Adam Smith’s relevance for contemporary moral cognition

The aim of this paper is to show the relevance of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy for contemporary trends in moral cognition. According to these accounts, research on moral judgment should start focusing more on its diachronic dimension, as opposed to its synchronic one, so that it can properly account for the constitutive and developmental integration of automatic and controlled processes, of emotions and reasons (§1). Smith’s reflective sentimentalism – appropriately interpreted (§2) – can provide the theoretical and philosophical framework for these accounts. On the one hand, Smith’s account makes the collaboration and integration of emotions and reason necessary for an appropriate normative moral judgment in typically developed individuals: developing a moral conscience requires both automatic and controlled processes (§3). Furthermore, since Smith was very aware of the limits and flaws of sympathy and of the impartial spectator’s possibility of error, his theory is capable of explaining the many ways in which typical individuals can misjudge, individual differences in moral judgments, and some of the ways in which the development of a full-blown moral conscience can go wrong (§4).