In his 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' Adam Smith made a foolish claim-
In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the probable expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man
is a miserly Scrooge. We hope he will be wiped out by a Stock Market Crash or that he drops dead and his profligate heirs run through his fortune in a matter of weeks.
I suppose there are some people who are habituated to 'industry and frugality'. That's what makes them happy. Different strokes for different folk. They too are a thread in life's rich tapestry.
is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator,
Why? If the guy is impartial he won't prefer 'industry and frugality' to 'laziness and prodigality'. Also, why is this dude stalking me? Does he also watch me poop?
What Smith has painted is a picture of a miserly Scotsman with paranoid delusions of being followed around by a spectator who applauds every time he stoops down to pick a shit stained penny out of the gutter.
and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast.
It is one thing to think you are being watched. It is another to believe your invisible stalker has installed a 'representative' in your heart. The fact is, even if this is the case, there is no 'Momus window' into the soul. We don't know if the industrious and frugal Accountant isn't planning to run off with all the cash belonging to the Enterprise. Perhaps, he himself doesn't know that this is what he plans to do.
The impartial spectator does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites.
He doesn't exist. Children may believe that Santa Claus is keeping an eye on them. They don't want to get on his naughty list. Smith is offering a grown-up version of this story. The difference is that his 'impartial spectator' won't give you nice pressies. The good news is that you get to work on Christmas day. Instead of Roast Turkey, you can save money by consuming a little gruel and gnawing on a rusk.
To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same: he sees them nearly at the same distance, and is affected by them very nearly in the same manner.
In other words, the impartial spectator is omniscient. There is no Knightian Uncertainty for him. He knows all possible states of the world. Indeed, he appears to know the actual future. If so, this impartial spectator should be the oracle or even the Benthamite Planner of his Society.
He knows, however, that to the person principally concerned, they are very far from being the same, and that they naturally affect them in a very different manner. He cannot therefore but approve, and even applaud, that proper exertion of self-command, which enables them to act as if their present and future situation affected them nearly in the same manner in which they affect him.
Approval and applause are not things which a grown-up craves. Smith was a pedagogue. Perhaps his adolescent students liked getting a gold star from him. But being a grown-up means being autonomous. Sometimes you must do that which everybody else condemns. To bleat about Santa Claus or some 'impartial spectator' is puerile. Still, pedagogues ranked lower than priests back then. They naturally wanted to muscle in on the God business.
What is agreeable to our moral faculties, is fit, and right, and proper to be done; the contrary wrong, unfit, and improper… Since these, therefore, were plainly intended to be the governing principles of human nature, the rules which they prescribe are to be regarded as the commands and laws of the Deity, promulgated by those vicegerents which he has set up within us.
If it is agreeable to my moral faculty to fart then, clearly, God's viceregent applauds heartily when I do so for, verily, my fart is joysome thing which the Almighty has commanded me to release.
Smith, as a Scotsman, wanted his countrymen to drink tea rather than whiskey and make money rather than pursue vendettas. Imagine that an English or Dutch merchant is watching what you do. Will he think you a canny fellow or will he dismiss you as a drunken hooligan?
“The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator”
Real spectators are fickle. They can be distracted or overawed or suborned in some manner. A plausible rogue may make a better impression on a jury than an honest merchant. Capitalism needed a class of professional 'auditors' for the purpose of certification. Sadly, there is an element of 'moral hazard'.
“In order to pervert the rectitude of our own judgments concerning the propriety of our own conduct, it is not always necessary that the real and impartial spectator should be at a great distance” because 'the violence and injustice of our own selfish passions are sometimes sufficient to induce the man within the breast to make a report very different from what the real circumstances of the case are capable of authorising”
The solution is to have lawyers and accountants and P.R professionals who can advise you on when and where it would be expedient to go against 'the man within your breast'. But, you also have 'Hohfeldian immunities' which you should exercise, absent the passing of consideration, in a self-interested manner.
