The same face of the two Smiths: Adam Smith and Vernon Smith

The Same Face of the Two Smiths: Adam Smith and Vernon Smith

The Same Face of the Two Smith

Going from personal to impersonal exchange seems to be a relevant feature that allows humans to develop complex societies and grow prosperous. Adam Smith’s idea of moral imagination, embodied in the impartial spectator and achieved through sympathy, may integrate and complement today’s evolutionary biology and experimental economic explanations, providing the missing key as to how we generate a...

Religion and Spirituality: Adam Smith versus J-J Rousseau

Adam Smith and J-J Rousseau share some common ground when it comes to religion, namely that they were born into  and educated in cultural contexts deeply shaped by Reformed Christianity. However, close consideration of their writings on religion reveal marked difference. This paper explores those differences and finds that Rousseau and Smith are radically at odds on this score. Smith has almost...

Adam Smith and Greed

Adam Smith on the Virtues: A Partial Resolution of the Adam Smith Problem

It is now easy to see, in the light of Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were parts of a grand system. Nonetheless, TMS and WTVare not tightly linked. This paper pursues the following strategy: knowing that Smith wrote both works, one can go back to TMS, investigate Smith's handling of the virtues, and see how that work implici...