually support three elements of my argument.

First, he denies my argument that Westermarck's Smithian and Darwinian moral theory of the moral sentiments conforms to what I have called "Darwinian natural right."  He says this cannot be so since Westermarck identified himself as a moral relativist.  

My argument, however, is that Darwinian morality is relative to the biological nature of the human species, in that it is grounded in a moral anthropology, but not in a moral cosmology.  Contrary to the claims of philosophers like Immanuel Kant, morality cannot be rooted in any objective cosmic truth--a Cosmic Reason, Cosmic Nature, or Cosmic God.  But morality still has a species-specific truth in being grounded in the evolved moral psychology of the human species, and therefore morality is true for as long as the human species endures.  Here I agree with Westermarck in rejecting Kantian rationalism and embracing the moral sentimentalism of David Hume and Adam Smith as understood by a Darwinian science of human nature.

Second, Lepisto doubts that Westermarck supports my defense of human marriage and family life as rooted in evolved human nature, because Westermarck often took a "liberalizing" or reformist position on marriage and family life, as in his arguing for liberalizing marriage and family law to make divorce easier.  Westermarck was also one of the first people to argue for tolerating homosexuality.

One should note, however, that Lepisto agrees that "Arnhart and others are right to assert that Westermarck saw marriage and the family as rooted in biological instincts" (206).  If that is true, I have argued, then we can rely on those biological instincts to preserve heterosexual marriage and parental care while liberalizing the marriage laws to allow for divorce, same-sex marriage, and homosexual adoption of children.  We might even privatize marriage as a purely contractual relationship without any governmental licensing of marriages.  We might also recognize, as Westermarck did, that animal homosexuality is natural, so that it is natural for some human beings to be moved by homosexual desires that need not threaten heterosexual marriage.  (I have written about this here, here, here, and here.)

Third, Lepisto says that "Westermarck did not draw similar libertarian-leaning, pro-civil society, and antigovernmental political conclusions from his moral theory," as I have (206-207).  In particular, Lepisto doubts that Westermarck would have agreed with the libertarian questioning of the modern welfare state.

In assuming that I totally reject the modern welfare state, Lepisto is silent about what I have written about "Nordic Social Democracy as the Capitalist Welfare State."  There I argue that a Smithian liberal could support the sort of capitalist welfare states that one sees in the Nordic social democracies and elsewhere.  As measured by various rankings of "human freedom," these countries have the highest levels of individual liberty in the world, because their limited welfare-state policies leave plenty of room for the liberal spontaneous orders of morality and markets (Arnhart 2016, 420-24).

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2016. Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Lepisto, Antti. 2017. "Darwinian Conservatives and Westermarck's Ethics: A Political Dimension of the Late Twentieth-Century Westermarckian Renaissance." In Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, and Camilla Kronqvist, eds., Evolution, Human Behavior, and Morality, 194-208.  London: Routledge.

Otteson, James. 2002. Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pipatti, Otto. 2019. Morality Made Visible: Edward Westermarck's Moral and Social Theory. London: Routledge.

Smith, Adam. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Smith, Adam. 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Westermarck, Edward. 1900. "Remarks on the Predicates of Moral Judgments." Mind 34: 184-204.

Westermarck, Edward. 1906. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan.

Westermarck, Edward. 1932. Ethical Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company.

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.

Bourgeois Virtues?

Deirdre McCloskey tells the story of preparing for a lecture at Princeton University.  An office secretary at Princeton called her to get the title for the lecture.  McCloskey said: "The Bourgeois Virtues."  After a long pause on the telephone, the secretary laughed.  Then she asked: "Isn't that an oxymoron?"

McCloskey has now completed a trilogy of big books to answer that question.  No, it's not an oxymoron, she explains.  On the contrary, the idea that the bourgeois life--the commercial life of buying and selling--can be a virtuous life is the idea that caused the world in which most of us live today: the richest, healthiest, freest, and most populous world that human beings have ever experienced in their 200,000 years of evolutionary history. 

Making deals--buying low and selling high--has always been part of human life.  Even our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors engaged in long-distance trading networks.  So there have always been bourgeois people living a life devoted to trading.  But such a life was generally scorned as morally corrupting.  Not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (first in the Dutch Republic and then in Great Britain), McCloskey claims, did a few philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith argue that such a bourgeois life could be admirable, even virtuous.  And it was the spread of that idea that brought the Bourgeois Era in which we now live.

So what are the bourgeois virtues?  McCloskey's answer is not clear.

