prior probability

Last night, my wife Sydjia and I saw the movie “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which tells the story of how the FBI and Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party. This movie left me stunned … and extremely angry. (Check out Elizabeth Hinton’s review of the movie here.)

A strong case can be made that “ethnic cleansing” began in the USA. Exhibit A: The Indian Removal Act of 1830.

“The personal library of retired John Hopkins University Humanities professor Richard A. Macksey, housed in his home.” Check out the full thread here, via Twitter. Hat tip: @DrLindseyFitz. Also, thanks to Sheree, whose ViewFromTheBack blog is one of my faves, for the “Wordless Wednesday” blog post concept.

What if Texas were to split up into five smaller States? This scenario, though it may sound strange–outlandish even–, is not that far-fetched; see, for example, this thought-provoking paper “Let’s Mess with Texas” by Vasan Kesavan (an independent scholar) and Michael Stokes Paulson (a law professor at the University of Minnesota). As an aside, this paper was the subject of one of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” podcasts (see here).

Hat tips: u/kernals12 and @ShaunKetkar

Remember Brady Sluder? He was the spring breaker from Ohio who famously said, “If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying …” Sluder was lambasted by the lamestream media at the time, but the virus certainly didn’t stop the massive anti-police protests last summer or the Super Bowl earlier this month. Maybe he was right, after all.

Alternative Title: “That’s all folks!”

Thus far, I have devoted several blog posts (seven separate posts in all!) to the substance of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s new book on Adam Smith: Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton U Press, 2019). I now want to conclude my review of his book by saying a few words about its beautiful style. Instead of a dense or dry scholarly tome, Hanley’s chapters are crisp and short, and he has kept his citation notes to a minimum. [Memo to the editors at Princeton U Press: what is preventing you from replacing the end notes with footnotes?] In addition, Hanley begins each chapter with a direct quotation from the works of Adam Smith. (Note: Although most of the chapter quotations are from the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, some are from The Wealth of Nations, showing us the essential unity of Smith’s world view.)

For my part, although I found Hanley’s approach to be appealing (starting off each chapter with a direct quotation from Smith), as it invites us to focus on the immortal words of Adam Smith, I want to respectfully point out a danger with this strategy, the danger of selection bias, of taking Smith’s words out of their proper context. To his credit, Hanley does an excellent job of presenting Smith’s main philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, although Hanley resolves the apparent contradiction in Smith’s works between self-regarding and other-regarding behavior, many other tensions and problems are left unanswered or unresolved. (See some of my previous posts, for example.) Hanley himself concedes (pp. 61-62, internal quotation marks omitted), when reading Smith “it often feels like Smith giveth on one page, and taketh away on another,” and that one of the challenges of reading Adam Smith’s works today “consists in figuring out how all of his claims go together, even (and maybe especially) when they don’t seem to match perfectly on their face.” What if we took a different approach, then? Specifically, what if were to point out the many apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in Smith’s works instead of trying harmonize Smith’s ideas into a coherent whole? That, of course, would be the subject of another book; perhaps the next generation of Smith scholars will write that book soon …

In honor of Saint Valentine’s Day and Adam Smith, I am re-posting a link to my paper “Adam Smith in Love.” (See here.) I will be uploading a significantly-revised version of the paper soon, but in the meantime, immediately below you will find one of the most beautiful love ballads ever-recorded, the original version of “Sabor a mi” by the legendary Trio los Panchos, followed by an Andean-inspired rendition of the same song, as well as a third bonus version with Manoella Torres. (P.S.: Sydjia, you will forever be the love of my life!)

Alternative title: Are Smith’s “impartial spectator” and his “wise and virtuous man” the same person?

In my previous post, I summarized Ryan Patrick Hanley’s portrait of Smith’s wise and virtuous man, and I also criticized Hanley’s portrait as implausible and unattractive: the wise and virtuous man does not aspire to absolute perfection (an impossible goal, in any case); nor is he an officious intermeddler. But as we say in the academy, it takes a theory to beat a theory, so here I want to offer a new interpretation of Smith’s wise/virtuous man.

