David Schmidtz's "Living Together"

David Schmidtz is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. Before that, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Four
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND MORAL SCIENCE
13. THE MORAL SCIENCE OF ADAM SMITH

THEME: Adam Smith aimed to observe what sort of freedom commercial society makes possible and what sort of challenge this freedom poses. He also sought to explain why opportunities created by commercial society are as liberating as they are, yet not more so.

Chapter 1 reflected on the ambition of Hume and Smith to develop an observation-based approach to moral philosophy. The emergence of Economics as an autonomous discipline was an unintended consequence of their success. It was only in the late 1800s that theorems became the field’s Holy Grail as the mathematical power of neoclassical theory split Economics from Political Economy. Smith produced no theorems about market efficiency and in this respect he was no part of the neoclassical tradition he inspired (Hargreaves Heap, 2021).

What Smith called self-love was not a simple drive to maximize profit that is so unrealistic yet so apt for cranking out theorems. On Smith’s model of a social animal’s self-love, pro-social attitudes don’t correct self-interest; they define it. Neoclassical economists equate self-interest with profit maximization when that helps them to crank out theorems, but Smith was not in the business of cranking out theorems. He was describing the human condition.

Had Smith been asked what guarantees efficiency, he would have been puzzled and might have said the question is what observably fosters progress, not what logically guarantees it. Had Smith been asked to prove that public regulation is never needed, the implied failure to read what he wrote would have appalled him. Smith’s true worry was that people who become referees are themselves players of the game. Smith never doubted that we need impartial referees; what he doubted was whether we can get them.

Page 99 is the title page of chapter 13: “The Moral Science of Adam Smith.” The work as a whole is less historical than page 99 in isolation would suggest, but it could have been worse. The preceding page is blank!

Adam Smith was a Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow in the 1700s. Smith’s friend David Hume published a treatise now considered among the greatest works in the history of philosophy—some say the greatest work in the English language. Hume’s subtitle advertised his book as an attempt to “introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.” Hume and Smith studied the human condition: how things work, what spurs the wealth of nations, and what was making whole continents famine-proof.

In a way, they were victims of their own success, because in the 1800s their work inspired the creation of separate departments of social science: psychology, political economy, etc.. So they succeeded not in turning ethics into moral science so much as in turning ethics into what was left over after observation and empirical testing left philosophy behind to inform separate silos of social science. By the end of the 1800s, Henry Sidgwick would produce a book titled The Methods of Ethics that conceived methods of ethics as methods of deciding what to do, not methods of figuring out what works. The change of topic was unintentional.

Smith inspired what we now call neoclassical economics, but did not himself build models. He was not after what a logician would call proof. He was doing science, not geometry, and he knew the difference. In the empiricist tradition that Hume aspired to launch, Smith began with observation. Charles Darwin is known to have read Smith’s work and to have found in it a kindred spirit, inspiring Darwin’s own theorizing about how decentralized selection can, given time, produce what looks like order despite there being no central planner to design emerging order. Living Together concludes with chapters that work toward a (non-reductive!) theory of justice as inter alia an ecological phenomenon.

Learn more about Living Together at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue