July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Commerce attaches [men] one to another through mutual utility. Through commerce the moral and physical passions are superseded by interest. . . . Commerce has a special character which distinguishes it from all other professions. It affects the feelings of men so strongly that it makes him who was proud and haughty suddenly turn supple, bending and serviceable. Through commerce, man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both talk and action. Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgment on the part of present and future acquaintances; he would not dare make a spectacle of himself for fear of damaging his credit standing and thus society may well avoid a scandal which it might otherwise have to deplore.

Ricard, DDDD, quoted in Hirschman, 1982, p. 146 check page

The life of a merchant according to Smith is of course social and therefore—in view of Smith’s highly social theory of ethics—ethical. Smith according to Christopher Berry (1992) put great emphasis on the need to cultivate sympathy with strangers (this, after all, is Sam’s point about “it is not from the ….”). Berry summarizes Smith this way: “The ubiquity of strangers in a commercial society will have the effect of strengthening the character by making habitual the need to moderate one’s emotions. A stranger is more like the impartial spectator. This spectator corrects ‘the natural misrepresentations of self-love’”(citing TMS, 147, 153-154, 137). So: a merchant or customer must enter the mind of the other. Smith’s argument here is similar to his early point about the difficulty of conveying indignation. “Smith can be interpreted as associating the ideal of tranquility with the modern world of commercial interdependence and not with the miserably impoverished world [admired by stoics ancient and modern] of self-sufficiency.”²²⁶

And down to a modern statement of the case by the economist Frank Knight 1934 (p. 317f):

There seems to be no room for doubt that commercialism, while it lasted [he was writing when the future of commerce seemed dark], made for tolerance and humanity, and to a significant extent practiced as well as preached the doctrine of `live and let live.’ It encouraged friendliness and good humor, and the sense of a basic human equality, among men of divergent rank and station. This was surely true to a degree far beyond anything ever seen in any other type of culture. And this was in addition to its incomparable multiplication of the means necessary to a decent existence and they even more remarkable diffusion of these means among the masses

There are two versions of doux commerce, and the second is the most important. The first is that about “damaging his credit standing,” that is, doing well by doing good. A life in commerce even if you do not have an ounce of any virtue other than prudence will induce you---“give you the incentives,” say the modern economists and their fellow travelers with a knowing smile---to behave yourself. Being known to be nasty is bad for business---unless you are a defense attorney or a hired soldier for Blackwater Security, Inc. It is the sort of ethics taught in many courses in business ethics in American business schools, especially if the teacher has in fact no knowledge of ethical thought. Honesty is the best policy. The trouble with the first version as a historical hypothesis is that it has always been true, and operates entirely independently of the rhetoric of a commercial society. That is, it is equally true of the Bushmen of a Kalahari as it is of bond traders on Wall Street. If honesty is the best policy (it isn’t, no always), why did capitalism not develop in Namibia? So it doesn’t help us much in explaining how society changed to make bond traders more common than bushmen.

The second version of doux commerce weaves in and out of the 18^th-century sources, being very prominent for example in Smith. It is that you do good, and have a good life, by being. . . good---and that having a regular job, meeting people in the marketplace, having to cooperate with suppliers, staying up late to devise a new inventory system, watching a steam engine closely to figure out how to make the pressure release automatic, taking care over the formulation of a contract for shipments of coffee from Batavia, dealing with the personal problems of ones apprentices, traveling to Surat or to Cairo, and the other activities of a business civilization are not in themselves corrupting; rather the contrary. Too much “structuring of incentives” makes people into serfs, not ethical beings. The philosopher William Hausman makes the point, with Philip Pettit:

a system with too few possibilities for free-riding can undermine public-spiritedness and moral commitments as well. Workers who have to punch a time clock may be more likely to leave when they have put in their eight hours than workers who are trusted to fulfill their responsibilities. People can become what they are assumed to be, and with too much regulation people may not be able to make trust-inducing overtures to one another.