Smith was a pedant. His students felt that he was dialling down the Divinity and pointing to commercial possibilities and civic advancement. Scotland was poorer than England. To cut a good figure in Society, the Scot would have to practice thrift. The trick was how to do so while maintaining the character of a gentleman. The answer was to aim for aristeia- excellence. Smith and Hume had made themselves independent of factional politics or aristocratic patronage by their skill with the pen. Sir Walter Scott would take the next step. Then, sadly, came Carlyle.
Smith's system relies on sympathy. But Society is statistical. In a world of oceanic commerce, Scotland would rise and rise by pursuing excellence in the Natural Sciences and cultivating a rare entrepreneurial spirit which spanned the globe.
In 'The Spirit of Smithian Laws' Daniel. B. Klein writes-
Smith’s organon is that inside of every moral sentiment there lurks a sympathy.
Only in the sense that it lurks behind every immoral sentiment, not to mention farts.
For any moral sentiment that a person has, there is another being who shares that sentiment as a “fellow-feeling” ;
Hypothetically, sure. There is a guy who follows me around sniffing my farts appreciatively.
there is a communion of sorts behind any moral sentiment.
The chap who suddenly decides it is wrong to eat people and who quits a banquet hosted by his fellow cannibals, may be considered a party pooper. Communion is denied him. He ends up going off to live in a cave with only a goat for company. Then he eats the goat. Sad.
The sympathy might be vestigial, but its impression or echo makes it a living sympathy of a sort.
An imaginary sort.
Smith advanced the organon abundantly. In the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments he wrote: But in whatever manner it [i.e., our past conduct] may affect us, our sentiments of this kind have always some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the sentiments of others. We examine it as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it.
This may well have been true of people of a middling sort. It wasn't true of those at the very top or the very bottom of society. We get that the King may have to launch a war for a purely Statistical reason. His sympathy for those who are bound to die must not affect his decision.
Shortly after the appearance of the first edition, Smith showed Gilbert Elliot draft emendations confirming “my Doctrine that our judgements concerning our own conduct have always a reference to the sentiments of some other being” .
So, you have either circularity- in which case Moral Sentiments are merely conventions of a more or less parochial sort- or else you have an infinite regress- in which case, everything comes down to God. Still, for the middling sort, this may have been a convenient enough doctrine. Moh Tzu, the great Chinese Utilitarian philosopher said that belief in ghosts was useful. It kept the peasants honest because even out in the fields, ghosts are lurking around watching everything.
But in whatever manner it [i.e., our past conduct] may affect us, our sentiments of this kind have always some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the sentiments of others. We examine it as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it.
We expect a sentimental person to be sentimental. We expect an unsentimental person not to be. Strategies, in repeated games, however, are independent of personal traits. Public signals can support better correlated equilibria. But this is a matter of Statistical calculation. Spectators, however sympathetic, contribute nothing more particularly if we stipulate that they are wholly unselective. This throws away information. If some things attract a lot of eye-balls while other things don't, our decision making is affected. Farting while giving a lecture is bad. Farting while walking alone across a vast heath doesn't matter in the slightest.
Turning from 'organon', to 'allegory', Klein makes a bizarre claim.
By allegory, and only by allegory, we may elaborate and sustain talk of communication, cooperation, error, correction, etc., throughout the system, for example in the manner of Friedrich Hayek’s talk of coordination and communication.
This can be done in the language of Information Theory or Game Theory. Au fond, it is statistical and mathematical. It is not 'sentiment' which provides 'Schelling focal solutions' to coordination problems. It is what passes for 'common knowledge'.
Such talk gets us to focus on the mechanisms: What are the signals, etc.? What makes them function better rather than worse? Simple metaphor such as “the high price told me to buy less than I usually do” is like “the cloudiness told me to take an umbrella.” It does not suffice to elaborate Hayek’s “communication” and the other important terms. One could say, “the pristine snow around the house told the burglar to break in.”
Nobody speaks in that manner. They say, 'the price has risen. That's why I bought less.' There is no 'metaphor' here. There is a reference to a structural causal model to do with the budget constraint which people face.
