Abstract

Stephen Darwall

Smith on Honor and Self-Respect

A number of recent writers have stressed strong egalitarian themes in Adam Smith’s writings. For my part, I have argued that we can find in Smith a form of the idea that we share a common basic standing (second-personal authority, as I call it) to make claims of and hold ourselves accountable to one another. But this is only part of the story. Smith was also drawn to certain aspects of hierarchical cultures of honor. I consider these tensions in Smith’s views, which reflect a struggle between two competing conceptions of social and moral order.