Speaker
Description
This paper uses Smith’s corpus to explore the role that idealizations play in providing us with normative leverage on our practices. In particular, it is interested in whether a general account can be provided of why some degree of idealization seems needed to get leverage on our practices, while too much idealization seems to diminish the weight or significance of our normative assessments. To this end the paper pays special attention to whether normative assessments of the actions and characters of individual agents utilize idealizations in the same way that normative assessments of institutions and society do. Key to addressing this is comparing the role that idealizations play in the impartial spectator, on one hand, with the role they play in the analysis of aggregate social phenomena on the other. Along the way the paper will also address what Smith has to say about the source of our interest in normative questions comes from. Do these questions arise primarily from practical problems we confront in our lives, or are they instead downstream theoretical commitments we have about virtue, the good, and human flourishing? Ultimately the paper is not just concerned with understanding Smith’s views on these questions, though. Instead it asks whether Smith’s views can help us make progress in contemporary debates about these questions.
| Organization | Chapman University |
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