ABSTRACT
Jack Russell Weinstein's Adam Smith's Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments is an ambitious work that puts forth several intriguing claims. Adam Smith's Pluralism is admirably straightforward about its assumptions and methodology, and it is admirably careful regarding the difference between attributing a view to Smith and deriving a view from one that Smith himself held. It rightly claims novelty as 'the first full-length investigation of Smith's philosophy of education and his theory of rationality'. And the interpretive paths down which it chooses to tread are interesting, plausible, and potentially fruitful. Weinstein argues that Smith adopts from Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson the idea that there can be 'multiple motivations for human acts', which implies an account of deliberation allowing for the 'rational adjudication' of 'multiple influential forces'. By virtue of recognizing the existence of motives other than self-interest, thinkers like Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Smith must hold a more complicated account of deliberation than does any pure egoist.
