ABSTRACT
The town I come from, Kirkcaldy, is also the home of Adam Smith. While he is thought by many to be the prophet of modern capitalism, he is, in fact, the moral philosopher who wrote of our obligations to others. Visit the town and its one-and-a-half mile long promenade and you will under-
stand how the sea that dominates the town shaped his view of the world. You cannot understand Adam Smith without understanding the community in which he was born, grew up and to which he returned to write his two great books, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Smith’s time, Kirkcaldy was a major port, which specialised in trade between
the United Kingdom and the European continent. From his home overlooking the sea, Adam Smith, born the son of the local customs officer, would look out and every day witness some of the 100 or so merchant ships that came in and out of the harbour. Kirkcaldy flourished by exporting its goods and importing others. This is how
Smith came to understand that trade was the engine of growth and that the economy prospered through the specialisation of labour. But Adam Smith grew up in what was also a strong, cohesive community. The
church in which he was baptised and the school he attended were but only a few yards from where he lived. And theAdam Smith of the invisible hand was also the Adam Smith of the helping hand and, indeed, for Smith, his thoughts on moral sentiments were even more important than his theories on the wealth of nations. He wrote of our capacity to put ourselves in other peoples’ shoes, and thus to
consider their interests and needs, and he wrote of the ‘circle of sympathy’ starting with family, friends and compatriots, a sense of obligation that diminished, he said, with distance. Understandably, we felt less obligation to strangers. But this view was conditional upon three forces of importance then that are of less importance now: our limited knowledge of strangers, our restricted ability to make contact and communicate with them and our smaller sense of mutual obligation. IfAdam Smith were writing now, he would be showing how distance had ceased to be a barrier to knowledge, how contact and communication with strangers was possible and how we had developed a stronger sense of mutual obligation based on our interdependence.1 He might even be writing of us being able to feel, however distantly, the pain of others and of us being capable of believing in something bigger than just ourselves and those nearest to us.
