O miserable minds of men! O hearts that cannot see!
Beset by such great dangers and in such obscurity
You spend your lot of life! Don’t you know it’s plain
That all your nature yelps for is a body free from pain,
And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care?
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 2, lines 1–5
Soon a far more subversive thought evolved from the followers of Lucretius and Newton. What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along? In 1689, John Locke argued for religious tolerance – though not for atheists or Catholics – and brought a storm of protest down upon his head from those who saw government enforcement of religious orthodoxy as the only thing that prevented society from descending into chaos. But the idea of spontaneous morality did not die out, and some time later David Hume and then Adam Smith began to dust it off and show it to the world: morality as a spontaneous phenomenon. Hume realised that it was good for society if people were nice to each other, so he thought that rational calculation, rather than moral instruction, lay behind social cohesion. Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.
Quite how a shy, awkward, unmarried professor from Kirkcaldy who lived with his mother and ended his life as a customs inspector came to have such piercing insights into human nature is one of history’s great mysteries. But Adam Smith was lucky in his friends. Being taught by the brilliant Irish lecturer Francis Hutcheson, talking regularly with David Hume, and reading Denis Diderot’s new Encyclopédie, with its relentless interest in bottom–up explanations, gave him plenty with which to get started. At Balliol College, Oxford, he found the lecturers ‘had altogether given up even the pretence of teaching’, but the library was ‘marvellous’. Teaching in Glasgow gave him experience of merchants in a thriving trading port and ‘a feudal, Calvinist world dissolving into a commercial, capitalist one’. Glasgow had seen explosive growth thanks to increasing trade with the New World in the eighteenth century, and was fizzing with entrepreneurial energy. Later, floating around France as the tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch enabled Smith to meet d’Holbach and Voltaire, who thought him ‘an excellent man. We have nothing to compare with him.’ But that was after his first, penetrating book on human nature and the evolution of morality. Anyway, somehow this shy Scottish man stumbled upon the insights to explore two gigantic ideas that were far ahead of their time. Both concerned emergent, evolutionary phenomena: things that are the result of human action, but not the result of human design.
Adam Smith spent his life exploring and explaining such emergent phenomena, beginning with language and morality, moving on to markets and the economy, ending with the law, though he never published his planned book on jurisprudence. Smith began lecturing on moral philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1750s, and in 1759 he put together his lectures as a book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Today it seems nothing remarkable: a dense and verbose eighteenth-century ramble through ideas about ethics. It is not a rattling read. But in its time it was surely one of the most subversive books ever written. Remember that morality was something that you had to be taught, and that without Jesus telling us what to teach, could not even exist. To try to raise a child without moral teaching and expect him to behave well was like raising him without Latin and expecting him to recite Virgil. Adam Smith begged to differ. He thought that morality owed little to teaching and nothing to reason, but evolved by a sort of reciprocal exchange within each person’s mind as he or she grew from childhood, and within society. Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.
As the Adam Smith scholar James Otteson has observed, Smith, who wrote a history of astronomy early in his career, saw himself as following explicitly in Newton’s footsteps, both by looking for regularities in natural phenomena and by employing the parsimony principle of using as simple an explanation as possible. He praised Newton in his history of astronomy for the fact that he ‘discovered that he could join together the movement of the planets by so familiar a principle of connection’. Smith was also part of a Scottish tradition that sought cause and effect in the history of a topic: instead of asking what is the perfect Platonic ideal of a moral system, ask rather how it came about.
It was exactly this modus operandi that Smith brought to moral philosophy. He wanted to understand where morality came from, and to explain it simply. As so often with Adam Smith, he deftly avoided the pitfalls into which later generations would fall. He saw straight through the nature-versus-nurture debate and came up with a nature-via-nurture explanation that was far ahead of its time. He starts The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a simple observation: we all enjoy making other people happy.
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, but the pleasure of seeing it.
And we all desire what he calls mutual sympathy of sentiments: ‘Nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast.’ Yet the childless Smith observed that a child does not have a sense of morality, and has to find out the hard way that he or she is not the centre of the universe. Gradually, by trial and error, a child discovers what behaviour leads to mutual sympathy of sentiments, and therefore can make him or her happy by making others happy. It is through everybody accommodating their desires to those of others that a system of shared morality arises, according to Smith. An invisible hand (the phrase first appears in Smith’s lectures on astronomy, then here in Moral Sentiments and once more in The Wealth of Nations) guides us towards a common moral code. Otteson explains that the hand is invisible, because people are not setting out to create a shared system of morality; they aim only to achieve mutual sympathy now with the people they are dealing with. The parallel with Smith’s later explanation of the market is clear to see: both are phenomena that emerge from individual actions, but not from deliberate design.
Smith’s most famous innovation in moral philosophy is the ‘impartial spectator’, who we imagine to be watching over us when we are required to be moral. In other words, just as we learn to be moral by judging others’ reactions to our actions, so we can imagine those reactions by positing a neutral observer who embodies our conscience. What would a disinterested observer, who knows all the facts, think of our conduct? We get pleasure from doing what he recommends, and guilt from not doing so. Voltaire put it pithily: ‘The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.’
How morality emerges
There is, note, no need for God in this philosophy. As a teacher of Natural Theology among other courses, Smith was no declared atheist, but occasionally he strays dangerously close to Lucretian scepticism. It is hardly surprising that he at least paid lip service to God, because three of his predecessors at Glasgow University, including Hutcheson, had been charged with heresy for not sticking to Calvinist orthodoxy. The mullahs of the day were vigilant. There remains one tantalising anecdote from a student, a disapproving John Ramsay, that Smith ‘petitioned the Senatus … to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with a prayer’, and, when refused, that his lectures led his students to ‘draw an unwarranted conclusion, viz. that the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered in the light of nature without any special revelation’. The Adam Smith scholar Gavin Kennedy points out that in the sixth edition (1789) of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published after his devout mother died, Smith excised or changed