Hausman 1998 p. 75 (he refers Pettit 1995, p. 225).

With the right balance of autonomy and incentives, virtue becomes in a commercial society a commonplace. Ah, doux commerce!

A different, classical republican view is that true virtue is extraordinary. It is Machiavelli’s view, and implies that only a few are fit to participate in politics. The republican pessimism of Italy merged in the 16^th century with Protestantism in the north to produce a theory of passions barely under control. The fallen state of humans required societies to conserve on love, not depend on it. It was the great achievement of the Dutch Republic, says the historian Robert von Friedeburg, to govern among strangers.²²⁷ Literally strangers, as Wiep van Bunge noted on the same occasion: the Dutch term vreemdelingen, “alien” from vreemd, “strange,” like English “stranger” but perhaps with more awareness of its formation, was used for the lowest class of the Dutch cities, below even the invoners, that is, unprivileged but resident population, and far below the burgerij, the guildsmen and holders of public office. “Republican provincialism,” not some optimistic theory of democracy, ruled, and had to be democratized before people could be free.

* * * *

The coffee houses and theatres of the cities were the sites where freer bourgeois values were theorized. Reactionaries like the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher in 1703 or the Englishman Robert Southey in 1830 or the American Earth First! Movement in 2008 railed against the cities, crammed with the bourgeoisie and their workers. Anti-capitalist proto-romantics around the mid 18^th century like Rousseau and Goldsmith praised the countryside, in ways conventional in philosophy and poetry since the Greeks. Fletcher asked, “Can their be a greater disorder in human affairs” than “the exercise [in cities] of a sedentary and unmanly trade?” (quoted in Herman p. 42; Fletcher had a few years before helped bankrupt the middle class of Scotland in the Darien Scheme, which aimed to start a Scottish empire in, of all places, Panama).

This was always so, the quarrel between urban wealth and rural sufficiency (“enough blessed with my country seat,” sang Horace in 23 B.C.E.). As John Pocock argues, “We can no longer hold that the beginnings of a modern political theory of property are to be found . . . in any simple transition from feudal to bourgeois values. We must think instead of an enduring conflict between two explicitly post-feudal ideals, one agrarian [Jeffersonian, e.g.] and the other commercial, one ancient and the other modern” (p. 109). A jurisprudential notion of citizenship, he claims, undermines the ancient notions: Europeans start to speak of people having “rights” to such things as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Instead of property merely assuring one a place in the polis it becomes something to be traded on for private, not public, purposes, a counter in an urban game.

Pocock claims with me that there is something new in the 18th century, and it is "manners."²²⁸  He puts it late, I would put it early, but the difference has more to do with the issues we are interested in than any substantive disagreement: he is speaking of political philosophy, I am speaking of mere vulgar trade. But in any case the manners, he says, are a redefined "virtue." Pocock is interested of course in political philosophy.  He speaks of the "humanist" approach to political philosophy associated with virtues (going back to Aristotle) and the "legal" approach associated with rights (going back to the stoics and Roman law).  These are freighted words. Virtue, for one thing, comes from virtus, manliness, and is used by Machiavelli in the old Roman sense.

The issue that Pocock faces is a central one: were cooperative norms the result of internalized ethical codes or of fear of loss of reputation and social sanctions? Doux commerce One or Two? It is certainly central, though of course it's going to be a devil of a job to identify it, econometrically speaking.  One argument for internalization is that, as many have argued, there seems to be an actual rise in ethical standards in business.²²⁹  I here attach it to the rising prestige of the bourgeois life, attacked in Moliére but by 1730 admired in "The London Merchant."  If ethics were endogenous---merely a result of causes already present in the economy---then it would already have risen, since the incentives not to cheat were as big in 1300 as in 1800.  It's hard to see why there would be more of an endogenous effect in 1750 than in 1250.  

