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Adam Smith on the Morality of the Pursuit of Fortune

Vivienne Brown's article "Signifying Voices" (Brown, 1991) is the first published installment of a larger project in which Brown proposes to explore Adam Smith's views on the relationship between virtue and commerce. This project, particularly because it proposes to establish the eighteenth-century context for Smith's reflections on this relationship, should prove very interesting and enlightening. In view of the promise of this larger project, it is all the more important that certain assertions contained in the article not be allowed to pass without comment. Brown's thesis is that for Smith, economic activity lies outside the realm of morality proper; while not immoral, it is "amoral," occupying "a shadowy, twilight space in the moral universe" (Brown, 1991, p. 216). This conclusion is founded upon two main lines of argument. One turns on a distinction that Smith allegedly introduced, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), between the virtues of self-command and benevolence on the one hand and the commerce-related virtues of justice and prudence on the other. The other rests on the observation of certain stylistic differences between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations (WN). I will argue that neither approach provides adequate support for Brown's conclusion. Her first line of argument may be summarized as follows. TMS III.3.4, among other passages, shows that for Smith, only those actions are genuinely moral that require the agent, in order to decide upon a course of action, to enter into an imaginary dialogue with the "inhabitant of the breast," the impartial spectator. Actions lacking this "dialogic" element, while they may still be moral, are of a lower order of morality, even "amoral."