ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Adam Smith’s path-breaking work in moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter referred to as TMS). Adam Smith’s legacy was tied to the Scottish Enlightenment and the French and American Enlightenments. Adam Smith’s TMS created a bedrock for a moral and ethical structure. The TMS won him high praise from Hume, Burke and Kant. Smith’s system was seen as a giant step forward and was the product of the age of enlightenment in the eighteenth-century Scotland (Griswold 1999). Smith’s work is a promulgation of the great themes of the Enlightenment. The TMS puts forward ideas that attempt to free us from war and faction, repressive institutions and especially religious institutions. His moral philosophy was very explicit about the correct attitudes of human behavior, took to task what was seen as the prejudicial and dogmatic assumptions about culture, social hierarchy, freedom and religion. He contended that modern liberty requires moral virtue not wisdom. Thus, it is not built upon philosophical reason, but on a doctrine of moral emotions. The TMS
is a book that seeks to show that ‘sentiments’ (also termed “passions of emotions”) can suffice for morality, virtue, liberty and in general for a harmonious social order.We are creatures of these passions. Smith seeks to understand and justify the passions as a basis for decent ethical life. The passions are not exclusive of reason, but as a basis for human life they displace “theoretical pursuits such as philosophy.
