Adam Smith’s version of Virtue Ethics can be traced directly back to Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle. Smith basically skipped Aquinas and Augustine because they were also Catholic theologians, as well as philosophers. Referencing them would not have been looked upon kindly by the Scottish...

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian tracts The Principles of Morals and Legislation and In Defense of Usury contains an explicit attack on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations on pages 8-23 in chapter Two of The Principles of Morals and Legislation, as well as on...

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided a general analysis of virtue ethics (prudence, temperance, courage, justice, benevolence, where Smith combined the virtues of temperance and courage into the virtue of self command) that was applied to all areas of a human society...

Augustine’s argument about the failure of wealth to insure one’s happiness is very similar to Adam Smith’s position except that Augustine compares a lower income or middle income class citizen with a rich citizen while Smith compares a lower income class citizen,or poor citizen, with a...

Adam Smith completely rejected Utilitarianism in any form in his lifetime in his two major books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). This paper will examine the basis for Smith’s rejection of Utilitarianism in the Wealth of Nations (1776) only. The Virtue...

Adam Smith was the first economist, philosopher or mathematician in history to give a clear and specific definition of what the term “uncertainty” meant and to apply it consistently in his analysis of decision making in the Wealth of Nations. The term uncertainty for Smith, as it was for...

Smith's use of the “Invisible Hand,” as pointed out by Gavin Kennedy, is a metaphor provided for the great percentage of readers of the Wealth of Nations whom Smith realized would not be able to grasp the nature of his argument, which was about the ambiguity-uncertainty aversion of the...

Keynes provided an overwhelming argument in his letter of August 27th, 1935 to Harrod that convinced Harrod twice to acknowledge that Keynes had made a “radical reconstruction” of the theory of the rate of interest. Special significance can be given to Keynes's three point post script in...

Both J M Keynes and Adam Smith used very similar ethical, epistemological, philosophical, and economic approaches in their analysis of the conditions that are necessary to maintain a stable, full employment economic system over time. They also agreed upon the nature of the fundamental problem...

Adam Smith and J M Keynes were both practitioners of virtue ethics who rejected Benthamite Utilitarianism. Their axiomatic foundations consist of the following three axioms only. The first is that probabilities are nonadditive, in general. Additivity is a special case. The second is that...