Smith on Moral Agency and the Significance of Context

Abstract

Although Adam Smith has often been taken to be firmly on the side of those who applaud the morally uplifting features of markets, Smith scholarship is increasingly recognizing that he engaged in a rather subtle analysis of commercial society as a moral context that was alert to its moral dangers and benefits alike. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how this nuanced analysis is informed by and illustrates Smith’s philosophical attentiveness to the influence of context upon individual moral agency more generally. It begins by introducing Smith’s moral psychology, in which mentors, experiences, and the culture and institutions that individuals inhabit can all affect the individual’s formation of character and moral judgment. This chapter then turns to Smith’s account of how the particular virtues and vices that commercial society encourages vary according to one’s occupation, and how therefore commercial societies are comprised of a variety of moral contexts. This chapter concludes by considering the implications of adopting this Smithian view of the import of context. Among other things, this view suggests that any action that shapes the moral contexts that others inhabit is ethically significant, given the role that agents’ cultural, institutional, legal, and commercial environments play in their moral formation.