Our Great Purpose: Ryan Hanley on Adam Smith

Ryan Patrick Hanley. Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Summarized by John Teevan, October 2019

Capitalism is regarded as a system of market prices, specialization, and trade that is based on self-interest, defined by many as greed. Smith wrote an earlier book about morals and values; none of his conclusions appear in the Wealth of Nations, as he saw it as a completely separate study. Ryan Hanley has written a 2019 book, Our Great Purpose, in which he briefly summarizes Smith’s moral argument in “Moral Sentiments” (1759).

Smith, like many in the Scottish Enlightenment, was a post-Presbyterian secular thinker who wanted all the good things of God. Happily, he was not as eager as men like Hutcheson or Hume to dispense with God. That is why he is going to posit the ‘impartial observer’. This observer is more than our conscience but less than the soul seeking God.

Introduction: Smith developed an original theory of moral judgment based on sympathy that is inherent to human nature. Sympathy is assisted by that impartial spectator, an ideal judge who somehow stands both inside and outside the individual. Based on these two (sympathy and the impartial observer), Smith provides a philosophy of living based more on the Stoics than Augustine or Knox.

1. Self-interest is defined in Moral Sentiments not as greed but as taking care of your health and relationships. Smith made a distinction between our wants and our needs and stated that self-interest is natural and usually good. Who can take care of our needs better than we ourselves?
2. We also care about the well-being of others since self-interest is only part of our nature. We feel more than sympathy for others; we actually want to promote their happiness because their happiness is also necessary to us. How can I be happy if I know you are miserable?
3. Our interest in others must be matched by action to care for others. He challenges us to call forth the figure of our souls to bring relief to others. Relief from poverty, from oppression, from suffering, and from grief. This is our great purpose.
4. In addition to our physical needs, we earnestly desire attention and sympathy from others. Smith calls this ‘fellow feeling’ and indicates that we ought to think about life in another’s shoes just as we want them to think about us in our shoes. We want to be recognized: we want to be the center of attention. We do not have to have the trappings of the rich, but we would at least like to be recognized (as on social media). This desire does not come from our body but from our imagination. That does not make these needs imaginary.
5. In order to get the attention we want, we believe that earning money is the best path. We want wealth not for its own sake but to gratify our love of distinction. A world full of job opportunities helps us distinguish ourselves. Sadly, such wealth makes us less sensitive to the needs of others, and so wealth fails to give us what he calls ease or tranquility.
6. Our own unhappiness comes from overvaluing what we lack and undervaluing what we have. It may be that we are depriving ourselves of enjoying the very good that we have, meaning that money leads to misery rather than happiness. This is like imagining that we want to win the lottery only to discover that the lottery has ruined our lives. Henley recounts Smith’s well-known parable of the poor man’s son and his anger, which has been visited with ambition. He spends his life striving for wealth, never reaches it, and regrets the effort.
7. There must be other ways besides money to meet our goal. Smith suggests a healthy mindset and perspective. The human cost of hard work at a job is mental fatigue and even mental mutilation. Smith thinks the government might step in here, but regardless, we must re-orient our thinking so that we come to see our work as a joy rather than as a burden.
8. If we want to be happy, we must first be at peace with ourselves. Busyness is not a solution, so learning how to be still, to rest, might bring us tranquility. Smith does not call us to renounce pleasure, but like the Stoics, he wants us to find a middle path of balance and happiness. This quiet reflection is not what Smith seeks; he wants us to be active.
9. We must address the moral cost to our lives of the benefits of industrial wealth. This is a refreshing corrective to The Wealth of Nations. The first cost is the inner discord between the demands of the world and what our inner beings need. We must transform this work relationship or else we will be alienated from others and ourselves. That alienation will extend to the poor and needy whom we will ignore, but we also need to relate to them. This is the heart of the problem. Regrettably, Henley introduces Rousseau as a comrade on this quest.
10. Friendship promotes tranquility. We must seek friends to draw this out, to rejoice with and share our lives with. Here he introduces society as more than marriage (home) and insists that we must choose the right kind of person to be our friend. We must choose wise and virtuous people as our friends.
11. The best of life’s pleasures are simple, enjoyed in moderation, and yield to our self-control. Excessive drinking, like excessive taxation, is out. The ancients thought taxation would reduce drinking, but Smith disagrees and faults bureaucrats as dangerous.
12. Tranquility is promoted by gratitude and love. We must flee hatred and anger and arrange our lives in ways that we surround ourselves with people we can respect. At last, he mentions love, which has the power to help us. Key: we must discover a way of living that is at once good for others and good for ourselves (57). Footnote: being angry at what is wrong is good; sympathetic resentment can be followed by correction in society. To be happy, we must hate less and love more.
13. Loving others is good for us, and we also want to be loved. The life of competition in the free market doesn’t have room for love, but love is the source of happiness. So, first we want attention, and now we want love. Smith is going to make a significant switch here and require us to give love in order to receive love. We must love others not for what they have but for who and what they are.
14. We get love when we give love. Is this an exchange? “It is not the benevolence of the butcher….” That is an exchange for cash, not love. Smith does not want one person happy in an ocean of misery. Instead, he offers each person the chance to pursue love and happiness in his own way. Smith regards love as the opposite of self-interest. Disinterested love or selfless love has been the call of many Christians (67).
15. It’s a delight to think that everybody loved others and was loved by them and returned. So, we could make it our goal to love others. Smith wants us to coalesce in community rather than coexist. He wants a society with many diverse opportunities to thrive. Smith warns us sternly about the politician who has a government plan to make everybody fit and be happy (72). Smith believes that this limits the liberty that is needed for happiness as well as for markets. He wants opportunities, not a perfect society.
