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In Book III of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith speaks of duty, "the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions." But although duties are to be "regarded" as fixed "rules of justice," and even "regarded as the commands and laws of the Deity," Smith's analysis shows that duties in fact arise as an abstractions from ordinary moral experience: they are "founded upon experiences of what, in particular instances," the natural operations of sympathy reveal to us. Strictly speaking, Smith's moral law is not a law at all: moral duty does not legislate so much as describe or indicate proper conduct in most cases.
Immanuel Kant--who is said to have referred to "der Engländer Smith" as his "Liebling" writer on moral passions--attempts to address this defect by deducing a system of moral duties from the abstract dictates of pure practical reason. Where Kant's imperative is "categorical," that is, legislated absolutely by pure reason, Smith's imperatives are conditional, that is, conditioned by the very ordinary experience which Kant denies can be a basis for moral rules. Only if duty is legislative and binding, Kant argues, can we speak of duty in the precise sense.
This paper aims to use Smith's and Kant's conflicting accounts of the origin of moral duties as an entry point into what I identify as a tension in the Enlightenment moral law tradition between the deduction of moral or political duties from pre-political experience (be it in a state of nature or in a natural "moral sense") and the authority those duties are supposed to wield over the individual. If Smith gives greater due to "ground-level" moral experience, Kant gives greater due to the higher (one might say transcendental) claims morality seems to make for itself. I end by speculating on the possible origin of this tension in the divorce of rights from duties in modern political thought, and whether classical political philosophy offers any resources with which to synthesize Smith's and Kant's moral insights.
| Organization | Boston College |
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