The question political philosophy is supposed to answer is: how can a community flourish?  One way to flourishing is to have good, virtuous people, somehow.  The other is to have good laws, and to give this person right X and that person right Y and then carry on.  Pocock argues that law-as-politics became uninteresting (in England: he is here talking only about England) after it was established that citizens did have rights against an anointed king, and in special circumstances could even cut off his head.²³⁰  The legal-constitutional issues were settled by 1688.  So---Pocock claims---the virtue approach to politics was left.  Politics came in the talk of early 18^th-century England and later in Scotland to be about virtue, not rights.

Now the problem perceived very sharply by observers of the increasingly commercial society in England and France---really, the Dutch model of stock exchanges and so forth---was that commerce was corrupting.  In Steven Shapin’s The Social History of Truth one can read how at the Royal Society any commercial interest in a piece of scientific argument---even a commercial occupation outside the laboratory---spoiled a scientist's standing. Scientists had to be gentlemen in the pre-20^th -century sense. The solution was to claim that commerce in fact created virtue itself, doux commerce, as Pocock notes.²³¹  The political classes of ancient Greece and Rome, which were constantly in the minds of political men c. 1700, claimed to be uninvolved in commerce (the claim was false, of course, but they had gone on making it, while accepting large payments from their tenements in central Rome and their interest on loans on the grain coming into Athens).  Only holding "property" (Pocock means land) was an "assurance of virtue" (think of Jefferson much later making this same argument).  If people were to continue in this way talking about ancient virtue and ancient law they were going to get nowhere in dealing with the modern world----except to sit back and sneer at the vulgar tradesmen while sitting on the porches of their country estates.  That's what the "neo-Harringtonians" (as Pocock calls them) in fact did. 

But most English people early in the 18th century and French people in the late 18th century decided against the sneer.  Or at any rate enough did that the climate for capitalism changed.  (This is my assertion, though I reckon Pocock would agree.)

Pocock asserts that Law Came Back.²³²  That is, people like Smith thought in legal terms, and used legal situations---whether one owned ones own labor, whether one owned property---to define "stages," that set of ideas that still curses economic history.  His term at the bottom, "legal humanism," is a little witticism because it merges the two conflicting strands of civic humanism (remember: virtue) and law (rights).  "Now at last," he concludes, "a right to things became a way [if you had proper manners, if, to use another of their words, you were properly 'cultivated'] to the practice of virtue."²³³ Pocock leaves hanging the extent to which all this was a Marxian result of the commercial base changing.  He is an anti-Marxist but willing, as he says earlier, to see where some of it might apply.  I myself think---and I suspect he thinks, too---that it was more exogenous than that.  It certainly in his mind had nothing to do with the behavior of shopkeepers: he's talking about the high-theoretical discourse of the age. The emphasis in Pocock is on "modifying and developing more and more aspects of [the citizen's] personality" (p. 365). In other words, if he were talking about commerce it would be the second hypothesis of doux commerce.  That is, a new kind of person emerges, with "capacities" called "manners."  That is another way of putting the theme here.

The new dispensation was protected by the accident that it led at length to military superiority for Western liberal regimes. There was nothing automatic about this. Being bourgeois does not automatically make you militarily formidable. More like the contrary. Economic superiority in the end did not help the bourgeois Carthaginians against the less commercial but more faithful Romans. In Europe the commercial superiority of the Hanseatic League stretching in N clusters of bourgeois from Bergen to Deventer did not protect it against nationalism. Russia was a European power even though it was painfully incompetent at the bourgeois arts. Unlike the Pope, Russia had many divisions of soldiers.

Imagine a Europe around 1450 failing by some miracle to adopt Chinese-invented gunpowder or the North-Sea-invented ocean-going ship. In such a case, of course, European imperialism would not have happened. But imperialism, left and right to the contrary, was not crucial to Europe's success. What was crucial, and what made the gunpowder and the ship crucial, was protecting a bourgeois Europe from aggressions from the Steppe far to the East, and more importantly from the European castle itself down the road. Without the military revolution of the 16^th century the aristocratic and reactionary powers would have smothered innovation. How do I know? They always had done so before. Compared at least with knightly armor or slave-propelled galleys, the gun and the frigate were democratizing technologies.

