Adam Smith, who is more remembered for his having written the Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, was also a moral philosopher. Although Smith’s allusion to the phrase “invisible hand” has subsequently been distorted by opponents of government regulation of the economy in the United States to support their minimalist ideology, his writings need to be read in historical context of the time in which he lived.
Smith wrote as a early participant and contributor to the evolution of liberalism. A keen observer of the newly emerging market economy, Smith opposed mercantalism and he chafed at the heavy hand that the ruling British aristocracy, whose wealth was based upon ownership of land, and their continued control over political and economic affairs. Smith wanted to reign in their political and economic power. However, as one steeped in tradition of communitarianism, were he alive today, Smith would not know what to make of the likes of Donald Trump, Rand Paul and the others who apotheosize the marketplace and deny the right of government, as an agent of the public interest, to restrain the excesses of unbridled capitalism.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith described what we today would call empathy: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not
those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.”
In the past century, the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have contributed to our understanding of the importance of empathy. Based upon Piaget’s modeling, Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development that identified six stages of moral reasoning through which each of us, as a result of discussion and dialogue with one another after consideration of a variety of moral dilemmas, and subsequent reflection, is able to progress.
For Kohlberg, the pre-conventional level of moral reasoning is most common in children, although his studies documented that many adults fail to progress beyond this level of reasoning in which the morality of any particular action is judged by its direct consequences, “Don’t do X because you will be punished.” Kohlberg’s writings and studies conducted by adherents to his school of psychology have also documented that a substantial number of adults have not evolved in their moral reasoning beyond Stage 2, which is epitomized by pure ego-driven, self-interest, “What’s in it for me?”
Kohlberg contended that as adults progressed beyond an under-standing of morality rooted in preoccupation with the satisfaction of one’s own needs, adults begin to comprehend
broader principles based upon an understanding of the importance of reciprocity and our mutual obligations to one another.
At Stage Five, Kohlberg argued, “Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis upon procedural rules for reaching consensus. Aside from what is constitutionally and democratically agreed upon, right action is a matter of personal values and opinions. The result is an emphasis upon the ‘legal point of view,’ but with an additional emphasis upon the possibility of changing the law in terms of rational considerations of social utility (rather than freezing it in terms of stage 4 ‘law and order’). Outside the legal realm, free agreement, and contract, is the binding element of obligation. The ‘official’ morality of the American government and Constitution is at this stage.”
Finally, at Stage Six, Kant’s categorical imperative becomes the paramount, operative principle. As Kohlberg defined that stage, “Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments. At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity, and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. It is also at this stage that the full implications of empathy, as human quality, manifest themselves.”
Adam Smith’s recognition of the importance of empathy and Kohlberg’s subsequent contributions to our understanding of moral reasoning provide valuable insights that elucidate much of what’s wrong with what passes for discussions about American politics and economics today. In an article published by the Associated Press, Hope Yen reports that “four out of five US adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.” Yen traces the cause of this phenomenon to “an increasingly globalized economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs are the reasons for the trend, according to a recent Associated Press survey and other economic reports.”
Yen’s article chronicles economic hardship that has risen among whites and their increasing pessimism “about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy ‘poor.'” She quotes one Irene Salyers, age 52,”I think it’s going to get worse.”‘ Ms. Salyers is described as a resident of Buchanan County, Va., located in a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Yen reports that Ms. Salyers currently helps to run a fruit and vegetable stand with her current boyfriend, but, because the business doesn’t generate much income, they live mostly off of government disability checks. Ms. Yen also quotes William Julius Wilson, of Harvard University, “It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities . . . are increasingly due to economic class position.”
Professor Wilson’s concern has been echoed by Paul Krugman. In a New York Times op ed column entitled “Stranded by Sprawl,” Krugman notes that “Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities. Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil” but that “in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility – the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents – is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit.”
Paul Krugman observed that “Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger,” and he described a study from the Equality of Opportunity Project that confirmed previous studies of social mobility
“all such studies find that these days America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity, actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced nations.”
The existence and tolerance of widespread misery and rising economic inequality throughout the United States have been propelled by the lingering effects of the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, the loss of trillions of dollars of investments by Americans during the accompanying stock market meltdown, the housing foreclosure crisis, pervasive unemployment and underemployment among minorities, young men and women, and adults between the ages of 45 and 65 who have now been become collateral damage. The existence of these phenomena must be viewed as profound moral issues that cry out for redress.
The third and final iteration of the Kant’s categorical imperative states, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.” Our current economic system violates that injunction because it treats employees as a disposable means to what the advocates of unrestrained capitalism view as a more important end – the pursuit of profits.
The most zealous defenders of the current status-quo who are among the winners in our economy insist that the losers have no one to lame but themselves, because they lack initiative. Their lack of empathy suggests indifference or self-absorption. But what about the rest of us? How does one explain our insouciance in the face of so much suffering? Aren’t our fates and those of our children and grandchildren inextricably linked to the fates of the millions of our neighbors now mired in economic hardship and despair?