Aristotle, Adam Smith and the Virtue of Propriety

Abstract

Adam Smith's ethics have long been thought to be much closer to the Stoic school than to any other school of the ancient world. Recent scholarship however has focused on the fact that Smith also appears to be quite close to Aristotle. I shall attend to Smith's deployment of a version of the doctrine of the mean, shall show that it is quite close to Aristotle's, shall demonstrate that in its detailed application it is seriously at odds with Stoic teaching on the passions, and particularly with their teachings on anger, and shall conclude that on a central issue of ethics Smith is a good deal closer to Aristotelian than to Stoic thinking.