Abstract

"There is in Ethicks as in most Sciences," Thomas Reid told the students in his moral philosophy class, "a Speculative and a practical Part. … The proper object of the Theory of Morals is to explain the Constitution of the human Mind so far as regards Morals, that is to explain the Moral and active Powers of the human Mind." He continued: "The various Theorists disagree not about what is to be accounted virtuous Conduct but why it is so to be accounted." It was as a theorist of morals that, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith distinguished between the questions of, first, what virtue consists in, and, secondly, "by what...