Abstract

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Adam Smith and Moral Fortune

Adam Smith is wonderfully alive to the influence that fortune, contingency, and peculiarity, have on moral practice — on both our particular moral judgments and on the standards we invoke in evaluating such judgments.   At the same time, he is wonderfully alive to the principled arguments one might have against allowing such an influence.  Yet he defends actual practice.  His arguments suggest viewing morality, like the market, as working as if an invisible hand guides us towards the outcomes that utilitarianism vindicates.  Yet, I will argue, reading Smith in this way fails to capture the subtlety and complexity of his view.