How can us mere mortals, living in a ruthless, dog-eat-dog capitalist system, ever hope to obtain the sagacity and wisdom of a Stoic sage? Is it even possible to become wealthy or to better one’s condition in a way that is both logically and morally consistent with the main precepts of Stoic ethics? These questions are no minor intellectually masturbatory quibble. To the extent most people live in a “commercial society,” i.e. a society in which “Every man … lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant ….” (Wealth of Nations, I.iv.1, p. 37), the Stoic-capitalist dilemma should be of interest to all. My contribution to these questions is to propose a Smithian solution to the Stoic-capitalist dilemma by imagining Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” device as a Stoic sage–our inner Marcus Aurelius. (See my previous post.)

But at the same time, my Stoic portrait of Smith’s impartial spectator poses several deep questions that deserve further study. For starters, if a Stoic spectator is possible, what about a Kantian impartial spectator or an Hegelian or even a Nietzschean one? Is it possible to conjure up different versions of Smith’s impartial spectator, and if so, does this possibility undermine or bolster my argument for a Stoic spectator? In addition, the ontology of the impartial spectator is open to two radically different and diametrically opposed interpretations. Some Smith scholars conceptualize Smith’s imaginary entity as “an ideal observer with divine grounding whose normativity comes from an Archimedean point of view.” (Weinstein 2026, p. 174) Others, by contrast, “flatten” Smith’s imaginary spectator, seeing him as “a product of an individual agent’s imagination and therefore limited by the imaginer’s fallible capacities.” (ibid.) Which of these two pictures of the impartial spectator is the correct one, and does the divine interpretation rule out the possibility of a Stoic spectator? Is God a Stoic?