I spent some of my lockdown time reading one of the great, and one of the underappreciated, books of Western social philosophy, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). The choice is, I suppose, no accident. I also read Scott’s Waverly, and found myself putting shortbread biscuits in my weekly grocery cart. I suspect an underlying grieving over the prospects of my getting back to Scotland anytime soon. Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, twenty miles or so from St Andrews, and he is buried in Canongate Kirkyard, just down the street from Holyrood Palace at the bottom of Calton Hill on one of my regular jogging routes in Edinburgh. The relative temperatures in St Andrews (48F/9C) and Brownsville (93/34) may also have something to do with this.

This is, indeed, the same Adam Smith that wrote The Wealth of Nations, the most famous book of economics of all time. Smith is generally regarded today as the patron saint (if not the inventor) of pure, unbridled free market capitalism, a champion of individualism and selfishness. The first part of Smith’s modern public legacy is incomplete; the second is simply wrong. The Wealth of Nations was titled very deliberately. It was not about how to maximize individual prosperity at the expense of those less fortunate. It was about Smith’s theory that the free market was the best way to enhance the wealth of the commons – literally, the wealth of the nation. If a rich man wanted to spend his money on luxuries, so be it; the invisible hand of the market would determine the best price for the extravagance and working people would earn a living making it. It was a good thing, he thought, that the wealthy liked mansions. Not only was the architecture pleasing to all that saw it, the construction job employed many. It would have been a loss, Smith thought, if the wealthy woke up to the fact that the mansion was scarcely any more serviceable as a home than the cottage. And while he did believe in limited government, the two purposes of government he endorsed – promoting a living wage for all and constructing the necessary infrastructure for society to operate – were a far cry from the 21^st Century’s combination of laissez faire economics and egoistic ethics.

More importantly, The Wealth of Nations was the second part of a set, The Theory of Moral Sentiments being the first. Smith always intended them as a set and thought that The Theory of Moral Sentiments set the groundwork for the latter book. The first book continued a discussion of a theory started by fellow Scot Francis Hutcheson and continued by Smith’s friend and colleague David Hume, that humans have an innate moral sense that are as much like emotions as they are reason, that the most important moral sentiments are justice and benevolence, and that the faculty of sympathy is what connects citizens to each other in just and benevolent relationships. Justice comes from our ability to sympathize with the suffering of a victim; benevolence from the same ability to sympathize with those in trouble.

You could win a lot of bar bets at an economist convention, or flunk a lot of philosophy undergraduates, with this question:

Identify the author of this quote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.

1.  Gandhi
2. The Dalai Lama
3.  Seneca
4.  John Donne
5. None of the above.

The correct answer, of course, is E; it is Adam Smith, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. These were not, however, throwaway lines buried deep in the text. They are, in fact, the very first lines, from page one. Anyone that sees Smith as the prophet of greed must never have picked up TMS, because they would not have the excuse of quitting before the end.

Immanual Kant was apparently much impressed with and influenced by TMS. However, Smith’s philosophy, and that of the Scottish Enlightenment in general, takes a different tack what turned out to be Kant’s greatest legacy for the modern world: the idea that morality consists in mutual agreement on a rationally-derived set of rules by which to govern our conduct. Smith thought that our ability to form moral sentiments, based on our sympathetic instincts, was innate, although it clearly needed to be exercised and developed. He thought it was universal, not culturally-bound. Thus, for instance, the English colonizers and the Indian colonized could make moral judgments about each other – which, in Smith’s mind, usually reflected poorly on the English. Finally, because the ability to form moral sentiments was both innate and universal, central to correct behavior is the need for approbation of others. We conduct ourselves in a manner that will please others.