16. Smith adds a new ingredient here that we must be someone who deserves to be loved even before we are loved. We have an inner voice that tells us what is required not just to get love but to deserve it. We must learn to be more than to do. First, we need a definition of what it means to be worthy, and second, we need a way to evaluate our own worthiness.
17. In order to evaluate our own worthiness, we must divide ourselves into two persons. The second person is the impartial spectator: a person we need who is removed from our own self-deception and delusion. Think of this as the golden judge of the golden rule. We will find this judgment unpleasant, but we must face it impartially.
18. We will recognize the effectiveness of the impartial spectator when we realize that we aren’t better than anyone else and no one else is better than us. This is humility that must be worked into us since it goes against our nature. We must not focus exclusively on our own pursuit of wealth or happiness as if others are unimportant.
19. Nature has made us all more or less the same. There are no rankings of inherently better or worse people. Smith believes in our natural equality of abilities and talents. Thomas Jefferson spoke similarly of inalienable rights. (90). Smith would agree with Rawls and Obama that the luck of birth or education gives some people critical advantages over others.
20. We need to choose between the popular road of pursuing wealth and the less traveled road of becoming worthy of love. Politicians seem immune to this humility.
21. Most people prefer wealth and greatness to the path of wisdom and virtue. We must choose virtue, meaning not skills or character, but excellence. Smith sees two sets of excellent virtues. First virtues concerning ourselves and second virtues concerning ways in which we relate to others. If we handle these correctly, we will gain the sympathy of others who find that we act as they expect a virtuous person to act.
22. Even our personal virtue helps us act in a way that is good for society. First, our virtue makes us a natural and proper object of the admiration of others, and secondly, we will behave in ways that demonstrate sympathy to others. Smith calls this a harmony of sentiments (102). He then explains that there are two levels or standards of virtue. The first is the idea of absolute perfection, which no human can achieve. The second is a virtue that creates actions that are good for society.
23. Finally, we come to the wise and virtuous man, not like the Greeks with their strong ethics of citizens (nor just personal like the Stoics) but a blending of both. Smith’s goal is to combine wisdom and virtue in a person of moral sentiments. But what is its source? Nothing transcendent for Smith; instead, he observes and learns wisdom and virtue from others. Unlike the Greeks with their reclusive philosophers, the wise and virtuous man that Smith envisions is a man of action.
24. The virtuous person has the virtues of humility and beneficence. The inner virtue is humility, and the outer virtue is beneficence. Smith wonders why anyone who left Plato’s cave would leave the sunshine. except to return as a wise and virtuous person to the real world and to serve there without arrogance or pride. Even seeing changed people causes sympathy, not disdain. And he is active in serving the interests of others and of society above his own (112). Suddenly, this person has become a servant.
25. While the wise and virtuous man may be a servant, his reward is the pleasure. By sacrificing our interests, we are realizing a deeper self-interest (113). This Adam Smith is light-years from the greedy man assumed by critics to inhabit the Wealth of Nations. The servant may give himself to likely futile efforts to help people, but Smith insists that misery and righteousness can never enter the heart of a person who is so completely self-approved.
26. Wisdom alone is not enough, but with virtue we become sublime and godlike. This is surprising language from Smith. He cites his friend Benjamin Franklin who said that he sought to imitate Jesus and Socrates. Smith is going to do a dance here to avoid transcendence. Socrates sought to live a good life but also thought a lot about death and dying, and then he died. Smith admired Socrates for his teaching, which has given him glory through the ages. It was his high level of self-command that made him strong, but Smith says Socrates lacked the virtue of sacrificing himself for others (119). Socrates acted like an elite person rather than just one of the crowd, as Smith prefers.
27. Like Socrates, Smith never mentions Jesus. The Christian virtue of love is considered three times. Unlike the hostility of the Enlightenment or even of Hume, Smith’s friend, Smith was very sympathetic to the Bible’s presentation of the noblest and best principles of human nature. Smith viewed religion as natural to us rather than as a transcendent gift as the Bible teaches. Sympathy for others not out of self- interest but out of actual concern for others, including the appeal to heaven and the hope that God will give justice at last (123). So, Smith saw an omnipotent God as also a judge who, in Jesus, demonstrated great love.
28. In this chapter he cites his friend David Hume, who died in 1776, as a great example of wisdom and virtue. Our author says Smith saw him as a modern Socrates with his great and amiable qualities that led to a temper that was happily balanced. Smith rejected many of Hume’s skeptical ideas, but that did not harm their friendship or his admiration.
29. Beyond the wisdom and virtue of man lies the wisdom and goodness of God. How should we relate to God? Who controls the great machinery of the universe? First, God can help us desire to be worthy of praise. Second, God can be the impartial spectator who advises us in our lives. Third, God is the judge who can bolster our fortitude and resolve to act morally. Smith even had a high view of God’s providence. Though some consider Smith a Stoic, he was not. What differentiates Smith from the Stoics? The wise and virtuous man is not only happy; he not only promotes the happiness of all, but he also does God’s will on earth.

Post script

First, Smith was surprisingly religious in his conclusion, if not in his methods. Second, the broad road of greatness and wealth may be a poor choice, but wealth brings benefits to the poorest among us. The tragedy is if we are only lifted from poverty without gaining wisdom and virtue. Third, Smith is encouraging to us today as philosophy has fallen into an abyss.

Note: Smith defines the invisible hand as the system that drives natural liberty (138). Wisdom and virtue are useless without action.