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Articles

Hume and Smith on utility, agreeableness, propriety, and moral approval

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Pages 675-704 | Published online: 12 Mar 2019
 

OVERVIEW

We ambitiously reexamine Smith’s moral theory in relation to Hume’s. We regard Smith's developments as glorious and important. We also see them as quite fully agreeable to Hume, as enhancement, not departure. But Smith represents matters otherwise! Why would Smith overstate disagreement with his best friend?

One aspect of Smith’s enhancement, an aspect he makes very conspicuous, is that between moral approval and beneficialness (‘utility’ in Smith) there is another phase, namely, the moral judge's sense of propriety. With that phase now finding formulation, Smith, if only implicitly, generates a spiral of beneficialness and propriety, a spiral shown in Figure 7 in the present paper. We consider Figure 7, illustrating the spiral, to be the most important arrival point in the present paper; it highlights the non-foundationalism of Smith's ethics. But to arrive at the spiral, we must engage in extensive exegesis.

In Part IV of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith presents a foil against which he develops his own theory, a foil supposedly representing Hume. According to the foil, moral approval derives from ‘utility.’ But, in multiple ways, the foil is misleading. We provide an interpretation of Hume, notably his four-factor account of moral approval, before examining Smith's representation of Hume.

One twist is that Smith used the words utility and useful differently than Hume did – Smith quietly stretched them to include species of agreeableness, thereby obscuring the importance of agreeableness in Hume’s theory.

Another, more significant problem is that Smith allows the impression that in Hume moral approval derives quite determinately from beneficialness. In fact Hume conveys the interpretive and sentimental spaciousness of the operations that generate moral approval; here, Hume even speaks repeatedly of ‘proper sentiments’, thus almost using the term propriety himself.

But the propriety phase in Smith opens up to a key facet of Smith’s development on Hume: He poeticizes a locus of sympathy not emphasized in Hume – namely, that between the moral judge and her own man within the breast; that locus enters the theory in addition to the sympathies emphasized in Hume, not in lieu of them. We distinguish lateral sympathy, which is important in Hume’s thought, and vertical sympathy, which is especially characteristic of Smith’s more inner-directed and allegorical thought. Smith embraces Hume’s lateral sympathy and enhances moral theory by adding formulations (‘the man within the breast’, ‘the impartial spectator’) that elaborate vertical sympathy.

Next, we come to something of a twist in the whole matter: We show that  – as Smith well knew all along! – propriety is a species of agreeableness! Smith’s propriety phase represents another dimension within which such agreeableness lives: Smith’s vertical dimension thus gives rise to a spiral representing the diachronic development of the judge herself. It is a spiral of beneficialness and propriety: Each propriety phase in the next loop of the spiral engenders a species of agreeableness now as a part of beneficialness.

Smith's developments on Hume, then, involve the following three facets: (1) formulation of the propriety phase; (2) the poetic elaboration of vertical sympathy; (3) the diachronic spiral of propriety and beneficialness.

The three facets come together, especially in Ed. 6 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The whole development goes beyond Hume, but, really, is agreeable to Hume – though Smith himself portrays his developments as disagreeing with features of Hume's moral theory.

We speculate that Smith was more or less aware of all that that we say, including the absense of any really substantive disagreement. Why, in that case, would Smith have proceeded as he did? We address that question at the end of the piece. Our speculations suggest a method in the madness.

JEL Codes:

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Reproduced in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest C. Mossner and Ian S. Ross (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 44. This work is hereafter abbreviated as ‘Corr.’, followed by page number.

2 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982). This work is hereafter abbreviated as ‘TMS’, followed by page and paragraph number.

3 Hume’s abstract is reproduced in John Reeder, On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith (Bristol: Thoemmes Press), 33–50. This work is hereafter referred to as ‘Abstract’, followed by page number. Note that on page 50 of the reproduction there is a typo: ‘digest himself’ should read ‘divest himself.’

4 David Raynor, ‘Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no.1 (1984): 51–79.

5 Abstract, 45.

6 Such is the reading of James Fieser, Early Reponses to Hume’s Moral, Literary, and Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. James Fieser (Bristol: Thoemmes Press), 117.

