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Reading Adam Smith's Texts on Morals and Wealth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Vivienne Brown
Vivienne Brown
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Abstract

In his Comment ‘Adam Smith on the Morality of the Pursuit of Fortune’, Richard Arlen Kleer accepts much of the argument in my article ‘Signifying Voices’ (Brown, 1991) but insists that I have ‘gone too far’ (Kleer, 1993). Kleer agrees that there is a moral hierarchy in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) where benevolence and self-command are ranked higher than justice and prudence, but he is uneasy with the conclusion that economic activity and the pursuit of gain are ‘amoral’ activities and insists that they do have a significant moral standing. In addition, although Kleer accepts a good deal of the stylistic analysis, again he is uneasy with the results that are derived from it. This reply will take each of these aspects in turn.

Type
Comments
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , October 1995 , pp. 344 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

REFERENCES

Brown, Vivienne. 1991. ‘Signifying Voices: Reading the ”Adam Smith Problem“’. Economics and Philosophy, 7:187–220Google Scholar
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Kleer, Richard A. 1993. ‘Adam Smith on the morality of the pursuit of fortune’. Economics and Philosophy, 9:289–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Campbell, R. H. and Macfie, A. L. (eds.). Vol. II of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford University Press; Liberty Classics imprint, 1981.Google Scholar