Indeed, this connects with Edgerton’s idea of Britain as a militaristic power. The nationalism of Britain here connects with the success of bourgeois virtues worldwide. It required, however, as contemporaries well understood, a balance between protecting the bourgeoisie by military superiority from aristocratic/Christian reaction on the one hand and on the other the danger of ruining the bourgeoisie and the economy by adopting for military reasons the very aristocratic/Christian values standing against the bourgeoisie. The City of London's opposition to the divine right of kings, the fear of standing armies, the modest push-back to imperialism, . . . . . A military-industrial complex that embraces the modern and bourgeois world is certainly irritating in its country-club values and its proud display. We have seen the worst of it in an imperial America. Yet even if it is moderately corrupt (gigantically corrupt is another matter), it is not all that dangerous. By contrast, military-industrial-faithful complexes that reject the modern and bourgeois world have tried repeatedly and with great initial success to end the bourgeoisie—or, better, to transcend it. Thus the secularized Christianity of 19^th-century socialism, the Germany of the Kaiser and then of Hitler, Wahabi Islam. Reread McNeill on military-industrial complex.


Additional paragraphs on: Montesquieu, Voltaire. English/Dutch model spreads. French imitate a bourgeois atmosphere established early in 18^th century, which nourished Smith as well. Anti-Rousseau.
Deal with this point somewhere: James Q. Wilson is right to stress that the universalization of obligation---or at any rate its notable broadening---is astonishing. Once we cared only about our family or clan. Once “the Apache [or Scottish clansman] would kill without remorse a warrior from another tribe, [but now] the philosopher would feel obliged . . . to spare the life of a sociologist.” ²³⁴ Wilson argues that the cause was above all the character of the family in Northern Europe, the “European marriage pattern,” as the demographers call it.²³⁵ European marriages from as early as Augustine stressed the joining of two souls voluntarily, not from the clan’s political needs.

Modern capitalism is commonly seen, in the words of the legal philosopher James Boyd White, as “the expansion of the exchange system by the conversion of what is outside it into its terms. It is a kind of steam shovel chewing away at the natural and social world” (White 1990, p. 71). I don’t think so. I do not deny that an amoral capitalism, recommended by the country club, is damaging, though as a card-carrying Libertarian I must add that it often does its damage through an over-powerful government, such as the independent authorities in the New York area run by Robert Moses. But the growth of the market, I would claim, can be civilizing, too. It’s not the worst ethic to be raised up to smile at customers and do an honest days work. Dr. Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money” (Boswell, p. 532; 27 March 1775).

Montesquieu had earlier not literally used the phrase “sweet commerce” (doux commerce), but implied it: “Wherever one has sweet manners, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce there are sweet manners.²³⁶

The problem of social  individual ethics:

John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath faced a problem faced by all observers of society—economists and anthropologists, lawyers and novelists, poets and rock lyricists. It is to capture the “eighth-floor” view and the street-level view, both, and to show what they have to do with each other. Both are true. It is true that 20 cents an hour is rotten pay; it is also true that quantity supplied of labor must equal quantity demanded. Steinbeck uses various novelistic devices to pull off the double view. But in the end he is limited by his lack of understanding of the economy (i.e., an eighth-floor view). He has no credible theory of why things happen, and so The Economy becomes a natural force like the rain or a personified, ethical force like the cop beating a striker. The Joads are seen as victims. Surely in many senses they are. But a victim does not from the eighth-floor view imply a perpetrator. The growers, the police, the rest of the society are in Steinbeck’s view simply bad: that, he says in the end, is the source of victimhood. His success at evoking the sadness of being a Joad implies—because his eighth-floor view is inadequate—an oversimple analysis of What Is To Be Done: oh bosses, he says, be good, and all will be well. Like Dickens, Steinbeck adopts a conservative view—though Dickens' Hard Times and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath made many a radical, a youthful D. N. McCloskey among them. Steinbeck's success in the small makes it impossible for him to make a persuasive criticism of the system—the system of capitalism, perhaps, or the system of imperfect capitalism raised by the conspiracy or growers and the local monopoly of banks.