7 Raynor, ‘Hume’s Abstract’, 161.

8 E.g. T.D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971); Knud Haakonssen, The Science of the Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), esp. 39–44; Raynor, ‘Hume’s Abstract’; Marie Martin, ‘Utility and Morality: Adam Smith’s Critique of Hume’, Hume Studies 16, no. 2: 107–20; Spencer Pack and Eric Schliesser, ‘Smith’s Humean Criticism of Hume’s Account of the Origins of Justice’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no.1: 47–63; Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 86–112.

9 Smith writes: ‘[It] seems impossible that the approbation of virtue should be a sentiment of the same kind by which we approve of a convenient and well-contrived building; or that we should have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers.’ TMS 188.4. See also 327.17.

10 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T.L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). This work is hereafter referred to as ‘EPM’, followed by section, chapter, and paragraph number. Hume says in EPM 5.1, ‘We ought not to imagine, because an inanimate object may be useful as well as a man, that therefore it ought also, according to this system, to merit the appellation of virtuous. The sentiments, excited by utility are, in the two cases, very different; and the one is mixed with affection, approbation, &c. and not the other’.

11 On conspicuous errors as a device of esoteric writing, see Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost Art of Esoteric Writing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 55, 314–5.

12 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, ed. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). This work is hereafter referred to as ‘T’, followed by book, part, section, and paragraph number.

13 TMS 179.2, 188.3.

14 Ibid., fn1.

15 It is true that Hume’s four-factor account finds articulation in at T 3.3.1.30. But it is only in EPM that it is made strongly schematic.

16 Hume refers to the Treatise as ‘that juvenile Work’ in the ‘Advertisement’ disavowing it, penned in 1775, published in 1777, and reproduced in T 586–7. Hume’s repeated regrets are presented by David F. Norton, ‘Historical Account of A Treatise of Human Nature from its Beginnings to the Time of Hume’s Death’, vol. 2 of T, 582–8. We agree with Tom L. Beauchamp, ‘Introduction to David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Crticial Edition’, ed. T.L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvi ‘it is probable that his “repenting” of his early work was unfeigned.’

17 EPM 6.1.3.

18 Ibid., 2.5, 3.1.

19 Ibid., 5.1.4.

20 Ibid., 5.2.17.

21 Ibid., 7.29.

22 T 2.3.10.5.

23 Friedrich A. Hayek, ‘Rules, Perception, and Intelligibility’, in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 58.

24 See EPM 6.1.3.

25 Ibid., 6.1.2.

26 Ibid., 9.1.1. Emphasis original.

27 Ibid., 8.1. Emphasis original.

28 Ibid., 7.1.

29 Ibid., 7.2.

30 Ibid., Appendix 1.2.

31 Ibid. Emphasis added.

32 Hume uses the word ‘reason’ in a number of senses. His primary use of ‘reason’ refers to an inferential faculty that operates upon relations of ideas, leading to demonstrations, and matters of fact, leading to probabilities. But at other points, he uses ‘reason’ to refer to a stricter faculty of intuition and demonstration. From the perspective of the second, stricter sense of reason, our primary faculty of reason – particularly its mode of probable reasoning – is not reasonable. On similar interpretations of ‘reason’ in Hume see Barbara Winters, ‘Hume on Reason’, Hume Studies 5, no.1 (1979): 20–35; David Owen, Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Erik W. Matson, ‘Hume and Smith on Reason, Political Economy, and the Spirit of Philosophy’ (PhD diss., George Mason University, 2017), 7–43.

33 EPM Appendix 1.2.

34 Ibid., 5.37.

35 Ibid., 7.29.

36 The taste essays are: David Hume, ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’, and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, both in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987).

37 EPM Appendix 1.2. Emphasis added.

38 T 1.3.8.12.

39 ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste’, 6.

40 ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 238. Emphasis added.

41 Ibid., 233. Emphasis added.

42 Ibid., 234. Emphasis added.

43 Ibid. Emphasis added.

44 Cf. TMS 20.4.

45 Haakonssen, Science of a Legislator, 46.

46 TMS 188.3.

47 Except that at ibid., 188.3.

48 Raynor, ‘Hume’s Abstract’, 59.

49 Cf. Campbell, Science of Morals, 118, who notes that Smith ‘does include the immediate effects of action’. Emphasis original.

