The Mediation Between Stoic Virtue and Humean Utility: Contributions from Adam Smith
Renata Biana da Silva Smith generally recognized the moral importance of both views (stoic virtue and humean utility). However, he also pointed out the weaknesses demonstrated by each, seeking to promote the use of a new principle that could reconcile classical virtue with the need to consider “self-love”. Virtue theory, associated with the stoics and […]
Rediscovering Adam Smith’s “Three Primary Virtues”
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own inter-esteem. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”. It is with this […]
Virtue as a roundabout way to Eudaimonia
In their article, Michael Brady and Clark Tang analyze the virtues within the writings of two philosophers about 22 centuries apart and geographically thousands of miles apart: the Chinese Confucius and the Scottish Adam Smith. In the Analects, a book in which texts attributed to Confucius and his disciples come together, and in the final […]