Back to (relative) coherence:

Chapter 13:

Smith Was the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicist
Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher. The recent literature from Knud Haakonssen (1981) through Charles Griswold (1999) and Samuel Fleischacker (2004, pp. xv, 48-54) says so, against the claim by the economists, believed for a long time, that he was mainly an economist in the modern, anti-ethical sense. The taking of ethics out of Smith began immediately after Smith’s death, in the reactionary era of the French Revolution. To assure the British authorities and British public opinion that political economy was not subversive, ethics was omitted. The Cold War inspired similar omissions, and it may be that during the American conquest of economics a fear of radicalism supported the anti-ethical reading of Smith.

But another reason the economists’ claim was accepted for so long, against the textual and biographical evidence, is that Smith practiced what for a long time after Smith was considered an obsolete sort of ethical philosophy, known as “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics somewhat mysteriously disappeared from academic circles after the 6^th and final and substantially revised edition of Smith’s own favorite of his two published books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790). Since 1790 most ethical theory as practiced in departments of philosophy has derived instead from two other books published about the same time as Smith’s, one by Immanuel Kant (1785, for example Frankfurt 2004) and the other by Jeremy Bentham (1789, for example Singer 1993). A third and older tradition of natural rights, which influenced Smith, too, by way of Locke and Pufendorf, finds favor nowadays among conservative and Catholic intellectuals.²³⁷ And the new contractarian theories of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes, to which Smith paid no attention, has provided in our time a fourth, related, stream of narrow ethics paired with grand political theory.²³⁸

But the fifth and by far the oldest and broadest stream is the virtue-ethical one. It flowed from Plato and especially from Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics (c. 330 BC), meandering through the Stoics, mapped by Cicero (44 BC), and channeled into Christianity by Aquinas (c. 1269-72). As I say, in the late 18^th century this ethics of the virtues, viewed until then by most Europeans as the only sensible way to think about good and bad character, was pushed underground, at least in the academic theories of philosophers, re-emerging only in 1958.²³⁹

The 170 year reign of ethical theories new in the Enlightenment lasted until the frailties of logic without context became clear, in the later Wittgenstein, for example, and in numerous other post-positivist thinkers. Before then “the notion that the mathematical method could be applied to ethics, rendering it a demonstrative science,” writes Father Copleston of the proliferation of new ethical theories c. 1710, following the examples of Hobbes and Spinoza, “was . . . common, . . partly because of the prestige won by mathematics through its successful application in physical science and partly because it was widely thought that ethics had formerly depended on authority and needed a new rational basis.”²⁴⁰ By 1950 the Enlightenment program was in this respect looking frayed, though quite a few decades passed before the news began to reach fields like economics or evolutionary biology. As Isaiah Berlin noted in his very last paper on analytic philosophy, “no abstract or analytic rigor exists out of all connection with historical, personal thought. . . Every thought belongs, not just somewhere, but to someone and is at home in a context . . . which is not purely formally described” (Berlin 1950 quoted in Ignatieff 1998, p. 88).

Though Immanuel Kant knew and appreciated the 1759 edition of TMS in its German translation, Smith even in 1790 knew nothing of Kant’s ruminations in far Köningsberg about the duty to follow generalizable ethical maxims. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Mackie note that “the extent to which Smith was influenced by other moral philosophers of his time” was “remarkably small.”²⁴¹ But he did know, and sharply opposed, the reduction of what is good to what causes pleasure, that is, utilitarianism, if not in the form of the “chaos of precise ideas” in Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in the year before Smith’s death. The utilitarian stream began earlier than Bentham—for example in the writings of Smith’s David Hume, though it also has ancient predecessors in the Epicureans, and it had modern ones in figures like Bernard Mandeville (1714), in the extreme form of “license,” or for that matter Nicolò Machiavelli, in the extreme form of the virtú of the prince. Smith opposed these. “In the opinion of [Epicurus, Hume, and the like],” Smith noted, “virtue consists in prudence.”²⁴² “That system. . . which makes virtue consist in prudence only, while it gives the highest encouragement to the habits of caution, vigilance, sobriety, and judicious moderation, seems to degrade equally both the amiable [Hutchesonian] and respectable [Stoic and virtue-ethical] virtues, and to strip the former of all their beauty, and the latter of all their grandeur.”²⁴³

