prior probability

Note: This blog post is based on my most recent work-in-progress “A Short History of Adam Smith in Love.”

Perhaps the most neglected aspect of Adam Smith’s biography is the pervasive role religion played in Scottish life. More to the point, the most regulated aspect of Scottish life by far in Adam Smith’s time was not the economy; it was people’s sex lives. Every parish in Scotland had its own ecclesiastic or church court. These parish courts or “kirk sessions” (as they were called) had jurisdiction over every parish member’s private and public conduct, including over all matters of sexual morality.

According to extensive historical research by Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, the great majority of these church cases consisted of sexual matters. (Mitchison & Leneman, 2001, surveys over 8,000 church court records spread across 78 Scottish parishes from the mid-17th to mid-18th Century.) Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 483, emphasis added) have also painted a detailed picture of the repressive nature of Adam Smith’s world and of the roving jurisdiction of Church courts over sex: “In the early modern period every parish in Scotland had its own church court (the kirk session) dealing with matters of conduct and morality. Drunkenness, sabbath breaking, slander, riotous behavior–all these came under the aegis of the session. However, partly through a sharper defining line between the roles of lay and of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, by the mid-eighteenth century the great majority of cases were of a sexual nature ….” In addition, Leneman and Mitchison emphasize “[t]he thoroughness with which these cases were pursued.” Specifically:

Even pre-marital sex or “ante-nuptial fornication” was a sin. According to Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 484), for example, most of these cases would came to light when a woman gave birth to a child less than nine months after being married. (According to scholars, there was a disconnect between official Church doctrine and informal social norms on the matter of pre-marital sex. For ordinary people, betrothal was a part of marriage, and as such made sexual intercourse permissible. Church elders, however, generally did not approve of such “irregular” marriage. For the Church, a marriage required the public exchange of promises in the presence of the parish minister. See generally Hardy, 1978; see also Gillis, 1985, pp. 52-54.)

We can thus make two Smithian conjectures given this repressive state of affairs in early modern Scotland. One conjecture is that the Adam Smith must have been very careful in his private life. Although the penalties for fornication, adultery, and other such moral offenses consisted of shaming penalties, or “penance on the pillar” to quote Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 495), a cautious and careful scholar of Adam Smith’s stature would not have wanted to incur such penalties as they would have derailed his prestigious academic career and lucrative private tutoring opportunities. The other conjecture I wish to make here is far more provocative and tentative. Given that there is evidence that Adam Smith did fall in love multiple times during his life, did Adam Smith not resent these religious restrictions? Were these religious restrictions on his love life perhaps the genesis of Adam Smith’s life-long love and defense of liberty?

“The Ordination of Elders in a Scottish Kirk” by John Henry Lorimer (1891)

I will be resuming my ongoing series of blog posts on “Adam Smith in Love” in the next day or two. In the meantime, here is the latest draft of my paper on Adam Smith’s lost loves and below is a complete catalogue of my previous blog posts on this enigmatic topic: (1) Abstract, (2) Introduction, (3) Exhibit A, (4) Exhibit B, and (5) Exhibit C.

As a law professor myself, this color meme hits close to home! Hat tip: Sarah Burstein, @design_law

I am fascinated by how widespread cheating is at the highest levels of our society, especially in the world of sports. Name me a champion or record breaker in any high-stakes sport, and I will name you a cheater, whether it be Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, or Sammy Sosa (baseball); Tom Brady and Bill Belichick (North American football); Lance Armstrong (cycling); Ben Johnson (Olympics), etc., etc. It now turns out that the world of chess is not immune from this sordid pattern. Check out, for example, this revealing report by Archie Bland for The Guardian. (Hat tip: The Amazing Tyler Cowen.) Here is an excerpt: “Chess.com, the world’s biggest site for online play, said it had seen 12 million new users this year, against 6.5 million last year. The cheating rate has jumped from between 5,000 and 6,000 players banned each month last year to a high of almost 17,000 in August.” But be that as it may, we still have to ask, What is the “optimal level” of cheating in any particular sport?

Artist Credit: Harry Campbell

Alternative Title: Preview of Class #8 (Part 2)

In my previous post, I referred to Ronald Coase’s classic paper “The Problem of Social Cost” and introduced the nucleus of the so-called “Coase Theorem.” Here, I will discuss its philosophical implications. To begin with, when Coase is saying that the problem of harmful effects is a reciprocal one what he means is that in any legal dispute one side to the dispute will suffer “harmful effects” no matter how their dispute is decided. On the one hand, if we permit the owner of the factory to continue to emit smoke (to borrow Coase’s own example), the neighbors will be harmed. If, however, we rule in favor of the neighbors, then the owner of the factory will be harmed. (In the latter case, by the way, it is not just the owner of the factory who will be harmed but also all consumers who wish to purchase the products produced by the factory.)

On one level, then, Coase is simply making a practical point about trade-offs. One must weigh and balance (a) the cost to the neighbors caused by the emission of smoke versus (b) the cost to the factory owner and to consumers that will be caused by preventing the emission of smoke. But at a much deeper level, Coase, perhaps unwittingly, discloses a profound and counter-intuitive insight, for his approach implies that neither party to the dispute has an ex ante right to be free from harmful effects. To say, for example, that the owner of the factory has a right to use the factors of production free from legal or government intervention is not dispositive because one could argue that the neighbors have a right to clean air or to good health. In other words, however we frame the problem–as one involving property rights in the factors of production or moral rights to good health–the problem remains reciprocal. One of the parties will suffer harmful effects however the dispute between them is resolved!

