ABSTRACT
Adam Smith was born and raised in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, went to school in the local parish school, and to university first in Glasgow and then Oxford. This chapter focuses on the descriptions of two deaths that Smith portrays to demonstrate how Smith offers a moral defense of commercial societies. The first death is of David Hume, another Scottish philosopher contemporary of Smith, and generally considered his closest friend. The second relevant death for the chapter is the death of a “savage.” A “savage” never lets anything “disturb the serenity of his countenance or the composure of his conduct and behavior.” At the time of death, the “savage” is surrounded by torturers who are completely indifferent to him and his pain. The difference between the poverty of the hunter-gatherer society of the “savage” and the opulence of the commercial society of David Hume is the root of the difference in the way they die.