As we have seen, Smith’s theory of virtue is personified by an archetype, “the wise and virtuous man,” but what does it mean for a person to be wise or virtuous or to act in a wise and virtuous manner? Let’s start with wisdom. Hanley defines wisdom in terms of “the appreciation of perfection” (p. 109), but this view is implausible at best. Smith is not Rousseau; Smith does not believe in the perfectability of man. As I read Smith, a person is wise in the Socratic sense of intellectual humility; he is aware of how little he knows. Also, this Socratic interpretation of wisdom has the additional bonus of being consistent with Smith’s praise of humility. What about virtue? As Hanley himself shows, Smith views virtue in several senses: magnanimity, self-command, charity, and Christian love. Simply put, Smith’s ideal man is intellectually humble; he is magnanimous; he has a high degree of self-command; and he is charitable to boot, full of Christian love.

Smith’s concept of virtue, however, poses a potential problem: what happens when the values of the wise and virtuous man (i.e. magnanimity, self-command, charity, and Christian love) collide or come into conflict. By way of example, how would Smith’s wise and virtuous man respond to the trolley problem? I would love to hear how Hanley and other Smith scholars would respond to this question, but in the meantime, I want to sketch out a different interpretation of Smith’s wise and virtuous man. When Smith is writing about this remarkable man–painting his portrait in words, so to speak–is it possible that he is referring to the imaginary spectator and not to any flesh-and-blood person in particular? Or in the words of Hanley (p. 110): “A wise and virtuous man strives to become an impartial spectator of himself ….” Would it be more correct to say that the impartial spectator–“the man within the breast” we are supposed to consult in cases of doubt–that this imaginary man himself should also strive to be wise and virtuous?

After all, as I read Smith, the wise and virtuous man is a fictional figure, every bit as imaginary as Smith’s “impartial spectator.” [*] We ourselves should aspire to become wise and virtuous in the various senses described above (intellectual humility, magnanimity, self-command, etc.), but how could we ever hope to pull off such an impressive, if not impossible, feat unless our respective “impartial spectators” themselves were wise and virtuous. Furthermore, this interpretation of Smith has the additional benefit that it resolves the many questions I posed to Hanley in a previous post.

1. What is the ontological status of the impartial spectator? Even if this imaginary being is not a human creation, even if he is somehow “hardwired” by natural or sexual selection into every human brain, Smith is inviting us to model our respective impartial spectators along the lines of the wise and virtuous man.
2. Timing and logistics: when does the impartial spectator come into play? Which of our decisions does he review? If my interpretation of Smith is correct, he comes into play whenever we make a decision that is not consistent with intellectual humility or not consistent with the virtues of magnanimity, self-command, charity, and Christian love.
3. What is the normative status and reliability of the impartial spectator’s moral judgements? Again, if my interpretation of Smith is correct, then the impartial spectator’s moral judgements are normatively valid and epistemically reliable only to the extent they are consistent with what Smith’s wise and virtuous man would decide.
4. Is the impartial spectator a superfluous entity? The answer to this question depends on the wisdom and virtue of the impartial spectator. Simply put, Smith’s imaginary spectator is not superfluous, but only to the extent his verdicts emulate or embody the values of the wise and virtuous man.

I will conclude my review of Hanley with some final though tentative thoughts about his book (the cover of which is pictured below) on Monday.

[*] I would make the following point in support of this proposition: Adam Smith himself is only able to identify but one flesh-and-blood person “as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit” (quoted in Hanley, p. 125). I will not give away the identity of this remarkable human being. Read Hanley’s book and find out for yourself!

Alternative title: Is Smith’s wise and virtuous man an officious intermeddler?

Alfred North Whitehead famously described the 2000-year European philosophical tradition as consisting of “a series of footnotes to Plato.” As we shall see, Adam Smith will be no exception to this general rule.

Thus far, we have reviewed the first half of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s beautiful new book on Adam Smith–specifically Hanley’s treatment of Smith’s imaginary spectator as well as his presentation of Smith’s theory of reciprocal sympathy. Here, we will review the culmination of Smith’s moral philosophy: “the wise and virtuous man.” Before proceeding, however, it is worth noting that Smith’s concept of virtue–his “wise and virtuous man”–is not only the focus of Hanley’s book; it is also a central feature of Smith’s moral philosophy, along with reciprocal sympathy and the imaginary spectator. Smith wrote up an entirely new section titled “Of the character of virtue” for the sixth and last (1790) edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a datum that is significant not only because of its relative size–the section on virtue takes up a big chunk of the entire book–but also because this section on virtue represents Adam Smith’s last major contribution to the world of ideas.