Since Bentham, however, and especially since the anti-ethical turn in 20^th century economics associated with Pigou, Robbins, Samuelson, and Friedman, the economists have interpreted Smith’s praise of the virtue of prudence to mean what the economists meant by virtue, that is: you do uncontroversial good only by doing well. As the economist Frank Knight wrote in 1923, “the nineteenth-century utilitarianism was in essence merely the ethics of power, ‘glorified economics’. . . . Its outcome was to reduce virtue to prudence.”²⁴⁴ The turn towards prudence-only was renamed in the 1930s the “new” welfare economics, attempting to build judgments about the economy on the supposition that virtue consists in prudence, with justice taken as sheer taste. If all are benefited, or could be benefited, the proposed policy is good. That is all ye know of ethics, and all ye need to know.²⁴⁵ Smith did praise prudence as a virtue, especially in his book on prudence. For example: “what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”²⁴⁶ But in his other published book one can find hundreds of pages in praise also of other virtues, especially temperance, or of justice in the unpublished lecture notes taken by his students in 1762-63 and 1766. And even in WN, unless one is pre-committed to seeing its implied hero as merely a confused precursor to Karl Marx’s Mister Money Bags or Paul Samuelson’s Max U, one can find a good deal of ethical judgment more grown-up than “prudence suffices” or “greed is good.” The economists on the contrary have usually believed, as the great economist—and much less great student of the history of economics—George Stigler, once put it, that “the Wealth of Nations is a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest.”²⁴⁷

The actual, Kirkaldy Smith, by contrast, assumed a person with all the needful virtues, in his accounting love, courage, temperance, justice, and self-interested prudence, too. From about 400 BC to about 1790 AD the moral universe was described in Europe as composed of the Seven Principal Virtues, resulting by recombination in hundreds of minor and particular virtues. The Seven are a jury-rigged combination of the four “pagan” or “cardinal” virtues (courage, temperance, justice, and prudence) and the three “Christian” or “theological” virtues (faith, hope, and love, these three abide).

Jury-rigged or not, they are a pretty good philosophical psychology. The tensions among the seven, and their complementarities, too, can be expressed in a diagram:

The Seven Principal Virtues

Minor though admirable virtues such as thrift or honesty can be described as combinations of the principal seven. A vice is a notable lack of one or more of them. The seven are in this sense primary colors. They cannot be derived from each other. Blue cannot be derived from red. Contrary to various attempts since Hobbes to do so, for example, justice cannot be derived from prudence only. And the other, minor colors can be derived from the primaries. You can’t derive red from maroon and purple. But blue plus red does make purple, blue plus yellow make green. The Romantic and bourgeois virtue of honesty, for example, is justice plus temperance in matters of speech, with a dash of courage and a teaspoon of faithfulness. Aquinas was the master of such analyses of virtues and vices. He provides scores of examples in showing that the seven are principal. “The cardinal virtues,” he declares, “are called more principal, not because they are more perfect than all the other virtues, but because human life more principally turns on them and the other virtues are based on them.”²⁴⁸ Courage plus prudence yields enterprise, a virtue not much admired by Adam Smith, who recommended instead safe investments in agriculture.²⁴⁹ Temperance plus justice yields humility, prominent in Smith’s theorizing and in Smith’s own character, Fleischacker argues, accounting for his principled modesty in social engineering.²⁵⁰ Temperance plus prudence yields thrift, which Smith came to believe, erroneously, was the spring of economic growth.

