ABSTRACT
Chapter Seven concerns Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here I note Bentham’s silence regarding TMS when he designates as the most influential of principles opposed to that of utility that which ‘approves or disapproves of certain actions … merely because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove of them’. Would Bentham not have mentioned Smith amongst the non-utilitarian ethicists if he understood TMS in this manner, especially since he never hesitated to protest Smith’s appeals in WN to ‘natural liberty’? This possibility will immediately be discounted by those who maintain that Smith rejected ‘ethical utilitarianism’ while several of those who do allow the presence in Smith of a utility dimension insist on its secondary character. My own approach emphasizes both the qualifications Smith (and also Hume) made to their respective doctrines, the utility dimension to TMS emerging clearly as a result. Partly responsible for the view of Smith as ‘non-Utilitarian’ is an understanding of Bentham as opposed to the idea of moral sentiments as the foundation of morals, when in fact it is a ‘moral sense’ understood as precluding the utility criterion of ethics that he dismissed.