50 TMS 188.5.

51 TMS 188.3. Emphasis added.

52 Ibid., 305–306.21.

53 Ibid., 316.2. As for other passages in TMS outside of Part IV, there are yet more passages in which ‘utility’ can be interpreted to encompass both usefulness and agreeableness, for example 52.3, 199.9, 238.4, 327.17. Related passages also occur in Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 338, 401ff. This work is hereafter referred to as LJ followed by page number. In TMS 305–306.21, Smith separates useful and agreeable but immediately brings them together under ‘utility’. Although Smith often seems to signify what we call ‘beneficialness’ when he says ‘utility’, we note that there are passages in TMS in which ‘utility’ seems to signify only (or, at least, especially) Hume’s usefulness, e.g., TMS, 20.4. 35.4, 86.2, 199.9.

54 Ibid., 188.3.

55 Ibid., 179.2.

56 Corr., 33.

57 On Bentham’s regret appearing as of 1823, see J.H. Burns, ‘Happiness and Utility: Jeremy Bentham’s Equation’, Utilitas 17, no. 1 (2005): 49. Also, in an 1822 writing Bentham speaks of ‘reasons derived from the principle known by the name of the principle of utility; more expressly say the greatest-happiness principle’. Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, vol. 3, ed. W. Stark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 439, 458. Emphasis added.

58 John Bowring, ‘History of the Greatest Happiness Principle’, in vol. 1 of Jeremy Bentham, Deontology, or the Science of Morality, ed. J. Bowring (London: Longman, 1834), 287–331.

59 Bentham used ‘principle of utility’ and the like in his 1776 Fragment on Government and 1789 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

60 Jeremy Bentham, ‘Historical Preface, Intended for the Second Edition’ to Fragment of Government, in vol. 1, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). Emphasis original. Also, Bentham writes: ‘for that was the name adopted from David Hume’, explaining why he used ‘utility’.

61 Searching online resources, we have found no direct evidence that Bentham had read TMS; still, it seems plausible to us that, even if he hadn’t, Smith’s moves there would have filtered down to Bentham. As for Hume: Nowhere in his earlier works does Bentham show awareness that Hume had separated usefulness (utility) and agreeableness; he does show such an awareness in Deontology, included in vol. 1 Works of Jeremy Bentham, 223, 250–1, published two years after his death in 1832.

62 It is perhaps not unreasonable to think that Smith may have influenced Cesare Beccaria, Dei Delitti e delle Pene, trans. H. Paolucci (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) and William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002), both of whom talk ‘utility’ in the vein of greatest happiness. As for Helvetius, his work De L’Esprit was published in 1758, one year prior to TMS; our French is not adequate to judge the utilité talk found there; but that word is what Google gives as the French translation of usefulness, whereas Google gives utilitaire as the French translation of utility, and utilitaire does not appear in De L’Esprit.

63 Trained as we are in economics, where ‘benefit’ has taken on willingness-to-pay meaning, it struck us as odd that Hume, Smith, and Bentham did not make ‘benefit’, ‘beneficial’, and ‘beneficialness’ central to their formulations. But we have come to realize that ‘benefit’ derived etymologically from ‘well done’, and was thus originally a good deed, a benefaction, the product of beneficence. Thus Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, ed. I.H. Hunter and D. Saunders, trans. A. Tooke (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), 106, says (as originally rendered in English): ‘[I]t is a higher Degree of Humanity, out of a singular Favour to do a good Turn freely[ … ][a]nd these […] are called Benefits, and are the fittest Matter for rendring Men Illustrious’. On such original understanding, consumer/producer surplus from mere market exchange would not constitute benefit. Though the OED indicates that the wider modern meaning does go back to at least to 1606, perhaps the original meaning was still too dominant for Hume et al to follow the word choice that seems so natural to us.

64 Indeed, Bowring, ‘History of the Greatest-Happiness Principle’, 321 treats at length Bentham’s agonizing over terminology, saying, ‘there is no topic on which his mind was more habitually occupied than in the search of fit terms to convey his ideas’. Bowring indicartes that Bentham pondered alternatives including Eudaimonologian, Feliotarian, and ipse-dixitism.