You can persuade yourself in various ways that the Aquinian Seven are a pretty good philosophical psychology.²⁵¹ For example, you can examine each in turn, noting its importance in human flourishing. Prudence is the executive function, and especially when pursued alone can be thought of as self interest or rationality in attaining ends. Justice is the social balance that answers to the personal balance of temperance. Courage is the characteristically male interest; love the female. Hope and faith are at first puzzling, but less so when understood as the forward-looking virtue of imagination and the backward-looking virtue of imagination. In other words, hope is the virtue of having a human project. Faith is the virtue of having a human identity. They do not have to be theological. But they do constitute, along with the higher form of love, what the Greeks called agape, the “transcendent.”

Or you can imagine the miseries of a human life without one of the seven, a life without courage, cowering in the corner; or a life without faith, without identity; or a life without hope, left abruptly this afternoon with a bullet to your head.

Or you can ask people how they feel about the virtues. Alan Wolfe found in the 1990s that the particular named virtues, plural, mean a lot. Americans admire, for example, loyalty, that blend of the theological and pagan virtues. Or you can note that the seven virtues figure in the stories people tell.

Or again you can compare the seven with virtues in other traditions, such as the Confucian. The characterization by Bryan Van Norden of the ethical theory of “the Second Sage” in the Confucian tradition, Mencius (372-289 BC), is startlingly similar to the Smith of TMS. Mencius’ grounds for opposing utilitarianism, for example, were identical to Smith’s: “Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: everyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion—not because one sought to get in good with the child’s parents, not because one wanted fame among their neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sound of the child’s cries.”²⁵² The “sprout” of such feeling, to use Mencius’ vocabulary, would be the “moral sentiment” posited by Smith. Moral sentiments in Smith, like Mencius’ sprouts, are few but powerfully generative of the mature Impartial Spectator. Van Norden calls the growth of a mature ethical character the “affective extension” of the Confucian sprout.²⁵³ The sprout of benevolence, then, is the beginning of a moral sentiment of benevolence à la Smith. “Affective” extension is to be contrasted with what Van Norden calls the “cognitive extension,” seen in Kant and Bentham and the like. The focus on affect rather than cognition, I am saying, is very Scottish of Mencius. Again, “righteousness” (yi) in Mencius is “what is appropriate,” strikingly similar to the notion of neo-Stoic and Ciceronian “propriety” elaborated in Smith.²⁵⁴ Indeed “propriety” is often paired with “righteousness” in the translations from the Chinese. And so forth. We are in a different ethical universe from a Kantian or utilitarian one, but not all that different from virtue ethics in the West.

Or yet again you can look into the word of “positive” psychologists. Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004), lends empirical support to the Seven, at any rate within the European tradition in which they were theorized.

From the Seven Principal Virtues, I say, Adam Smith chose five to admire especially. He chose the four pagan and Stoic virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. To these he added, as virtue number five, a part of the Christian virtue of love, the part which his tradition—such as that of his teacher at Edinburgh, Francis Hutcheson (1725, 1747)—called benevolence. In expositing Plato’s system, for example, Smith enumerates the Pagan Four, “the essential virtue of prudence,” the “noble” virtue of courage, “a word [sophrosune] which we commonly translate temperance,” and “justice, the last and greatest of the four cardinal virtues.”²⁵⁵ In expositing Stoicism he repeats the four, also with approval, speaking of virtue as “wise [that is, practically prudent: Greek phronesis], just, firm [that is, courageous], and temperate conduct.”²⁵⁶ And then benevolence: “Concern for our own happiness recommends us to the virtue of prudence; concern for that of other people, the virtues of justice and beneficence,” “the first . . . originally recommended by our selfish, the other two by our benevolent affections.”²⁵⁷ An Impartial Spectator develops in the breast which “in the evening . . . often makes us blush inwardly both for our . . . inattention to our own happiness, and for our still greater indifference and inattention, perhaps, to that of other people.”²⁵⁸

