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Fri Mar 31 17:18:26 2006 |
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----------------- 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
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