Adam Smith: He shows how to reconcile natural liberty with ordered justice (Ian Crowe, September 10, 2024, Modern Age)
The Theory of Moral Sentiments places Smith firmly among the thinkers, such as Hutcheson and Hume, who emphasize the role of aesthetics and the natural human passions in the shaping of principles of moral philosophy. In the way he links sympathy, imagination, and ambition, however, he moves beyond his contemporaries in two main respects. First, in developing the “sympathetic” link between the impartial spectator and the individual conscience, he injects an objective quality of imagination into the impulse of sympathy (in which sense Smith might be seen as a “philosopher of the normal,” a term used by Dr. William Campbell to describe the political economy of Wilhelm Röpke). Secondly, his treatment of the motive of “self-love” reveals a subtle combination of utility and benevolence that passes between Hutcheson’s reliance on a separate moral sense and Bentham’s utilitarianism. Both of these concepts, conscience and self-interest, reveal the powerful influence of Stoicism on Smith’s thought, and are vital in appreciating how Smith linked the natural and the moral—motive and judgment—within his system.