In the case of the burglar, presumably the decision to break in was dictated by a number of visible signs that the property was unoccupied- e.g. no lights were on, no smoke was issuing from the chimney, letters had piled up in the letterbox, etc.
The do-X message that Hayek says is communicated is something other than simply “do X for your own miserable good.” It is a more elaborate system of communication, emanating from a benevolent being (allegory), of quarterbacking, of cooperation, not just simple metaphor about the price telling you “buy this thing” or “don’t buy this thing.” That would be on par with the pristine snow telling the burglar to break in. Models (blackboard, equilibrium, agent-based) are metaphor, but not allegory.
They are structural causal models. I suppose an allegory is a way of saying 'the SCM applicable in this case is like the SCM applicable in a simpler case.'
Allegory is somewhat distinct from other figurative devices that create a comparison between the target and the figure (metaphor, simile, analogy, parable). Allegory seems to entail an entering into, or sympathy, between the target’s unfolding experience and the allegorical being’s unfolding experience; the two unfolding experiences cannot simply be two human beings (as with a parable).
What of Mandeville's 'fable of the bees'? It is an allegory. So is Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's progress'. The former is urbane and appeals to the intellect. The latter speaks to the heart.
Klein, it may be, identifies with bee-hives and ant-hills. Most people don't.
One has to be other than a human being. As for models, the figurative unfolding experience is too mechanistic, too cold. The Walrasian auctioneer is a metaphor, not an allegory;
No. He is an idealized auctioneer. He actually calls out prices and sees whether the market clears.
we don’t enter into the experience of the auctioneer.
Anyone can run an auction. It really isn't rocket science.
By allegory, and only by allegory, can we sustain the idea that to be virtuous is “to co-operate with the Deity” .
Sadly, allegory can't sustain shit. That's why my idea that I am cooperating with St. Peter by farting has not been sustained by the Vatican with the result that I've been denied the Papacy- again!
For Christians, orthodoxy requires the belief that the virtuous pagan isn't cooperating with the Deity.
Only by allegory can Jeremy Bentham sustain his statements: “The work of Adam Smith is a treatise upon universal benevolence....
as opposed to farting loudly and blaming the Holy Ghost for the smell.
[N]ations are associates and not rivals in the grand social enterprise”
They may be. They may not. America's First Nations weren't too thrilled with the grand social enterprise being conducted by Europeans on their soil.
All such statements, even the pervasive expression “price signal,” can be sustained only by allegory.
No. It is sustained by 'utility'. It solves a coordination problem. By saying 'price signal' you draw attention to market dynamics. You imagine a bunch of arbitrageurs (market-makers) sitting in front of electronic screens.
If you would banish God/Joy without expunging “price signals” from your active vocabulary, you display a dissonance. Hold on to “price signals” and welcome God/Joy’s invisible hand into your science of economics.
This is quite mad. 'Invisible hand' is like God's 'mysterious economy' in the Bible. It is what sustains the Katechon and keeps the Eschaton (end of days) at bay. Sadly, if you don't believe in bodily resurrection and don't get why Christ is nicer than Krishna, then you will have no truck with this nonsense.
In Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), two scruffy companions stick together throughout the film, but during the first 98 percent of the film they ceaselessly carp at one another and distrust one another. Only when they find, together, something higher, and personified, in the final moments of the film, is the road to virtue opened up to them; their interaction changes strikingly.
Nonsense! Kurosawa was descended from Samurai. He has some sympathy for the two peasants but they must serve the higher purpose of rescuing a particular clan's gold and of safeguarding their Princess so that the clan can reconstitute itself and regain what they had lost. At the end of the film, the Princess gives the two peasants a single gold piece and tells them to share it. This is a bit 'Marxist'- at least in the Japanese context. Perhaps the two peasants will become Ninomiya type 'social entrepreneurs' engaging in micro-finance and figuring out technological solutions to collective action problems. Perhaps they will get drunk and lose the money. After all, it would be some centuries before the Americans would turn up and force through land-reform.