Notice the approach to explicitness in dividing virtues into feminine and masculine: “The man who, to all the soft, the amiable, and the gentle virtues, joins all the great, the awful, and the respectable, must surely be the natural and proper object of our highest love and admiration” (TMS III.3.35, p. 152). Christian/Stoic, Peasant/Aristocrat/ masculine/feminine, private/public. Smith attempts to combine the two. In TMS he asserts, “Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded” (p. 152). The combination is not altogether convincing: but you could take a feminist view, that Smith recommending

Smith’s particular admiration for what Hume had called the “artificial” virtues, the three on which any society must rest, namely, temperance, prudence, and justice, shows in Smith’s life plan to write a great, thick book about each: temperance is the master virtue of TMS, prudence of WN, and justice (though “not only”: TMS, p. 342) was to be that of a treatise on jurisprudence never completed. The other two virtues of the Smithian five were courage in, say, entrepreneurship and love in, say, family arrangements. These stood apart from Smith’s central concerns for temperance, prudence, and justice. Contrary to what the men in Adam Smith ties believe, Smith detested buccaneer capitalism, with its emphasis on manly but imprudent courage. And as feminist students of the matter have noted, Smith did not much emphasize family love. Although he expected his dinner from the regard to their self interest of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, Smith neglected to observe that he expected it, too, from the love of Mrs. Smith the elder in arranging to cook it.

Smith made his virtue-ethical approach clear enough in his works generally and in TMS even in its 1759 edition, but most clear at the end of his life, in a Part VI added in 1790 as he lay dying. {Reword this to add to what I say p. 306 of BV] A concluding, climactic Section III, “Of Self-Command,” the master virtue in his book. “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence [love, that is] may be said to be perfectly virtuous” (p. 237). That accounts so far for three of the seven principal virtues—prudence, justice, and love. But suppose the man in question knows that he should act with prudence, justice, and love, but can’t bring himself to do it? “The most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable him to do his duty.” “Extravagant fear and furious anger,” to take one sort of passion, “[are] often difficult to restrain even for a single moment” (p. 238). The “command” of fear and anger was called by the ancients “fortitude, manhood, and strength of mind,” which is to say the cardinal pagan virtue of courage. “The love of ease, of pleasure, of applause, and other selfish gratifications . . . often mislead us.” The ancients called the command of these “temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation,” that is to say, the single cardinal virtue of temperance, so very much admired by the Stoics (pp. 338-339; compare pp. 268f, 271).

Smith then elaborates on the virtues of courage (pp. 238-240), temperance (pp. 240), a combined courage and temperance (self-command again, pp. 241-243), love briefly (p. 243), cowardice and courage again (pp. 243-246), and then discusses at length mere vanity as against proper self-esteem, figured repeatedly as temperance in judging oneself (pp. 246-262). He asserts at the beginning of the section that “the principle of self-estimation may be too high, and it may likewise be too low” (p. 246) and ends the section by praising “the man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought” (p. 261).

Such an analysis of temperance is no great advance on Aristotle’s golden mean. But Smith did not seek striking originality in his ethical theory. He was building an ethic for a commercial society, but on the foundation of ethical thought in the West, not on some novelty 1689 or 1785 or 1789. Smith’s main contribution to ethical theory in his own estimation was the notion of the Impartial Spectator “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct” (TMS, pp. 294, 137). (Smith’s use of dynamic theatrical metaphors such as the “Spectator,” by the way, has been emphasized by David Marshall [1986] and especially by Charles Griswold [1999]). The argument shows in the book’s outline. Smith begins with his own theory in Part I, “Of the Propriety of Action,” to which merit (Part II), duty (III), utility (IV), and custom (V) are subordinated. The Spectator is formed at first by upbringing and social pressure but at last evolves into a conscience, what was much later to be called “inner direction.” Though well expressed, it was a routine piece of virtue ethics.