Adam Smith in ContextMontes's

Abstract

Montes's interpretations of propriety and of self-command, the master Smithian virtue, led him to place Smith's ethics in the deontology camp with Immanuel Kant, clearly opposed to the utilitarians. This is an issue that is worth pursuing for two reasons. First, the relation between Smith and Kant has not been sufficiently explored in the secondary literature. Samuel Fleischacker (1991, 1996) has investigated the lines of influence from Smith to Kant. There is, for example, a striking mention of the impartial spectator in the form of “an impartial rational spectator” in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant [1785] 1997, 4:393, p. 7), yet it is impossible to tell exactly and to what extent Kant's reading of Smith contributed to the development of his own thought. Be that as it may, there is, nonetheless, a logical consistency between Smith's description of the operation of the conscience, as agents learn to construct the perspective of an ideal impartial spectator from which to accurately judge their own thoughts and actions on the one hand and the categorical imperative on the other. Smith's emphasis on impartiality in judging and Kant's emphasis on universality seem to be just different ways of getting at the transcendent nature of true moral character and action. In Smith, then, it is the virtue of self-command through which agents participate in the molding of their own character and stir themselves up for right action (as judged from this ideal perspective). As Montes argues, the spectator judges self-command in terms of the spectator's sense of propriety, not through an analysis of the merit or demerit of an action. It is a deontological argument, not a consequentialist one. When properly understood, self-command entails the development of a morally autonomous agent, similar to Kant's. Thus, Montes concludes:The philosophical meaning of propriety, underpinned by the virtue of self-command, and the role of the conscience introduced by the supposed impartial spectator, situates the sympathetic process within a philosophical tradition that seems closer to Kant than to utilitarianism. (p. 53)

Citation

Young, J.T. (2006), " Adam Smith in ContextMontes's", Samuels, W.J., Biddle, J.E. and Emmett, R.B. (Ed.) Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 24 Part 1), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 201-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-4154(06)24013-6