‘so weak and imperfect a creature as man’

Abstract

How do human societies hold together? What are the minimum conditions for their continuance? Moral Sentiments addresses these questions. Although Smith does much more, our focus necessarily must be narrower than that of a comprehensive account of his entire corpus. I discuss in plain language selected ideas from Smith’s moral philosophy without showing the development of his ideas in the context of past and contemporary philosophers, thereby unavoidably missing out a great deal of the contents of Moral Sentiments.