Abstract

Thornton C. Lockwood, Jr.

Moral education in Aristotle and Adam Smith

Smith’s account of virtue the Theory of Moral Sentiments has affinities with that found in Aristotle. But although Smith ultimately makes moral evaluation an aesthetic evaluation of the beauty of one’s actions in a fashion quite similar to the way in which Aristotle invokes the notion of acting for the sake of the beautiful in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle and Smith profoundly disagree upon the place of poetry and “musical education” in their accounts of proper upbringing.  My paper elucidates the sense of the beautiful or the noble in their respective ethical works and examines their divergent emphases on aesthetic education.