Honor and Justice in Adam Smith’s "Theory of Moral Sentiments"

• In Event: Themes in 18th Century Political Thought

Abstract

Can the sense of honor be compatible with modern commercial society, which seems to marginalize and even condemn this premodern motivation? Even if so, does this motivation matter to the moral and political life in such a society? In this essay, I reconstruct the oft-ignored honor ethics in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy to answer these questions affirmatively.

This reconstruction comprises four parts. First, I collect and systematically present Smith’s praise of self-command and self-esteem, the two qualities that characterize exemplary soldiers and virtuous men and which he explicitly calls honorable.

Second, I elaborate on Smith’s justification for the necessity of the two honorable qualities in modern commercial society. Given the state’s inability to eliminate justice despite its efforts, individuals must find a way to regulate their resentment, a motivation whose deficiency deprives them of the ability to stand up to injustice and whose excess often gives rise to further injustice from them. Self-command and self-esteem matter because the former restrains the excess of resentment while the latter mitigates its deficiency.

Third, I examine Smith’s skepticism about republican patriotism and the love of virtue, two potential ways to cultivate the honorable qualities defended both by his contemporaries and by scholars today. For Smith, while republican patriotism goes against the spirit of modern commercial society, the love of virtue is too demanding for the bulk of modern individuals to cultivate.

Fourth, I argue that Smith’s alternative to republican patriotism and the love of virtue is what he calls “the sense of duty,” whose sentimental basis is “the love of true glory” and which is the only principle compatible with “the coarse clay of which the bulk of mankind are formed.” This sense of duty is essentially the sense of honor in that it integrates into a single whole an individual’s sensitivity to and independence of the immediate opinion of others and motivates the individual to act accordingly. Such an individual is capable of practicing self-command and self-esteem and hence regulating their resentment without necessarily knowing the moral content of these two honorable qualities.

I conclude this essay with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Smith’s honor ethics. While the founding theorist of modern political economy sees no contradiction between honor and modern commercial society but even finds it necessary for maintaining justice in this society, his functionalist defense of honor does not entirely dissipate the widespread Kantian criticism that honor alone cannot determine what is moral.

Author

• Antong Liu, Singapore Management University