Abstract

Toni Vogel Carey

Accounting for Moral as for Natural Things

Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers aimed to establish a “moral science” analogous to Newton’s science of mechanics. But the relation they posited between humans and animals was neither mechanistic nor analogical; the two fall along a single organic continuum. This harks back to Stoic naturalism; but it also looks forward to Darwin’s, as Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Stephen Jay Gould and others have remarked. Gould calls the invisible hand principle and natural selection “isomorphic,” and I try to explain here the analogical parallels that would lead one to make that claim.