Virtues, Layers, and Lenses in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith speaks of each as a major, even principal source of disorder. Thus the enumeration vastly surpasses 100 percent. I suggest that, rather than thinking in terms of a ceiling of 100 percent, we read Smith as offering layers and lenses with which to explore sources of vice and disorder. I then turn the point around, applying it to virtues: For virtues, too, Smith is offering a plexus of layers and sets of lenses. Some of the main distinctions Smith makes between sets of virtues are made so as to advance liberalism, as opposed to being made so as to create a checklist of virtues and a guide to practicing them. The sets of lenses that he offers are fashioned sometimes to teach lessons in politics, not lessons in private morals. The political wisdom of the work is in good measure esoteric