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Journal of Business Ethics

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24.04.2017 | Original Paper

Adam Smith’s Philosophy of Science: Economics as Moral Imagination

verfasst von: Matthias P. Hühn

Erschienen in: Journal of Business Ethics | Ausgabe 1/2019

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Abstract

The paper takes a fresh look at two essays that Adam Smith wrote at the very beginning of his career. In these essays, Smith explains his philosophy of science, which is social constructivist. A social constructivist reading of Smith strengthens the scholarly consensus that The Wealth of Nations (WN) needs to be interpreted in light of the general moral theory he explicates in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), as the two essays and TMS stress the importance of the same concepts: e.g., moral imagination, the socially embedded individual, and humility. The connecting tissue between all three works is made up of sentiments and values. Smith regards the socially embedded human as the agent in all three realms (knowledge creation, morality, economics), and humans are always driven by values. Smith not only conceives of economics as an applied moral philosophy, but also bases both research areas on a view of knowledge creation that stresses specific epistemic values. If mainstream economic theory (and business theory that is based on it) wants to have any claim to Adam Smith, it would have to change not only what it argues but also how it argues. Economists would have to replace the language of mathematics with the language and logic of moral philosophy and give values centre stage.

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Another area where epistemic values play a role is research output, i.e. knowledge. I will not refer to this in this paper.

I will explain later that mainstream economics has very strong epistemic values: like all positivists they assume that they know the Truth, and their object of study, man, is assumed to be radically selfish.

I would see creativity, only in conjunction with conformity with observable facts, as the other important scientific virtue.

Constructivism is a wide range of ideas that have been around for thousands of years as Gergen (1999) points out. I stress this point because to some it may be a far-fetched idea to see constructivist ideas 200 years before they have been formulated in greater coherence and been labelled as such.

In the last edition of TMS, Smith stressed that the spectator was a mix of God's unchanging morality and of society's changing morality. Like many aging philosophers, he perceived public morality to be deteriorating and wanted to add God's values as an anchor.

Autopoiesis introduced by Varela et al. (1974) is a central concept in constructivism and refers to the ability of living systems not only to offset entropy but to self (auto) create (poiesis) the very structures that enable the system to do so.

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Titel: Adam Smith’s Philosophy of Science: Economics as Moral Imagination
verfasst von: Matthias P. Hühn
Publikationsdatum: 24.04.2017
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Journal of Business Ethics / Ausgabe 1/2019
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3548-9

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