For Coase, then, the key question is not, Who is harmed? Both sides are! Nor is it, How do we avoid harm? For harm is unavoidable. The key question, then, is, How do we decide which side to harm? Now that we have stated the key question in terms of choosing the lesser harm, allow me to conclude with a brief digression regarding John Stuart Mill’s famous “harm principle.” In Mill’s immortal words in his essay “On Liberty”: “The only purpose for which power [i.e. law] can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” But in reality, Mill’s harm principle is incoherent. It is just empty rhetoric, meaningless banter. Why? Because as Coase has taught us, harm is unavoidable. So, to say “do no harm” or “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” is totally unhelpful. Instead, we should ask, what legal rule or course of action produces less harm …

Let’s take a break from the mystery of Adam Smith’s love life in order to preview our next “Advanced Topics” class (BUL5332), which is devoted to something called “the Coase theorem”–named after the late great English economist and legal theorist Ronald H. Coase (b. 1910, d. 2013), who is pictured below. (Rest assured, friends, we will return to Adam Smith next week.) As an aside, one of the most remarkable aspects of Coase’s work is the absence of any advanced mathematics or inscrutable formulas. Instead, Coase relies on logic, plain English, and simple illustrations taken from the common law, such as pollution (the factory smoke example on page 1 of his social cost paper), nuisance (Sturges v. Bridgman or the case of the noisy confectioner on page 2), and cattle trespass (pp. 2-8).

In any case, Professor Coase’s theorem is so central to the field of “law and economics” that I will divide my preview into two parts. Here, I will first describe what Coase did and how he did it. In his 1960 paper on “The Problem of Social Cost,” Professor Coase begins by introducing the problem of “harmful effects,” or what is more commonly called “negative externalities” in economics textbooks. “The standard example,” Coase writes, “is that of a factory, the smoke from which has harmful effects on those occupying neighbouring properties.” In a now-famous passage, Coase makes the following poignant observations:

“The traditional approach has tended to obscure the nature of the choice that has to be made [i.e. the legal choice between A, the owner of the factory, and B, the neighbors]. The question is commonly thought of as one in which A inflicts harm on B and what has to be decided is, How should we restrain A? But this is wrong. We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature. The real question that has to be decided is, Should A be allowed to harm B or should B be allowed to harm A? The [correct solution] is to avoid the more serious harm.”

Coase’s irreverent utterance – “But this is wrong. [This is wrong!] We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature” – is to me the single-most powerful and revolutionary statement in the annals of Anglo-American legal history since the great Oliver Wendell Holmes uttered his famous maxim, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” For Coase is not just repeating the old saw that there are two sides to every dispute; he is saying something much more significant and original and insightful than that. Stay tuned …

Note: This blog post is from my latest paper/work-in-progress: “A Short History of Adam Smith in Love.”

There is yet another significant clue regarding Adam Smith’s love life, a third piece of primary evidence. The source of this particular piece of proof is Henry Mackenzie, a distinguished Scottish lawyer and novelist who, as I mentioned in a previous post, had co-founded–along with Professor Dugald Stewart–the Royal Society of Edinburgh. (For your reference, here is Mackenzie’s Wikipedia page.) It also worth noting that, according to Ian Simpson Ross (2010, p. 227), Mackenzie knew Adam Smith personally and “was much in Smith’s company when he [Smith] lived in Edinburgh in the last twelve years of his life.”

Toward the end of his life, Henry Mackenzie jotted down a series of personal recollections and memorable anecdotes from his lifetime, hoping to have these memories published in a book of “anecdotes and egotisms,” as Mackenzie himself referred to them. Mackenzie’s collection of anecdotes were eventually assembled by Harold William Thompson and published by Oxford University Press in 1927. Among other things, Henry Mackenzie recounts this brief recollection with the tantalizing title of “Smith and Hume in Love”:

This first sentence of Mackenzie’s fragmentary anecdote raises so many intriguing questions! Who is this mysterious “Miss Campbell of ________,” and when exactly did Adam Smith fall in love with her, and what, if anything, became of this romance? More specifically, could “Miss Campbell” be the same “young lady of great beauty and accomplishment” that Professor Dugald Stewart enigmatically refers to in “Note K” of his biography of Adam Smith? Or could she be the same “English lady” referred to in James Currie’s letter of July 1784, the woman that Adam Smith allegedly fell in love with during his visit to Abbeville? Or could she be an entirely different woman; could she be Adam Smith’s third love? Together, these three pieces of proof–Professor Dugald Stewart’s original obscure footnote and personal recollection of Adam Smith’s first love; Dr. James Currie’s hearsay report in his July 1794 letter to Prof. Stewart; and Henry Mackenzie’s brief and incomplete anecdote–point to an inescapable conclusion: Adam Smith had fallen madly in love on at least two occasions during his remarkable life.

In addition to Professor Dugald Stewart’s footnote, which we saw in our previous post, the next piece of relevant evidence relating to Adam Smith’s love life consists of a private letter dated July 14, 1794. This letter is addressed to Professor Stewart himself and is signed by one James Currie (pictured below), a noted medical doctor who was then residing in Liverpool. (For your reference, here is James Currie’s Wikipedia page.) This piece of evidence is important because it contains a second-hand account of a second(!) Adam Smith love affair. Currie’s letter is reproduced in relevant part below the fold:

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Note: This blog post is from my most recent work-in-progress “A Short History of Adam Smith in Love.”

The earliest published account of Adam Smith’s love life appears in Smith’s first biography, which was written by his academic colleague and friend Dugald Stewart (b. 1753, d. 1828), a noted Scottish philosopher and mathematician in his own right, shortly after Smith’s death in 1790. More specifically, this intriguing account appears in an obscure footnote in Professor Dugald Stewart’s 1793/1794 biography of Adam Smith, which he read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in January of 1793 and which he subsequently published in 1794. Below the fold is Professor Stewart’s full report of Adam Smith’s love life:

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