65 For an elaboration on the meaning of speculative and philosophical in this context, and Hume’s view on speculation, see T, 1.4.7; Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–33; Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1–27. Criticizing Hume for being overly speculative is, of course, ironic in that it is a charge Hume levels at metaphysicians throughout his work. For an exposition of the Humean (i.e., proto-evolutionary, psychological, experiential) nature of Smith’s criticism of Hume, particularly regarding Hume’s account of justice, see Pack and Schliesser, ‘Smith’s Humean Criticism’, 52–63.

66 Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 54. Emphasis original.

67 Haakonssen, Science of a Legislator, 69.

68 Martin, ‘Smith’s Critique of Hume’, 107.

69 D.D Raphael and A.L. Macfie, ‘Introduction’, in TMS, 31.

70 Pack and Schliesser, ‘Smith’s Humean Criticism’, 53.

71 James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8.

72 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 21.

73 TMS, 20.4

74 Ibid., 87.5. Emphasis added.

75 Griswold, Virtues of Enlightenment, 140 n23.

76 TMS, 191.11. Emphasis added.

77 Ibid., 175.11. Emphasis added.

78 The idea of asymmetric interpretation goes beyond asymmetric information, and for interpretations the term disjointed is a more fitting term than ‘divided’, ‘dispersed’, ‘diffused’, or ‘decentralized’. For a discussion on the relationship between knowledge and information, see Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi–xiii, 144–56.

79 TMS, 179.2. Emphasis added.

80 Ibid., 188.3. Emphasis added.

81 Ibid. Emphasis added.

82 See Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow.

83 Nava Ashraf, Colin F. Camerer, and George Loewenstein, ‘Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (2003), 131–45.

84 Ibid.

85 Campbell, Science of Morals, 118.

86 Griswold, Virtues of Enlightenment, 54.

87 T, 3.2.1.11. Emphasis original.

88 EMP, 7.29. Emphasis added.

89 See T, 3.1.1; EPM, Appendix 1.

90 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T.L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 9.1. This work is hereafter referred to as EHU, followed by section, part, and paragraph number.

91 EPM, 9.1.

92 Ibid., 9.2.

93 Ibid., 3.34.

94 T, 1.4.1.1.

95 EHU, 4.1.12.

96 T, 1.4.7.2.

97 EHU, 4.2.14.

98 ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste’, 5.

99 ‘The Platonist’, in Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 155.

100 See T, 1.4.7.12.

101 See Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life.

102 EPM, Appendix 1.2.

103 Smith reiterates a sort of propriety phasing at TMS 238.4, 316.2

104 Ibid., 188.5.

105 Ibid., 191.11.

106 Ibid., 188.3.

107 Ibid., 20.4.

108 Ibid., 188.5.

109 Smith affirms the organon at Ibid., 17.2, 46.9 n*, 109.2 (‘some secret reference’), 163.4–165.5, 193.12 (final sentence), 306.21 (final sentence), 325.14 (last three sentences). He also does so in a letter to Gilbert Elliot (Corr., 48–50).

110 Indeed, Smith explicitly says that, within his own system, sympathy is ‘the natural and original measure’ of propriety. TMS, 306.21.

111 Ibid., 215.11.

112 On the man within the breast and the polysemy of ‘impartial spectator’, see Daniel B. Klein, Erik W. Matson, and Colin Doran, ‘The Man within the Breat, the Supreme Impartial Spectator, and Other Impartial Spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, History of European Ideas 44, no. 8 (2018): 1153–68.

113 TMS 185.11.

114 Ibid., 131.32. Emphasis added.

115 For a discussion on Smith on a sense of propriety and selection in interpretation and reasoning, see Erik W. Matson, ‘The Sympathetic Formation of Reason and the Limits of Science’, Society 54, no. 3 (2017): 9–15.

116 TMS, 269.10.

117 Ibid., 327.17.

118 Cf. Ibid., 13.1–16.6, 46.9 n*.

119 Ibid., 20.4. Emphasis added.

120 For example, if Janet is starving, then we might say that the ice cream is to Janet not only agreeable but eminently useful: It serves the non-immediate purposes of self-preservation. Our chocolate ice cream example calls to mind Hume’s treatment of exceptions to the rules of justice (EPM, Appendix 3.7). Although it might, according to Hume, be agreeable to take money from a miser and give to the poor, Hume holds that we should disapprove of such redistribution on usefulness grounds: the rules of justice are useful in that they are all but universally and rigidly enforced. Smith might add to Hume’s assessment that departures from the rules of justice are propriety-disagreeable.

