Abstract

This dissertation critically examines aspects of Adam Smith's moral and political philosophy. It has four interrelated sections. Part one examines the historical and intellectual context in which Smith advanced his distinctive conception of moral philosophy. In this section I discuss three themes from that context: first, the emergence of the natural law problematic especially the distinction between justice and beneficence and the attendant problems of obligation that it bequeathed to the subsequent generation; second, I discuss how Hume and Hutcheson had reformulated the debate over the nature of the virtues; and third, I discuss the force of Mandeville's critique that any morality that took as its starting point a self that is shaped in response to imagining how others view it involves dissimulation. These three sections, taken together set the problematic for Smith's moral philosophy. ;Part two gives an account of the distinctiveness of Smith's account of the imagination and his theory of sympathy as a mechanism for moral judgement. This furnishes him with materials to answer the problems left to him by his predecessors. I end with an assessment of Smith's endeavours in light of the history of moral philosophy. ;Part three discuses some implications of Smith's moral psychology; especially his insight that any adequate moral psychology must not only be able to explain moral behaviour but non moral behaviour as well. This has some special bearing on his economic psychology; his account of authority etc. I place these discussions in a sociological context. ;Part four discusses what may be termed Smith's historical imagination. I try and argue for the centrality of conflict in Smith's vision of history; I assess his explanations for that conflict in light of his moral psychology and discuss the implications this has for both, Smith's politics and the conundrums that surround the idea of political rationality in modern society. I end with a brief reflection on Smith's account of religion and the implications this has for a 'liberal theodicy.'