CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

study and lecture, taking up in 1751 the Chair of Logic at the University of
Glasgow at age 28 and the next year the Chair of Moral Philosophy. In 1759
he published his remarkable book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and solidified
his position as an enormously popular teacher and respected philosopher.
Lecture notes taken by his students continued to turn up for years, as
late as 1958.
In 1763 Smith resigned his professorship in order to accept a lucrative
assignment accompanying Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch,
on a two-and-a-half-year tour of Europe, a position that paid him
£500 annually during these years and the same amount as a pension
thereafter. Returning in 1766, he devoted 10 years to completing his outstanding
treatise entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, fortuitously coincident with the
American Declaration of Independence, making this a pivotal date in
world history.
THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
The Anguish of Adam Smith 283
At age 36 Adam Smith offered his contribution to the fervent explorations
of many philosophers of the Enlightenment period who were seeking a basis
for morality in analysis of alternative ethical systems rather than in religion.
Upon what do our concepts of right and wrong, approval and
disapproval, rest? Theology was seen as an unsatisfactory source. This left
human judgment as the remaining locus, and two broad schools of thought
were actively pursued. One school sought structures for morality in notions
of general or personal well-being and gravitated toward identification with
Utilitarianism, as is addressed in the next chapter. The other school sought
structures that were intuitively appropriate regardless of time and place,
and they became grouped around a Moral Sense doctrine of ethics. Smith
was influenced by his teacher Francis Hutcheson at the University of Glasgow,
a leading figure in the Moral Sense school who believed that morality
can be inwardly divined. But Smith found this not altogether satisfying,
and he instead fixed the essence of his theory to the interactions that take
place continuously between people. Thus he constructed his program
mainly around the principal of personal sympathy operating within its
larger social fabric.