121 TMS, 110.2.

122 Adam Smith, ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’, in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 1983), 219.

123 TMS, 113.6.

124 EPM, 8.12–14.

125 Cf. TMS, 113.6.

126 Haakonssen, Science of the Legislator, 51–53.

127 David Friedman, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11, no. 2 (1994): 1–16 develops the idea of natural property and highlights how a locus of knowledge and control resides with the owner, and that that is socially focal.

128 TMS, 183.8–185.10

129 For an interpretation of Smith’s parable in relation to Hume’s conclusion to Book I of the Treatise, see Erik W. Matson and Colin Doran, ‘The Elevated Imagination: Contemplation and Action in David Hume and Adam Smith’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2017): 27–45.

130 Cf. TMS, II.ii.2.1.

131 TMS, 182.8. Emphasis added.

132 Ibid., 183.10.

133 Ibid., 183.9.

134 Daniel B. Klein, ‘Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Twenty-six Critics, from 1765 to 1949’, Econ Journal Watch 15, no. 2 (2018): 201–54.

135 TMS, 326–327.16.

136 See Ibid., 84.2.

137 Charles Griswold, ‘On the Incompleteness of Adam Smith’s System’, Adam Smith Review 2 (2006): 185; see also Haakonssen, Science of the Legislator, 43–4.

138 Smith's discussion of diachronic development beginning ‘A very young child has no self-command’ and moving on to ‘a man of a little more firmness’ and then ‘the wise and just man’ (TMS, 145.22–147.25) is new to Ed. 6, as is the entire ‘Of Self-command’ section of the new Part VI, which contains much on the theme of diachronic development, as well as perhaps the most important moment on the theme of exemplars and independent judgment, namely the Parmenides-Plato tale. Ibid., 253.31.

139 EPM, 9.23.

140 T, 1.4.6.19. See also Hume, ‘The Platonist’, 155.

141 T, 3.1.1.26; emphasis added.

142 Ibid., 2.2.9.14.

143 Baier, A Progress of Sentiments.

144 Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71; Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor, 39,

145 Corr., 44. Emphasis added.

146 Ibid.

147 David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 298.

148 Corr., 251. See Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor, 215f.

149 It might be argued that something similar is done in Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). This work is hereafter referred to as ‘WN’, followed by book, chapter, part, and paragraph. In WN, V.i.g.3–6, Smith presents Hume as an advocate for religious establishmentarianism: The quotation used by Smith is from the early part of Vol. III of Hume's History of England, treating early Tudor times. It is a bit hard to imagine Hume as a keen advocate of religious establishmentarianism for the England of 1776, but Smith allows the reader to perceive him as such, and again uses Hume as a foil, now to his own position on the religion policy. It must be acknowledged, however, that there Smith refers to Hume as ‘by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age’. WN, V.i.g.3; emphasis added. So maybe the moment is more a reflection of Smith's tendency to create arch foils than of a need in 1776 to distance himself from Hume.

150 TMS, 264.6. Emphasis added.

151 WN, V.i.g.3. Note that ‘useful or agreeable’ appears in the first sentence of the establishmentarian quotation Smith gives from Hume.

152 Ibid., V.i.g.8.

153 TMS, 180.3.

154 Corr., 43.

155 TMS, 46.9 n*.

156 Neatly dissected by Haakonssen, Science of a Legislator, 51.

157 T, 2.2.5.21.

158 TMS, 315.5.

159 EPM, 1.7.

160 See Griswold, Virtues of Enlightenment; Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23–6; Emma Rothschild, ‘Dignity or Meanness’, The Adam Smith Review 1, (2004): 152; and Daniel B. Klein, ‘Adam Smith’s Non-foundationalism’, Society 53, no. 3 (2016): 278–86 on non-foundationalism in Smith. See Simon Glaze, ‘Adam Smith and William James on the Psychological Basis of Progress’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 41, no. 2 (2017): 349–65 on philosophical pragmatism in Smith. For a some general pragmatist/non-foundationalist reading of Hume see J.B. Shouse, ‘David Hume and William James: A Comparison’, Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 4 (1952): 514–27 and Daniel B. Klein, ‘Hume as Non-foundationalist’, Liberty Matters (Published online by Liberty Fund). Link

161 Klein, ‘Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments’.

162 Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines.

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