----------------- 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]