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 many religious references. He may have been a closet atheist, but he might also have been a theist, not taking Christianity literally, but assuming that some kind of god implanted benevolence in the human breast.
Morality, in Smith’s view, is a spontaneous phenomenon, in the sense that people decide their own moral codes by seeking mutual sympathy of sentiments in society, and moralists then observe and record these conventions and teach them back to people as top–down instructions. Smith is essentially saying that the priest who tells you how to behave is basing his moral code on observations of what moral people actually do.
There is a good parallel with teachers of grammar, who do little more than codify the patterns they see in everyday speech and tell them back to us as rules. Only occasionally, as with split infinitives, do their rules go counter to what good writers do. Of course, it is possible for a priest to invent and promote a new rule of morality, just as it is possible for a language maven to invent and promote a new rule of grammar or syntax, but it is remarkably rare. In both cases, what happens is that usage changes and the teachers gradually go along with it, sometimes pretending to be the authors.
So, for example, in my lifetime, disapproval of homosexuality has become ever more morally unacceptable in the West, while disapproval of paedophilia has become ever more morally mandatory. Male celebrities who broke the rules with under-age girls long ago and thought little of it now find themselves in court and in disgrace; while others who broke the (then) rules with adult men long ago and risked disgrace can now openly speak of their love. Don’t get me wrong: I approve of both these trends – but that’s not my point. My point is that the changes did not come about because some moral leader or committee ordained them, at least not mainly, let alone that some biblical instruction to make the changes came to light. Rather, the moral negotiation among ordinary people gradually changed the common views in society, with moral teachers reflecting the changes along the way. Morality, quite literally, evolved. In just the same way, words like ‘enormity’ and ‘prevaricate’ have changed their meaning in my lifetime, though no committee met to consider an alteration in the meaning of the words, and there is very little the grammarians can do to prevent it. (Indeed, grammarians spend most of their time deploring linguistic innovation.) Otteson points out that Smith in his writing uses the word ‘brothers’ and ‘brethren’ interchangeably, with a slight preference for the latter. Today, however, the rules have changed, and you would only use ‘brethren’ for the plural of brothers if you were being affected,