"Adam Smith and the Rights of the Dead"

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2023

The purpose of this article is to analyse Adam Smith's view of death in The Theory of Moral Sentiments for commercial society to determine whether the current commodification of goods (e.g. pharmaceuticals) and services (e.g. cryogenics) to assist people to deal with the fear of death was what Smith envisioned for meaningful existence and to find out what he proposed as a means to manage the fear of death in existence. The investigation revealed that Smith's book contains many references to death as a source of anxiety that negatively influences the lives of people, their happiness and meaning in life, and ignites fear and anxiety. The cultural measure of Smith's time to manage the fear of death are magnanimity (e.g. war and suffering), the comfort of wealth, posthumous happiness (e.g. duty and sacrifice) and philosophy (e.g. Stoicism). The problem for Smith is that wealth and commodities, as is the case with the other means to deal with the fear of death, do not result in being-for-itself without the assistance of the impartial spectator which is a cognitive mechanism for self-awareness and socially located meaning-creation in the world with others.

RIIM

I reconstruct here the implicit rationale of Smith's ethical system, which unites in a single and consistent theory the most valuable features of both ancient virtue ethics and modern deontology. I propose that Smith could do this because of his approach to what I call "sympathetic impartiality", and the pretension of universality that arises from it. In Smith's theory, sentiments are moralized through the impartial spectator procedure which, willingly or not, changes the moral axis from emotivism to practical reason. * Paper delivered at the American Philosophical Association Meeting held in 2004. I am most indebted to Samuel Fleischaker, Douglas Den Uyl and Eric Schleisser's comments on the draft of this paper.

An introductory lecture on the moral philosophy of Adam Smith, focusing on his "Theory of Moral Sentiments."

Academia Letters, 2020

Scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Adam Smith in particular, are sometimes quick to attribute the ideas of the literati as an early instigator of the Antislavery movement. However, this quick attribution of proto abolitionism may be problematic. Adam Smith's economic criticisms of the slave system, though widely lauded, did not lead to the voluntary removal of slavery, a fact that Smith himself anticipated as he acknowledged in lectures that the "love of dominion and authority over others will probably make it perpetuall (sic)." 1 Authors such as Charles L. Griswold Jr. have attempted to enhance Smith's antislavery credentials by arguing that he laid the foundation for a moral criticism of slavery through the idea of sympathy and the 'impartial spectator'. 2 This brief essay will seek to touch on the intersection of Smithean sympathy and slavery in Theory of Moral Sentiments and explore why Smith's moral framework failed to find fault with the contemporary slave system. Slavery and Sympathy in the Personal Sphere. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that the individual could make moral judgements via sympathy without the need for externally-introduced absolutes. He wrote, [A]s we sympathize with the sorrow of our fellow-creature whenever we see his distress, so we likewise enter into his abhorrence and aversion to whatever his

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2010

A number of prominent nonconsequentialists support the thesis that we can wrong the dead by violating their moral claims. In contrast, this study suggests that the arguments offered by Thomson, Scanlon, Dworkin, Feinberg and others do not warrant posthumous rights because having claim-grounding interests requires an entity to have the capacity to experience significance. If dead people don't have this capacity, there is no reason to attribute claims to them. Raising doubts about prominent hypothetical examples of 'no-effect injury', the study concludes that nonconsequentialists should consider adopting an error theory regarding posthumous claims, and suggests two alternative explanations of the relevant moral domains. So when we shall be no more. .. to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all. Lucretius. On October 24, 2007, the local TV news in Auckland carried a story about the funeral of Adrian Collier in the South Island town of Invercargill. Seeking to follow a common Māori burial custom, Collier's brothers interrupted the funeral and attempted to take the body to Collier's iwi territory on the North Island. Collier's immediate family resisted the attempt, arguing that fulfilling Collier's explicit request for burial in Invercargill was their stringent moral obligation. When interviewed, Collier's granddaughter suggested that removing the body would wrong the deceased. Looking at her suggestion from a nonconsequentialist perspective, this study argues against the possibility of wrongdoing so as to violate a claim of the dead. Actions like the Collier family's are clearly done 'for the sake of the dead'.That is, such actions have a palpable posthumously 'directed' character. We feel compelled to keep promises made to the dead; we execute their wills, and believe that we ought to fittingly remember friends and family who have passed on. Given the powerful directed character of these obligations, we might reasonably think that moral failings in such respects, such as posthumous defamation, can be wrong just because they violate a claim of the dead. This thesis finds support in the writings of prominent nonconsequentialists including

Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2022

Christel Fricke suggests a reading of the TMS as a normative moral theory. According to her, the core of this theory is Smith’s account of the rules of justice – rather than his theory of conscience, as many scholars assuime, including both Carrasco and von Villiez. The rules of justice are not constituted by the spectatorial process between a person concerned and her impartial spectator. This is because an (implicit) endorsement of these rules is a condition for the person concerned and her spectator for engaging in a spectatorial process in the first place and for the possibility of their agreeing on shared moral standards. Shared moral standards arising from a spectatorial process have both factual and justified authority. The rules of justice, however, have absolute authority. Human beings are naturally motivated to act in accordance with the rules of justice; but the process of socialization within a particular culture gives rise to prejudices about who is (and who is not) among those whose feelings and interests have to be respected. Smith’s moral account of the socialization of a child (and his account of civilization at large) is therefore ambivalent: On the one hand, socialization is indispensable for a child’s moral education. But on the other hand, any process of socialization takes place under contingent conditions and gives rise to prejudices about who is to be respected as an equal. The rules of justice prescribe to respect all people as equals, independently of their cultural identity, and to take their interests into account: universal respect is a requirement of impartiality.