New Essays on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy

11. “A Delicate and an Accurate Pencil”: Adam Smith, Description, and Philosophy as Moral Pedagogy

Colin Heydt 211 “A Delicate and an Accurate Pencil”: Adam Smith, Description, and Philosophy as Moral Pedagogy Colin Heydt I. INTRODUCTION In the mid-18th century, Scottish aristocrats, intellectuals, and members of the professional classes were focused on removing remnants of their nation’s cultural, intellectual, moral, and economic backwardness. These elites thought of themselves, as Phillipson puts it, “as agents of improvement who would modernise their province by means of energetic, intelligent and publicspirited leadership and draw it from a state of rudeness to one of cosmopolitan refinement” (“Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment”, 127).1 One question raised by the Scottish elite’s emphasis on improvement is what role they took moral philosophy in particular to play. It is not a question that has gone unnoticed by commentators. Recent years have seen a variety of authors examining Scottish moral philosophy through the lens of “practical ethics”.2 Phillipson, Sher, Haakonssen, and Griswold, among others, have emphasized the ways in which Scots like Smith, Reid, Ferguson, and Stewart should be interpreted as practical ethicists striving to improve their students, parishioners, and readers.3 This paper picks up on this strand of interpretation in the Scottish Enlightenment and analyzes Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in order to understand how the work functions as moral pedagogy. The idea that some kinds of philosophical prose have the capacity to bring about ethical improvement is at the heart of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, though Smith draws a distinction between the help we can expect from works in jurisprudence and that which we can expect from works in 1 Bibliographic information for all references can be found in the Select Bibliography at the end of this essay. 2 Dugald Stewart claims that the “practical doctrines of morality comprehend all those rules of conduct which profess to point out the proper ends of human pursuit and the most effectual means of attaining them; to which we may add all those literary compositions, whatever be their particular form, which have for their aim to fortify and animate our good dispositions, by delineations of the beauty, of the dignity, or of the utility of Virtue” (in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 278). 3 A sample of these works includes Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civic Moralist”; Sher, “Professors of Virtue”; Haakonssen, “Introduction” to Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics; and Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. 212 new essays on adam smith’s moral philosophy ethics.4 In jurisprudence, an author can provide precise and accurate rules that tell us exactly what we must do in order to be just in particular circumstances. In ethics, on the contrary, all we can hope for are “loose, vague, and indeterminate” rules for how to be, for example, benevolent or generous (TMS, VII.iv.1). The “ancient moralists” provide the best example of writing in ethics, Smith claims, because they have “contented themselves with describing in a general manner the different vices and virtues, and with pointing out the deformity and misery of the one disposition as well as the propriety and happiness of the other” (TMS, VII.iv.3). Their texts “present us with agreeable and lively pictures of manners” that have the capacity to improve the reader by motivating us to be virtuous and by helping “both to correct and to ascertain our natural sentiments with regard to the propriety of conduct”. In other words, the texts of ancient moralists both “inflame our natural love of virtue, and increase our abhorrence of vice” and foster more discerning “moral sentiments” that improve the propriety of our conduct (TMS, VII.iv.6). Since The Theory of Moral Sentiments is itself a work in ethics rather than jurisprudence, it is not surprising that Smith would follow the lead of the ancient moralists, whose descriptions of virtues and vices he applauds. In order to begin identifying and analyzing the therapeutic features of TMS, therefore, this essay scrutinizes Smith’s descriptions of a particular virtue and vice with an eye to what the text tries to communicate to, and elicit from, the reader. II. RESERVATIONS Though there is a general enthusiasm for speaking of the Scots as practical moralists, there are a number of reasons why we should be cautious in taking TMS as supporting that narrative. The first reason for caution is that Smith wrote a treatise. With some important exceptions, 18th-century treatises tended to have much less to do with moral improvement...