In Adam Smith’s Own Words: The Role of Virtues in the Relationship Between Free Market Economies and Societal Flourishing, A Semantic Network Data-Mining Approach
Johan Graafland and
Thomas R. Wells ()
Additional contact information
Thomas R. Wells: Leiden University
Journal of Business Ethics, 2021, vol. 172, issue 1, No 3, 42 pages
Abstract:
Abstract Among business ethicists, Adam Smith is widely viewed as the defender of an amoral if not anti-moral economics in which individuals’ pursuit of their private self-interest is converted by an ‘invisible hand’ into shared economic prosperity. This is often justified by reference to a select few quotations from The Wealth of Nations. We use new empirical methods to investigate what Smith actually had to say, firstly about the relationship between free market institutions and individuals’ moral virtues, and secondly about the further relationship between virtues and societal flourishing. We show with more quantitative precision than traditional scholarship that the invisible hand reading dramatically misrepresents both the nuance and the sum of Smith’s analysis. Smith paid a great deal of attention to a flourishing society’s dependence on virtues, including the non-self-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence, and he worried also about their fragility in the face of the changed incentives and social conditions of commercial society.
Keywords: Adam smith; Doux-commerce; Societal flourishing; Self-destruction; Semantic network data-mining; Virtues (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-020-04521-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:172:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-020-04521-5
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-020-04521-5
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman
More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().