Sometimes she says that the bourgeois virtues embrace all of the traditional seven virtues: four profane pagan virtues (prudence, temperance, courage, and justice) and three sacred Christian virtues (faith, hope, and charity).  But she also says that the bourgeois virtues are "commercial versions" of the seven virtues or "merely the seven virtues exercised in a commercial society" (BE, xxi; BV, 508).  She distinguishes the "bourgeois/mercantile" virtues from the "aristocratic/patrician" and "peasant/plebeian" virtues (BE, 229).  But she says the differences are "mere verbal shading" (BV, 350).  They differ as Achilles (aristocratic/patrician) differs from St. Francis (peasant/plebeian) and Benjamin Franklin (bourgeois/mercantile).  In speaking of "a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values" (BE, 410), McCloskey does seem to say that bourgeois virtues are separated from aristocratic and Christian virtues.  But when she says "the seven principal virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois" (BE, 410), she seems to say that the bourgeois virtues really do include the aristocratic and Christian virtues.

The virtues of Benjamin Franklin seem very different from those of Achilles and St. Francis.  McCloskey admits that Franklin's "theorizing" about virtue includes only the virtue of prudence, and excludes all of the other virtues (BE, 214-15).  But when it is not balanced by the other virtues, the virtue of prudence becomes the vice of greed (BE, 644).  Nevertheless, McCloskey insists, Franklin's behavior as distinguishing from his theory shows more than just greed.  This is a strange argument for McCloskey, however, since she stresses the revaluation of bourgeois life as a rhetorical activity.

Adam Smith seems to be a better model than Franklin for McCloskey, because Smith was a rhetorical theorist of bourgeois ethics, she claims.  But even so, it's not clear that Smith fully supports McCloskey's argument.  Rather than embracing all seven of the traditional virtues as bourgeois virtues, McCloskey admits, Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments includes only four and a half virtues--prudence, temperance, courage, justice, and benevolence (a part of the Christian virtue of love) (BE, 191).  And thus, Smith "sidesteps" the Christian virtues.  She thinks Smith was mistaken to sidestep Christian virtues for fear of endorsing intolerant religious fanaticism (BE, 196-98).  A bourgeois life can be, and should be, open to the transcendent.  But, then, McCloskey often scorns those like Mother Theresa, who were excessively devoted to the transcendent to the point of thinking that "all that mattered, after all, was the soul's path to eternal life" (BE, 537-38).

Early in Bourgeois Equality, McCloskey devotes four chapters to Adam Smith, arguing that Smith "exhibits bourgeois theory at its ethical best" (172-209).  Only much later in the book, does she mention (in only one paragraph) that The Theory of Moral Sentiment has a long chapter (I.3.3) in which Smith rails against admiring the rich.  She does not mention that Smith identifies this admiration of the rich as the "corruption of our moral sentiments."  In her one-paragraph comment on this chapter, McCloskey observes: "That the Waltons are rich does not make them admirable people, despite the undoubted commercial savvy of Sam and his brother Jim" (BE, 564).  Doesn't this contradict McCloskey's claim that the rhetoric of the bourgeois virtues promotes "the admiration for and acceptance of trade-tested betterment" (BE, 278)?  If the success of Walmart shows "trade-tested betterment," then why doesn't this show the Waltons to be "admirable people"?  Must we say that the economic success of bourgeois businesspeople like the Waltons does not by itself show their moral success?

In his Wealth of Nations, Smith never identifies businesspeople as virtuous.  In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith refers to "virtue" or the "virtues" hundreds of times.  But while the Wealth of Nations is more than twice as long as The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Wealth of Nations refers only once to "virtues," and it's a lament that the "laboring poor" in a commercial society suffer a decline "in intellectual, social, and martial virtues" (WN, Liberty Fund, 782).

McCloskey says that the "main point" of her three books on the bourgeois virtues is "that markets are embedded"--that is to say, that economic life is embedded in moral life (BE, 554).  So should we say that the free markets of Smith's Wealth of Nations are embedded in the moral communities of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, although he does not explicitly say that?

The one fundamental weakness in McCloskey's argument that the Bourgeois Revaluation (beginning in the 18th century) led to a recognition of the bourgeois virtues is that she cannot cite any explicit statement in Smith (or anyone else) that the commercial life of money-making promotes the bourgeois virtues, which correspond to the four pagan virtues and the three Christian virtues.  She can point to Smith's account in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, justice, and benevolence.  But she cannot find any statement by Smith that these are the bourgeois virtues of a commercial society.

It would seem that McCloskey is saying that the commercial activity of a bourgeois life is neither inherently vicious nor inherently virtuous.  Rather, commercial activity can be judged as vicious or virtuous only insofar as it is embedded in "non-commercial realms" (BE, 559).  In a liberal bourgeois regime, we all live in at least four different realms of life (BE, 554).  We live in a marketplace governed by market prices and mutually beneficial exchanges.  We live in a family, which is a natural association where children are raised, and where we take care of one another in the household.  We live in a political community where the government exercises a monopoly of the legitimate use of violent coercion.  And we live in a civil society of voluntary associations, including neighborhoods, schools, religious communities, clubs, ethnic groups, mutual aid societies, and friendships.  Different virtues are appropriate for different realms: "Prudence is indeed . . . the central virtue of the agora, as courage is of the polis, and love is of the oikos" (BE, 558).

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.