So, then, what is Smith’s theory of virtue, and why does Hanley find it so appealing for our times? In summary, Smith’s theory of virtue is personified by an archetype, “the wise and virtuous man.” According to Hanley, he is not just a man of contemplation, an idle philosopher; he is a man of action–a point Hanley emphasizes throughout his book. But this observation begs the question, What actions are wise and virtuous?

Hanley responds to this key question by bringing Plato’s famous allegory of the cave into the picture. Specifically, Hanley compares and contrasts Smith’s archetype to the freed prisoner in Plato’s allegory in which a group of prisoners are chained to the wall of a cave. The chains prevent their legs and necks from moving, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them. Shadows are projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The prisoners, unable to see the objects casting the shadows, thus mistake the shadows for the objects themselves. Now, suppose one of the prisoners is freed from his chains. He has left the cave and seen the natural light outside, the truth. But what does the man do after he leaves the cave? Wouldn’t you, Hanley asks (p. 110), if you were such a person, want to stay in the world of the perfect and beautiful rather than be compelled to return to the cave? Here is Hanley’s response (ibid.):

“But in fact it’s precisely this [the act of returning to the dark cave] that the wise and virtuous man does. So far from sitting forever with his vision of absolute perfection, the wise and virtuous man takes the vision of absolute perfection that his wisdom has afforded him and carries it with him back into the real world, using it as a standard with which to judge the things of this world.”

Furthermore, Smith’s wise and virtuous man is not only a man of contemplation; he is also a man of action. Hanley claims that Smith’s archetype would return to the cave to help the prisoners trapped inside (p. 112): “Bettering the conditions of others–striving at all times ‘to promote their further advancement’–is however the project of a wise and virtuous person’s life.” In other words, the wise and virtuous man is an officious intermeddler. Legally speaking, an officious intermeddler is someone who, without any contractual or legal duty to do so, steps in to assist or confer a benefit on another. Courts have generally concluded that intermeddlers are not entitled to compensation for their voluntary intermeddling, a legal doctrine that goes back to the Roman law maxim culpa est immiscere se rei ad se non pertinenti–“it is a fault for anyone to meddle in a matter not pertaining to him.” (For a review of the caselaw, see John P. Dawson’s classic law review article “The Self-Serving Intermeddler,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 7 (1974), pp. 1409-1458.)

Alas, the Smithian classical liberal in me strongly rejects Hanley’s portrait of Smith’s wise and virtuous man. It is one thing to strive to become wise and virtuous for your own sake, or to set a good example for one’s children, or to lead one’s men into battle, but I strongly disagree with Hanley’s portrait of the wise and virtuous man as an officious intermeddler, as someone who wants to improve the condition of others. Also, Hanley himself seems to have forgotten the actual ending of Plato’s allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory, the freed prisoner does return to help his fellow prisoners, but he becomes blind upon re-entering the cave, and worse yet, the remaining prisoners infer from his blindness that the journey out of the cave is too dangerous to undertake themselves. Plato concludes that the prisoners do not want to be dragged out of the cave.

My critique of Hanley’s reading of Smith’s theory of virtue, however, does not mean that we should reject Smith’s wise and virtuous man. I agree with Smith (and Hanley) that we should aspire to become wise and virtuous, and I further agree that wisdom and virtue are necessary conditions for free markets to thrive, but I draw a different lesson from Smith. I will present my view of Smith’s concept of virtue and wrap up my review of Hanley in my next post …

My colleague and friend Oliver Scott Curry created the “moral philosophy cheat sheet” pictured below and posted it on his Twitter feed (@Oliver_S_Curry). Since I am in the process of reading and reviewing Ryan Patrick Hanley’s beautiful new book about Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, I thought I would re-post his cheat sheet here. Notice how “well-being” is an important criterion or dimension of most moral theories, but in the spirit of Smith and Hanley, I now wish to pose the following question to Curry: Whose well-being are talking about? The individual’s or the community’s? And if the latter, how should we define the term “community”? One’s immediate or extended family? One’s neighborhood? One’s city, province, or country? The whole world? (Also, what about the well-being of non-human animals? Where do they fit in?)