Episode 69: Christel Fricke discusses Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments
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What is Adam Smith’s broader philosophical project beyond economics?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. All right, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Francie Russell.
With us today is Crystal Fricke, a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, and research director at the Center for the Study of Mind and Nature in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art, and Ideas at the University of Oslo. And she's here to discuss Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiment. Crystal Fricke, welcome. Thank you. So I think Adam Smith is primarily known to us these days as an economist, but apparently he was also a philosopher as well?
Well, in the 18th century, the distinctions between the academic disciplines as we have them today did not really exist. So he was an economist, and he was a moral philosopher, and he was a philosopher of law, but he understood this as parts of one overall project, trying to understand people, trying to think of where society should go and how it could be encouraged to move in the right direction.
Okay, so moral philosophy was one of the things that Adam Smith worked on. What did he take the subject matter of moral philosophy to be? What was morality for Adam Smith?
Adam Smith is becoming quite an important figure in moral theory at the moment because he tried to understand the morality of human people as something that comes to them naturally. And he based his moral theory on the idea that people are, by nature, provided not only with self-love or selfishness but also with another basic need, namely the need of living in a state of mutual harmony with other people. So underlying is the idea that people are essentially social and as such they care not only for their own happiness but also for the happiness of other people. And we have now a great deal of experimental evidence that people indeed are not exclusively selfish, that they are concerned about what other people think about them and how other people are doing.
This said, that is mainly a psychological claim, and he then tried to explain how something like moral competence, the competence of making proper judgments about what is right and wrong to do on the basis of these natural dispositions. And what makes it somewhat difficult to read his theory is that he addresses the topic from two different angles. On the one hand, he engages in a kind of thought experiment where he tries to reconstruct how people, who are more or less like normal human beings but communicate under somewhat ideal conditions how they would interact in order to join forces and understand what is morally right and wrong.
How does Smith define the natural basis of morality and mutual harmony?
And at the same time he talks about real people and how they interact their emotional responses to other people, their feelings, their concerns about social status, their power relations, and gives a rather complex account of how real people interact. So what he talks about in the thought experiment is supposed to be at least one part of what drives people, but it is not the full picture that you get when you just describe how people run their everyday lives.
So you spoke about how Adam Smith wants to ground morality in human nature, but part of what humans do is learn how to be the natural beings we are with
others.
So I wondered if you could speak a little bit about how he saw us as developing or learning how to be moral.
Yes, and Smith has a fairly realistic account of the beginning of the education of a child. Now, let's assume that it lives under rather nice conditions. It is brought up by loving parents who teach this child to take care of itself. The child learns what to eat and to drink without getting sick, and it also learns how to interact with the other people in the family without provoking their anger or other kind of punishing responses.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Adam Smith’s broader philosophical project beyond economics?
0:00–3:54
2
How does Smith define the natural basis of morality and mutual harmony?
3:54–8:06
3
What role do thought‑experiments and real‑world interactions play in Smith’s moral theory?
8:06–12:46
4
How does Smith describe the process of moral education through peer interaction?
12:46–17:43
5
What is the ‘impartial spectator’ and how does it function in moral judgment?
17:43–20:47
6
How does Smith reconcile emotions, empathy, and reason in moral decision‑making?
20:47–24:06
7
What is Smith’s view on moral principles, rules, and their revision?
24:06–29:02
8
How can individuals become their own moral judges within a biased society?
29:02–32:46
Speakers
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