----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
Actually what Smith is talking about in this passage from the Wealth 
of Nations is the duty of the government to prevent the spread of 
cowardice in the population---the reference to public health is an 
analogy. This is a striking passage for we moderns, for it proposes a 
reason for public action that has to do neither with efficiency nor 
with equity. It is public action to prevent the deformation of character. 
It is part of the evidence that Smith's liberalism was qualified with a 
lingering debt to civic humanism. 
 
However, on one reading of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith may in  
this passage be giving a spillover/ efficiency  make-over of a  
civic-humanist theme. If character is shaped by the need for social  
approbation--if that's what the impartial spectator is all about in the  
earlier work --then when I become  cowardly,  I change by a small bit, the  
composition of the  impartial spectator  in a direction 
that  makes it more approving of cowardice in others, and so contribute to  
the spread of cowardice in the population. In just the same way, my failure 
to be vaccinated makes it that much more likely that others catch a disease 
from me. The government has an externality-based reason to subsidize  
vaccination in the one case, and cowardice in the other. (Also, the  
externality in both cases is "public": we all simultaneously have  a  
greater chance of catching a moral or physical disease, respectively. 
 
(I think there is another reading of the Impartial Spectator that rules out 
this interpretation, but I think Smith never clearly resolved on one or the 
other -- both co-exist.) 
 
Kevin Quinn 
Bowling Green State University 
 
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]