2025
Adam Smith, David Hume and the problem of moral relativism
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Social Philosophy and Policy
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​Despite the considerable attention paid to Adam Smith’s ethical theory over the past quarter of a century, at least one area of his thought remains outstanding for the lack of interest it has received: Part 5 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘Of the influence of custom and fashion upon the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation’. This is unfortunate, however, insofar as there are good reasons for thinking that Part 5 is important to Smith’s project. The following article substantiates this importance by placing Smith’s intervention in the context of David Hume’s earlier attempts to wrestle with the problem of moral relativism. The connections between Hume and Smith on this matter have not previously been explored, yet doing so is crucial for gaining a more complete appreciation of Smith’s moral thought. Beyond this historical intervention, however, I also contend that neither Smith nor Hume offer satisfactory answers to the philosophical challenge posed by moral relativism. Despite remaining the two outstanding theorists in the tradition of ethical sentimentalism, both Smith and Hume fall short on this score. Insofar as moral relativism remains a challenge to ethical sentimentalists today, proponents of this tradition must look elsewhere for solutions.
Bernard Williams and the relativism of distance: a defence
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European Journal of Philosophy
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Despite being one of the most well-known of his ideas, Bernard Williams’s “relativism of distance” has received surprisingly little sustained critical attention. Furthermore, what attention it has received has been predominantly negative: critics by turn find the relativism of distance perplexing, theoretically flawed, implausible, or even incoherent. By contrast this essay seeks to offer a defence of Williams on this score. It argues that, when properly understood, the relativism of distance is both cogent and plausible. In turn, it can be defended from the criticisms so far levelled against it (in particular by Miranda Fricker). The paper concludes by considering the wider significance of Williams’s position.
2023
Adam Smith, Sufficientarian
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in Interpreting Adam Smith: Critical Essays (ed. Sagar)
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Recent scholarship has sought to read Smith in TMS as an ethical critic of market inequality, one motivated by egalitarian commitments. This chapter pushes back against this reading, arguing that the position Smith adopts in TMS is most accurately labelled sufficientarian, not egalitarian. However, Smith’s sufficientarian considerations are deliberately focused on what is most apt for securing individual happiness. He says little of direct or decisive bearing on the plausibility of egalitarianism as a political commitment. Yet because ethical questions are not, in this area at least, isomorphic with political ones, we ought not to assume the latter can straightforwardly be read off the former. This ought to temper both our reading of Smith’s argument, and what we can appropriately extract from his text for present normative debate.
2022
On the liberty of the English: Adam Smith's reply to Montesquieu and Hume
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Political Theory
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This article has two purposes. First, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law in England's legal history. Seeing this enables the paper's second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith's account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith's famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith's history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume, and his wider political theory of modern freedom.
2021
Adam Smith's genealogy of religion
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History of European Ideas
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This paper has three main aims. First, to make good on recent suggestions that Adam Smith offers a genealogy of the origins of religious belief. This is done by offering a systematic reconstruction of his account of religion in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, demonstrating that Smith there offers a naturalized account of religious belief, whilst studiously avoiding committing himself to the truth of any such belief. Second, I seek to bring out that Smith was ultimately less interested in the truth of religious beliefs than in evaluating and understanding the place of religion in healthy ethical living. Third, I put Smith's account into contrast with the more famous treatment offered by Nietzsche (as well as Bernard Williams's later, Nietzschean, reflections), and suggest that Smith offers us the more plausible picture of both religion and morality, a finding of both historical and contemporary philosophical import.
Adam Smith and the conspiracy of the merchants
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Global Intellectual History
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Adam Smith famously declared that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. Although Smith's hostility to the merchants and the mercantile system is well known, what has not hitherto been appreciated is the full extent to which Smith believed such a ‘conspiracy’ to obtain, how he believed that it came about, and why it would likely prove highly resistant to effective political control. To appreciate this, it is necessary to situate The Wealth of Nations in relation to Smith's wider assessment of the origins of modern European commercial societies, connecting his critique of mercantilism to his history of law and government, as well as to his late interventions regarding the problematic centrality of political judgement to managing affairs of state. Once this is done, we see that the famous attack on mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations must ultimately be read as janus-faced, given Smith's wider assessment of modern European conditions as revealed in the student lecture notes of the 1760s, and the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments
Between virtue and knavery: Hume and the politics of moderation
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Journal of Politics
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Hume is widely believed to have held that constitutional stability depends entirely on institutional design predicated on the assumption that every person is a knave. His famous statement to this effect has been enormously influential, both historically and amongst contemporary scholars. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that Hume did not think institutional design on the assumption of universal knavery was enough if seeking to establish long-term constitutional order. This was due to the ongoing threat posed by faction, and its capacity to subvert even the best-designed constitutions. The knave maxim was thus a necessary, yet not sufficient, condition for political stability. To see this, we must locate Hume's knave maxim in the wider context of his critique of parties, and especially his narrative construction in the History of England as centred around the difficulties of cultivating attitudes and dispositions of moderation amongst political actors, and his exploration of the limits of political science in ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’.
