The nature of Smith's moral theory

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is apt to confuse, perhaps startle, the modern reader who approaches it with expectations formed by recent moral philosophy. Though profoundly different in many respects, the moral philosophies which have dominated the debate for the last fifty years, utilitarianism and Kantianism, have a common concern with an ultimate criterion for right action. Even the doctrine which in recent years has mounted the most serious challenge to these two, so-called virtue ethics, is devoted to establishing criteria for what constitutes the morally good character. In other words, modern moral philosophy is primarily the hunt for a universally normative doctrine, a theory of what is right or good for humanity as such. Furthermore, it is commonly backed up by meta-ethical ideas of moral judgment which presuppose such a view of philosophical ethics. Smith's idea of moral philosophy was very different, and that is one good reason for studying him; he is a challenge to our common ways of thinking.

For Smith the most basic task of moral philosophy is one of explanation; it is to provide an understanding of those practices which traditionally are called moral. Like his close friend and mentor, David Hume, Smith saw moral philosophy as central to a new science of human nature. To this purpose Smith analysed those features of the human mind and those modes of interaction between several minds which gave rise to moral practices in the human species.