Thursday, February 12, 2009

Selfishness Is Never a Smithian Virtue

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, author of Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business (Encounter Books), writes in American Spectator this week, ‘The Deeper Roots of Our Financial Crisis’ (11 February), HERE:

Capitalism, the goose that laid our golden eggs over the past decades, brings about immense transformation, particularly in its globalized form. It is in nature as Adam Smith reminded us in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written long before his better-known work, The Wealth of Nations, all about what he called "the moral sentiments." He himself distinguished between self-interest, which he promoted, and greed. Self-interest is both good and essential. Greed is always wrong and bad. The key difference is the former uses self-restraint, which obviously requires a moral code and a moral compass. There are moral preconditions in a market economy: the sentiments of sympathy, benevolence and compassion, of approval; disapproval and indignation, which underpin the social order and make it possible to engage in business in the first place. Human beings are not just profit-maximizers. They have moral scruples, personal commitments and the desire for happiness. These set limits to their plans for personal profit, and also stimulate them to pursue profit in ways that honor their higher values and generosity. Many companies, large and small, exhibit these; they live and conduct business by these values, in every industry and on every continent. I collected sixty examples in my recent book but there are thousands upon thousands.”

Comment
Adam Smith also taught his course in ‘Ethics’ (moral philosophy) in his public Edinburgh Lectures, 1748-51, and at Glasgow University, 1751-64. Much of their contents were written up as The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It is also important to realise that he also taught his Lectures on Jurisprudence, which contained elements of his ‘political economy’ and parts of which were repeated verbatim in Wealth Of Nations (1776 – though essentially completed c. 1763-4).

I mention this to be sure that Theodore Roosevelt Malloch does not accidentally give the impression that Smith’s moral philosophy was in some sense an ‘early work’ that was different in moral tones from his Wealth Of Nations, published some years later. Smith’s Work, essentially, a part of his oeuvre was not a ‘second thought’ as exponents of the myth of the 19th-century, ‘Das Adam Smith problem’, still tout seriously today (I heard a paper claiming it to be a continuing problem in 2008!).

Having said this, I congratulate Theodore on his assessment of Smith’s clear understanding, and repeated statements of the difference between self-interest and selfishness.

This is the second time today that I have offered congratulations to an author on this subject, which certainly makes a change from almost daily having to chastise authors for eliding the two quite separate motivations of self-interest and selfishness, and worse, attributing the erroneous elision to Adam Smith.

Smith didn’t ever get confused on this matter. Those authors – sad to say, many of them economists – who do so, confuse Adam Smith with a predecessor, Bernard Mandeville (1734), whom Smith criticised in Moral Sentiments as ‘licentious’, and they exhibit the ignorance of the Hollywood script writer who had Gordon Gecko mouth the savage words, ‘greed is good’, or perhaps, like Alan Greenspan of the Ayn Rand school of selfishness, misread what Adam Smith actually wrote, perhaps relying on Ayn to be authentic.

That misleading ideas about Adam Smith are not unanimous, encourages Lost Legacy in its not so-lonely battle against the epigones.

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