ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests an alternative reading of Adam Smith's moral philosophy in which Wealth of Nations (WN) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) are understood as coextensive contributions to a single social science of human cooperation. Extensive social cooperation is facilitated in each case by knowledge surrogates: stand-ins for detailed, on-the-ground knowledge of distant others. The chapter finds in TMS a systematic account of complex cooperation and human flourishing – including humanomic incentives, feedback loops, and potential growth of human cooperative capacities – on par with Smith's analysis of commercial order in WN. It argues that Smith affirms and extends the Stoic doctrine by recasting moral proximity and duty as emergent phenomena, not predetermined by blood or geographic proximity. The chapter argue that TMS sets forth an economic theory on par with WN, not just a marketplace model of how "general rules of just conduct" emerge and evolve, but a theory of non-commercial cooperation and assistance on an extended scale.