Smith & Hume were Scotsmen eager to see their country gain in opulence, security, culture and refinement. They hoped the bitterness of political or religious faction would subsidize and that no future generation would be seduced by talk of the 'auld allegiance'. This did not mean Scotland should become subservient to England. It must protect its own institutions and ensure that its population could rise. This was the 'foundation' of the Edinburgh enlightenment.
Klein thinks Hume was 'non-foundationalist'
It is very seldom that one has a distinct notion of the foundation of their duties, but have merely a notion that they have such and such obligations.
I have a distinct notion of my bedroom because it is useful for me to do so. I don't have a distinct notion of the foundation of the Apartment Block in which I live. That would not be useful to me. Utility is a good enough foundation for getting on with life. Moral Sentiments may be useful in some contexts but not others. Smith is perfectly sensible on this point. We get that he is a Professor of Moral Science and is paid to gas on about such things. What matters is that he wrote in a gentlemanly manner rather than in the crabbed fashion of a provincial pedant.
In 'Wealth of Nations' Smith spoke of- “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”. This was like the lex mercatoria, or Law Merchant, but it presented difficulties. Should the Americans pay taxes to England in return for military protection? The Americans decided they could manage better on their own. What about the East India Company? Was it a greater danger to the polity, as Edmund Burke said, than Revolutionary sentiments wafting across the Channel? As for the Corn Laws and the Speenhamland System and the Combination Acts, even the most Liberal of intellectuals might be for one or more of these things and against others. In the end, 'Moral Science' could not usurp the messy business of Politics. Still, there was a market for books on 'Political Economy' and some dull but industrious Scotsmen were bound to fill it.
Smith lectured on law but did not complete a book on jurisprudence. Issues of Sovereignty and Justiciability aren't 'ergodic'. They are path-dependent. The intellectual might want clarity and canonicity- i.e. 'natural law'. But what was it? Scotland had a different legal system from England & Wales. There might be 'convergence' on some issues but not others. In the end, one had to be partial to what exists or what works, not what may exist, or may work, in an ideal work.
With 'general rules', there was the problem of 'Akreibia' or an inequitable result arising where the law falls short by reason of over generality. Without them, how was a ratio decidendi to be constructed?
When these general rules, indeed, have been formed, when they are universally acknowledged and established, by the concurring sentiments of mankind,
History would have ended.
we frequently appeal to them as to the standards of judgment….
If we are judges- sure. Otherwise, why bother?
They are upon these occasions commonly cited as the ultimate foundations of what is just and unjust in human conduct; and this circumstance seems to have misled several very eminent authors,
i.e. guys who thought they were smarter than Judges who- back then- got paid a lot.
to draw up their systems in such a manner, as if they had supposed that the original judgments of mankind with regard to right and wrong, were formed like the decisions of a court of judicatory, by considering first the general rule, and then, secondly, whether the particular action under consideration fell properly within its comprehension.
What is the alternative?
[The general rules of morality] are ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve, or disapprove of.
Experience tends to dull our moral intuitions. I think killing is wrong. But if the only people I meet are serial killers, my repugnance decreases. I become more sensitive to things I previously considered unimportant- like body odour or a reluctance to laugh at my jokes.
We do not originally approve or condemn particular actions; because, upon examination, they appear to be agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general rule.
Sure we do. Then we stop because we aren't being paid for our approval or condemnation.
The general rule, on the contrary, is formed, by finding from experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.
Experience teaches us that approval or disapproval don't matter. Wealth does. Health does. The bubble reputation- not so much. Refined sentiments have to give way to rude common sense. But, in Econ, Statistics rules over all. Estimate the price elasticity of demand for a commodity and you have done something useful. As William Blake would say only 'minute particulars' matters. Those who speak grandly of the 'general good' are 'scoundrels, hypocrites or flatterers' unless they are simply pedants of some type trying to make a little money.
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