Adam Smith and ‘the most sacred rules of justice’

Abstract

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith provides detailed and well-informed descriptions of the way people interact, of the way they emotionally respond to each other and make judgments about feelings and actions as morally good or bad. Scholars agree that his purposes include at least the following two: First, he wants to provide evidence for his claim that humans’ natural dispositions include not only self-love or selfishness but also ‘sympathy’, a disposition to emotionally care for each other which plays a key role in a person’s moral development. And second, his study of the dynamics of social interaction aims at explaining the way in which, through processes of interaction driven both by self-love and sympathy, people can, as individuals, acquire the capacity of selfcommand and moral conscience and, as members of a society, a state of mutual approval and respectful co-citizenship in accordance with moral standards. Self-command and moral conscience are, according to Smith, the characteristic features of the free and responsible moral agent. Respectful interaction in accordance with moral standards allows people to achieve a state of social harmony in which they still enjoy a great degree of individual liberty, a state which, according to Smith, is a condition for a happy life. That people have by nature certain emotional dispositions in common nei-ther implies that the societies in which they actually live are all the same, nor does it imply that all those societies are the same in which the conditions for a happy life are fulfilled to a high degree. Smith was fully aware of the fact that moral norms, understood as the non-conventional standards of propriety adapted by the members of a particular society, are subject to geographical and historical changes. But this does not mean that his project in TMS was exclusively sociological and psychological in kind, or that he only wanted to explain how different cultures (and, in particular, different moral cultures) come into existence even though all humans are intrinsically the same.1 There is evidence enough that Smith’s ambitions reached beyond social science, that he had a third purpose which was philosophical, namely normative in kind, that he wanted to explore what was morally right and wrong from a pancultural or cosmopolitan point of view, or rather: from the point of view ofhuman nature as it prevails across all cultural differences. Smith’s theory of sympathy, of the impartial spectator, his analysis of the morally good in terms of proper sympathetic feelings, judgments and actions, his account of moral conscience, as well as his description of the virtuous man, do indeed support a normative reading of the TMS.2 But what was Smith’s view of morality? In this paper, I shall focus on Smith’s third purpose, suggesting a newanswer to this question. I shall try and defend the claim that Smith argues for there being some moral rules the authority of which is absolute, namely ‘the most sacred rules of justice’ (TMS II.ii.2.1, p. 84),3 and that his argument is convincing. A rule prescribing how to act in a certain kind of way (in accordance with a certain norm) has absolute authority if all people of all times and cultures have an obligation to follow it and if this obligation is independent of any factual authority this rule might have, that is, if this obligation is independent of whether or not people in a particular social environment actually act in accordance with this rule (and the norm underlying it) or not. If the members of a society did not act in accordance with the rules of justice, they could never achieve any consensus on standards of proper behaviour that could be considered as having more than factual, namely justified or moral authority. The focus of my argument will be Smith’s theory of the nature, function, origin and authority of the ‘sacred rules of justice’.