(The Muir portrait, circa 1800, unknown author. Wikimedia Commons)
(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
The competitive nature of commercial activity in markets can produce significant material and social advances, bringing about unprecedented enhancements in human life. But the division of labour also has a dangerous consequence: workers engaged in endlessly repetitive and increasingly focused, microscale tasks will be intellectually and spiritually damaged. To ameliorate this, Adam Smith proposed that, along with defence of the realm and the administration of justice, governments should support a system of schooling that would protect workers’ moral lives. As Forman-Barzilai has summarized:
Smith’s orientation to modernity was one of genuine ambivalence – [he ultimately embraced] the rise of commerce for its material benefits, its extension of human liberty, and its “ennobling byproducts” … but [he also acknowledged] and at times directly confront[ed] the profound indignities and cruelties of modern commercial life, [and sought] to counter-balance some of them through the ‘expense’ of public education (Forman-Barzilai, 2010, p. 34. Square brackets: my additions/modifications).
Education is essential to Smith’s account of, and moral concern with, the functioning of well-governed societies: formal education, building upon the fact of social learning, is essential to protect both workers moral lives and to facilitate the continued running of society itself. It is by education that the continued smooth functioning of society, which amounts to ‘peaceable coexistence’ – the ‘good’ for Smith – is achieved. This is achieved by virtue of negotiated social interaction and learning. Education is essential to well-governed societies: it is a ‘liberal and humanizing activity’ (Okensberg Rorty, 1998, p. 7). It ‘conduces to a mild mannered, reflective, and “discursive” society, capable of judicious civic deliberation’ (Okensberg Rorty, 1998, p. 7).
‘Universal opulence’, one of the two greatest blessings that human beings can possess (the other being freedom) is brought about in well-governed societies by the division of labour. Somewhat optimistically, in such societies, ‘Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for … and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society’ (WN I.i.10, p. 22). It was Smith’s view that, ‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and loged’ (WN I.viii, p. 96).
Smith was an advocate of equity or social justice for both moral and practical reasons: social cohesion, aided in its realization by education, is paramount for Smith, and he goes so far as to say that ‘The peace and order of society, is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable’ (TMS VI.ii.1.2I.20, p. 226). These utilitarian aspects of Smith’s thinking; namely, that a society cannot be flourishing and happy when a greater part of its members are poor and miserable, and that the peace and order of society is more important than relief of the miserable, should be contextualized. Smith believed in human benevolence, he also thought that we have a duty to our fellow human creatures: he advocated what he called ‘the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice’ (WN IV.ix.3, p. 664) whereby people should be allowed to ‘pursue [their] own interests in their own way’ (WN IV.ix.3, p. 664. Square brackets: my additions).
Such views, combined with his empirically grounded pragmatism and his desire to produce an accurate moral psychology, recognising that human morality is not best characterized by the adoption of single principles, led him to the view that what should happen is that the Poor Laws should be reformed to allow workers to move between parishes in order to find work. As a result, ‘relief of the miserable’ would be something that would better follow upon reform and the spread of freedom, which would serve to create even wider spread social cohesion. Poor relief would not be the result of piecemeal acts, which might prove destabilising, but rather would come about through wider liberalisation.
Smith’s concern for equity was even more pressing given his belief in the general equity of natural ability. He says, we recall, that ‘The difference between the most dissimilar characters [after all], between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education’ (WN I.ii.4, pp. 28-29. Square brackets: my addition). Given that there is no segment of society more naturally suited to work in factories than any other, equity would dictate that government ought to step in and support compulsory education to combat the ‘torpor’ of workers minds and to generally counteract the negative effects of the division of labour. Doing so would, on Smith’s account, generate the ‘good’.
References
Forman-Barzilai, F. (2010), Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oksenberg Rorty, A. (1998), The Ruling History of Education. In Oksenberg Rorty, A. (ed.) Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, A. (1976), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (eds) R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