Current events make us doubt whether Smith’s view of morality as a sentiment rather than a set of rules was anything other than a fantasy. Certainly, the effectiveness of approbation as a curb on moral excess seems to be in question. In this country we have leaders, including our supreme leader, that invite rather than avoid public scorn. Likewise, Smith’s idea that moral sentiments are universal rather than local is being put to the test in a way we have not seen for generations. In a way I do not recall, it is in doubt whether persons of different races and backgrounds can possibly understand each other; there seems no doubt at the moment that they often do not. The assumption that they can have a common ground of understanding is central to the whole concept of multicultural society that we profess to aspire to, even if we fail to achieve. And we need that concept now more than ever. The word pandemic comes from the Greek for all (pan) and people (demic). A pandemic unites us, whether we like it or not.

That is, of course, assuming that we regard the populations most grievously impacted by the disease – in this country, primarily poor, urban, and ethnically in the minority – as people, or more accurately, as persons. John Locke said that person is a “forensic concept,” distinct from “human being.” By forensic I think he meant some combination of legal, ethical, and religious. Persons have rights and interest and responsibility, and a person can actually change over time. In our metric-obsessed time, persons are all too often reduced to statistics. Persons are not statistics. Smith supposes that all persons can, and should, govern our lives based on sentiments of mutual sympathy; he might even say that this capacity is central to the idea of personhood. That idea is under severe attack today. Sympathy in some quarters is regarded as a weakness, not a strength, and infection that can be contained to urban ghettos seems less troubling than the risk of an economic recession.

Nevertheless, we should hope that Smith was right on this last point. If there is anything we find ourselves in need of right now, it is a healthy dose of compassion for others. One of the great strengths of Smith’s philosophy is its capacity to make complex judgments taking into account multiple points of view. Smith compared the relationship between justice and the other virtues to the difference between grammar and writing elegance. Grammar, like justice, is a matter of rules. But just as one can write grammatically but woodenly, ineffectively, one can be strictly just and yet not morally admirable. So,

Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbor. The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbors, has certainly very little positive merit. He fulfills, however, all the rules of which is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing. (TMS, 99).

Firehoses and tear gas are not capable of making fine moral distinctions, and deploring their use on crowds from the safety of our own homes, or in right-thinking phone chats, is justice of a very thin sort.

Benevolence. Sympathy. Universality. Equity. While we are sorely in need of them, right now, as Christians we immediately notice that they are at the heart of Christian confession. However, for sixty years at least, Christians have been told that their faith is purely a private affair, to be cordoned off from any discussion of public matters. To our shame, Christians have largely acquiesced in that, to the point that, as Stanley Hauerwas is so fond of reminding us, people go around saying something like “Well, I think Jesus was the Son of God, but that’s just my opinion.” On the other hand, Adam Smith emphasizes repeatedly the importance of the idea that there is a natural sense of duty that is not simply a contractually-assumed or politically-determined standard, that has its basis in fundamental justice (I avoid the term natural law, which in its technical sense is not something Smith believed in) and is subject to divine enforcement in the hereafter. Some have accused Smith, who may have been as much Deist as Christian, of thinking the latter a sort of convenient fiction, but even if there were true, and he did come from sturdy Presbyterian stock, he certainly found it a necessary one.

Perhaps what we are seeing is the playing-out of the idea that private morality is irrelevant to public life.  Christians, told to keep their religion to themselves and restricted to Sunday morning, have pretty much acquiesced. The cost to us of that idea have been incalculable. For most of our history, the great actors in social justice have been religious: William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu. Today, the field having been cleared, we have a president that bullies his way to the steps of a church building across the street from the White House, for a photo opportunity holding a Bible. Upside down. If you can’t find a message from God in that one, you’re just not listening. The president has indeed turned Scripture on its head.

Robert Burns was greatly influenced by The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a fact that gives me great pleasure, because it puts paid to two well-accepted bits of critical nonsense: that Smith was a callous, unfeeling champion of the rich, and that Burns was an unlettered farmer. The ending of “To a Louse” comes out of TMS almost verbatim:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us!

(The emphasis is in the original.) Giants walked the earth then. Perhaps they will again. But now, not so much.