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C H A PT E R 5 Propriety in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. It is perhaps, the instinct upon which is founded the faculty of speech, the characteristical faculty of human nature.” This statement byAdam Smith appears not in his rhetoric lectures but near the end of his treatise on moral philosophy (7.4.25).Smith published TheTheory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, while he held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. During that period (1752–1763), he continued to deliver his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres,and clearly there was much fruitful interaction in Smith’s mind between his theorizing on both subjects.This chapter will explore in greater detail a point alluded to several times in the last chapter:namely,the centrality of Smith’s concept of rhetorical propriety to his ethical theory.Its aim is to show that for Smith,the nature of rhetorical action as he describes it in LRBL—its epistemological conditions, its situatedness in particularity and contingency, and its expression in a manner appropriately adapted to these conditions—made it the originary site of moral thinking,the medium through which humans first take cognizance of moral being. Charles L. Griswold has recently made a compatible argument about rhetoric and ethics in Smith’s thought, but it should clearly distinguished from the aim of this chapter. Griswold convincingly demonstrates how rhetorical surface features of TMS (he points to Smith’s use of a protreptic “we,” his hypothetical , literary, and dramatic examples, and the organization of the text) enact, reinforce, and harmonize with Smith’s method of moral inquiry (1999, 48–75). Smith’s rhetorical practice, that is, constitutes his ethical metatheory. “T Griswold claims his purpose is not to use the categories of discourse in LRBL to taxonomize or otherwise analyze TMS (1991,215).While my central argument is compatible with Griswold’s conclusions,my focus and approach are significantly different. Instead of drawing insight from the rhetorical features of TMS into Smith’s theory of ethical inquiry,this chapter does use the rhetorical theory of LRBL—not Smith’s categories of discourse,but his theory of rhetorical propriety—to gain insight not so much into Smith’s theory of ethical inquiry (though my reading will support Griswold’s) as into Smith’s theory of moral conscience itself.Indeed,a further aim of this chapter will be to take the consequences of this reading of Smith’s moral philosophy as grounds for seeing TMS as having made a significant contribution to rhetoric.Whereas Griswold is concerned with how rhetorical practice informs Smith’s view of the proper method to be taken by moral philosophers,I will be primarily concerned with the way Smith implied and applied his own stated conception of rhetorical propriety in his account of the development of conscience in moral agents. To be sure, in Smith’s view there is an inevitable parallel between what moral philosophers should do as rhetoricians and how moral agents in fact rhetorically interact with one another.Thus, in a passage (already quoted in the previous chapter) that is key to understanding Smith’s rationale for approaching ethical theory (and metatheory) through rhetoric, Smith compares the rule of justice to the rules of grammar;the rules of the other virtues he likens to the rules of composition.The former are “precise, accurate, and indispensable”; the latter are “loose, vague and indeterminate” and present a goal to be reached for more than a certain means of attaining it. One can learn to write grammatically by observing rules,but this will not lead to“elegance or sublimity”of writing.Thus,ethics and rhetoric share a fundamentally situational problem:the rules of action beyond what justice requires,like the rules of composition beyond grammar, help us not by telling us what to do in all circumstances, but by enabling us “to correct and ascertain, in several respects,the imperfect ideas which we might otherwise have entertained of those virtues” (3.6.11). Ultimately, however, mere rules, as Smith had also indicated in LRBL, will not accommodate us “to all the different shades and gradations of circumstance, character, and situation, to differences and distinctions which, though not imperceptible, are, by their nicety and delicacy, often altogether undefinable” (6.2.1.22). Only through the mechanism of the impartial...

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