Don't be boring: political realism and social anthropology
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Contemporary Political Theory
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Why (and maybe how) political realists should aim not to be boring
2019
Liberty, nondomination, markets
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The Review of Politics
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Philip Pettit’s path-breaking 1997 book Republicanism has almost nothing to say about markets, nor the economy more generally. His 2012 On the People’s Terms does not offer a more extensive treatment. Pettit's only sustained considerations of republican freedom's relationship to markets comes in a 2007 paper, in which he claims that republicans can be 'complacent' about the compatibility of markets and freedom as nondomination. By contrast, this paper argues that the widespread existence of markets poses considerable difficulties for Pettit's account of freedom. Adopting a broadly realist desiderata, I argue that if we want to understand how freedom can be a value for us in a world of markets, Pettit's account cannot give us what we need.
Bhishma’s Boon: reflections on the complexity of immortality
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The Journal of Value Inquiry
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Is the desire for immortality simply a desire not to die? On the face of it this seems a simple enough question, with a simple enough answer. What could immortality be about, if not the permanent avoidance of death, and hence a desire for it a desire to never die? Nonetheless, I argue that a desire for immortality may encompass considerably more than that. Specifically, that it reveals important facts about our attitudes towards agency, and the control we seek to exercise over our own lives. To this end, I challenge Bernard Williams's famous treatment of the matter, as well as the revised (and improved) account put forward more recently by Samuel Scheffler. By using literary and fictional sources to delve deeper into what the fantasy of immortality might contain, we are able to uncover the considerable complexity of our attitudes towards death more generally.
2018
Legitimacy and domination
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Politics Recovered (ed. Sleat)
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This essay attempts an ‘internalist’ explication of political legitimacy. That is, a philosophically articulated and normatively compelling account, which nonetheless appeals only to resources that are (at least in principle) available to relevantly-affected agents, and not to external (even if eminently endorsable) moral constraints. Internalist accounts are implicit in the political theories of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Max Weber, but are not adequately explicated by any of them. An internalist account of legitimacy is explicitly put forward in the later work of Bernard Williams, but his presentation is somewhat obscure, and insufficiently developed to be serviceable. This essay therefore seeks to go beyond Williams – in particular by drawing on work by James C. Scott, Michael Rosen, Lisa Wedeen, and Sally Haslanger – to articulate a minimalist form of critical theory that enables the construction of an adequate internalist account of legitimacy. In turn I seek to show that internalists can engage in radical social critique of unjust structures, without needing to posit external moral values, raising the question of whether internalism is in fact all that we need.
István Hont and Political Theory
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The European Journal of Political Theory
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This article explores the relevance of the work of Cambridge historian of political thought Istvan Hont to contemporary political theory. Specifically, it suggests that Hont's work can be of great help to the recent realist revival in political theory, in particular via its lending support to the account favoured by Bernard Williams, which has been a major source for recent realist work. The paper seeks to make explicit the main political theoretic implications of Hont's historically-focused work, which in their original formulations are not always easy to discern, as well as itself being a positive contribution to realist theorising, moving beyond a merely negative critique of dominant moralist positions.
What is the Leviathan?
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Hobbes Studies
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The aim of this article is to explore some of what Hobbes says in Leviathan about what the Leviathan is. I propose that Hobbes is not finally clear on this score. Nonetheless, such indeterminacy might be revealing, insofar as it points us in different directions regarding how the state can be conceptualized, and what it is thought able to do. The paper is thus deliberately open ended: it does not aim to definitively settle interpretative issues, but rather to use Hobbes as a way of thinking about the differing potentials of state theory.
Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville
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Political Theory​
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This paper re-examines Adam Smith's encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Against the grain of present scholarship it contends that when Smith read and reviewed Rousseau's Second Discourse, he neither registered it as a particularly important challenge, nor was especially influenced by, or subsequently preoccupied with responding to, Rousseau. The case for this is made by examining the British context of Smith's own intervention in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, where a proper appreciation of the roles of David Hume and Bernard Mandeville in the formation of Smith’s thought pushes Rousseau firmly into the background. Realising this, however, forces us to re-consider our evaluations of Rousseau’s and Smith’s very different political visions. Given that questions of individual recognition, economic inequality, and political stability remain at the heart of today’s social challenges, the implications of this are not just historical, but of direct contemporary import.
2017
Beyond Sympathy: Adam Smith's rejection of Hume's moral theory
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The British Journal for the History of Philosophy
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Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has long been recognized as importantly influenced by, and in part responding to, David Hume’s earlier ethical theory. With regard to Smith’s account of the foundations of morals in particular, recent scholarly attention has focused on Smith’s differences with Hume over the question of sympathy. Whilst this is certainly important, disagreement over sympathy in fact represents only the starting point of Smith’s engagement with – and eventual attempted rejection of – Hume’s core moral theory. We can see this by recognizing the TMS’s account of moral foundations as predicated upon a rejection of Hume’s distinction between the natural and artificial virtues. Smith is in turn revealed as generating a major break with Hume – a break which, if based on a superior theory of moral foundations (as Smith thought it to be) has important consequences for how we treat Smith and Hume in both the history of philosophy and contemporary moral theory.
2016
From scepticism to liberalism? Bernard Williams, the foundations of liberalism, and political realism
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Political Studies​
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Bernard Williams was an ethical sceptic, but he was also a proponent of liberalism. To what extent can one finally be both? This article explores this question through a particular emphasis on Williams, but seeks to draw wider lessons regarding what ethical scepticism should and should not amount to. It shows how ethical scepticism can be reconciled with a commitment to what Williams, following Judith Shklar, called ‘the liberalism of fear’, which is revealed as an ecumenical outlook for different stripes of ethical sceptic. The article concludes by drawing some lessons for the recent ‘realist’ turn in political theory.
The state without sovereignty: authority and obligation in Hume's political philosophy
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History of Political Thought
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Hume has no theory of sovereignty. As a result he is frequently supposed to lack a proper theory of politics, providing only a political sociology incapable of addressing the central normative significance of political obligation in thinking about the modern state. This is a serious mistake. Hume addressed himself directly to the question of political obligation, but his argument was predicated upon a prior reconfiguration of our thinking about the nature, role and power of philosophy. In coming to appreciate this prior reconfiguration, in particular via a re-examination of Hume's indirect engagement with Locke's earlier juridical political theory, we can properly appreciate Hume as advancing a radically innovative theory of political obligation. What emerges is the possibility of a theory of the state without sovereignty. As well as thereby revealing Hume to be a major and highly original post-Hobbesian theorist of the state, we are invited to consider whether present political theory would do better by adopting Hume's recommended philosophical reconceptualization.
2015
Of mushrooms and method: history and the family in Hobbes's science of politics
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The European Journal of Political Theory
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Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth is standardly interpreted to be primarily a theory of contract, whereby the archetypal manner of forming a political community is via an act of mutual agreement between suspicious individuals of equal power. By examining Hobbes’s theories of the pre-political family, and what he says about the role of real history in the development of political societies, I conclude that this standard interpretation is untenable. Rather, Hobbes’s conception of commonwealth ‘by institution’ is a hypothetical model used to illustrate the mechanics of sovereignty, and to reconcile men to the conditions of subjection to absolute political power. In practice, all sovereignty is originally by ‘acquisition’. Realizing this casts serious doubt on the possibility that Hobbes is a fundamentally democratic thinker. In turn, we are invited to reconsider the history of political thought after Hobbes, in particular by seeing his theory of the family and of history as a genealogical ancestor of Scottish Enlightenment political theory.
2014
Minding the gap: Bernard Williams and David Hume on living an ethical life
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The Journal of Moral Philosophy
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Bernard Williams is frequently supposed to be an ethical Humean, due especially to his work on ‘internal’ reasons. In fact Williams’s work after his famous article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ constitutes a profound shift away from Hume’s ethical outlook. Whereas Hume offered a reconciling project whereby our ethical practices could be self-validating without reference to external justificatory foundations, Williams’s later work was increasingly skeptical of any such possibility. I conclude by suggesting reasons for thinking Williams was correct, a finding which should be of concern for anybody engaged in the study of ethics.
2013
Sociability, luxury, and sympathy: the case of Archibald Campbell
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History of European Ideas
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The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson’s rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.