A recent blog entry at Wondering on the Way, a Zen blog, got me thinking:
“The following excerpt from The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan, always provokes reflection when I read it. Which approach to moral activity is less likely to cause harm in the long run? (Note: There is no implied condemnation of any of the four approaches as unworthy, just questions about freedom and the roots of morality.)
Imagine a group of four people, each of whom is strenuously engaged in some charity work or some useful social or political activities, each from purely altruistic motives. Someone asks them: “Why do you work so hard helping your fellow man?” We get the following responses: The first says, “I regard it as my duty and moral obligation to help my fellow man”. The second replies: “Moral obligations? To hell with moral obligations! It’s just that I’ll be God damned if I will stand around seeing my fellow man oppressed without my doing something about it!” The third replies: “I also have never been very much concerned with things like duties or moral obligations. It’s just that I feel extremely sorry for these people and long to help them”. The fourth says: “Why to I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that’s all I can say.”
I agree with Jeb’s comment to his own entry (emphasis mine):
I have seen very few fourth category people, but I stand in awe when I do; it really does not seem to occur to them that they would do anything different, despite rather serious inconvenience to them. I have found myself there a few times; I was a bit surprised, though. Though Smullyan didn’t intend it, the examples he chose seem more like stages than necessarily different ways of thinking. Perhaps some get stuck at a particular stage. The fourth stage guy doesn’t see an “ought to,” a “angry solidarity,” or a “sorry for.” He acts out of the freedom of his own nature, confident and secure in the “goodness” rooted in his bones rather than feelings or concepts.
The “inherent goodness” in “fourth stage guy” (who Buddhists will say has become a ‘civilized man’ and is well on his way toward enlightenment) reminds me of Adam Smith’s commonly misunderstood and much-maligned philosophy, which I think stems largely from the ‘invisible hand’ concept in The Wealth of Nations being much more widely known than a little-known, superb little book he wrote 17 years earlier called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Simply put: the ‘ideal man’ in Smith’s conception is not a heartless capitalist who does everything for his own self-interest, but a ‘moralist’ who has a ‘natural sympathy’ for fellow human beings – not unlike the “fourth stage guy” in Smullyan’s example (or at least a “third stage guy” if he is still ‘conscious’ of that sympathy).
A recent blog entry at Wondering on the Way, a Zen blog, got me thinking:
“The following excerpt from The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan, always provokes reflection when I read it. Which approach to moral activity is less likely to cause harm in the long run? (Note: There is no implied condemnation of any of the four approaches as unworthy, just questions about freedom and the roots of morality.)
Imagine a group of four people, each of whom is strenuously engaged in some charity work or some useful social or political activities, each from purely altruistic motives. Someone asks them: “Why do you work so hard helping your fellow man?” We get the following responses: The first says, “I regard it as my duty and moral obligation to help my fellow man”. The second replies: “Moral obligations? To hell with moral obligations! It’s just that I’ll be God damned if I will stand around seeing my fellow man oppressed without my doing something about it!” The third replies: “I also have never been very much concerned with things like duties or moral obligations. It’s just that I feel extremely sorry for these people and long to help them”. The fourth says: “Why to I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that’s all I can say.”
I agree with Jeb’s comment to his own entry (emphasis mine):
I have seen very few fourth category people, but I stand in awe when I do; it really does not seem to occur to them that they would do anything different, despite rather serious inconvenience to them. I have found myself there a few times; I was a bit surprised, though. Though Smullyan didn’t intend it, the examples he chose seem more like stages than necessarily different ways of thinking. Perhaps some get stuck at a particular stage. The fourth stage guy doesn’t see an “ought to,” a “angry solidarity,” or a “sorry for.” He acts out of the freedom of his own nature, confident and secure in the “goodness” rooted in his bones rather than feelings or concepts.
The “inherent goodness” in “fourth stage guy” (who Buddhists will say has become a ‘civilized man’ and is well on his way toward enlightenment) reminds me of Adam Smith’s commonly misunderstood and much-maligned philosophy, which I think stems largely from the ‘invisible hand’ concept in The Wealth of Nations being much more widely known than a little-known, superb little book he wrote 17 years earlier called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Simply put: the ‘ideal man’ in Smith’s conception is not a heartless capitalist who does everything for his own self-interest, but a ‘moralist’ who has a ‘natural sympathy’ for fellow human beings – not unlike the “fourth stage guy” in Smullyan’s example (or at least a “third stage guy” if he is still ‘conscious’ of that sympathy).
Excerpts from this good review of Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment should make this clearer:
Smith, in Rothschild’s account, has been badly misunderstood. According to the common caricature, he is a conservative, a crude enthusiast of laissez-faire economics, a “cold-souled enemy of the poor,” “a relentless proselytizer of free enterprise,” The Wealth of Nations (1776) in “an extended and relentless critique of government.” In fact, Rothschild argues, there is nothing crude or relentless… about Smith’s economics, or about the larger and quintessentially Enlightenment philosophical system in which he unfolded them.
The “‘real’ Smith,” Rothschild argues, is simultaneously an economist and a moralist, who, in his other masterwork, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), derived virtue from the passions, and discovered the ground of moral judgment in our natural sympathy for our fellow human beings, and in our imaginative capacity to adopt the perspective of an impartial spectator and to see things from their point of view. The real Smith is a progressive, a friend of the poor, for whom the relief of poverty is one of government’s primary responsibilities. The real Smith is a comprehensive thinker who saw the close connection between sentiment and conduct, and to whom the disciplinary boundaries of contemporary intellectual life were foreign, because he understood that the spheres of human conduct—economic, moral, political, religious—are interwoven and mutually dependent. The real Smith is a courageous philosopher who believed that commercial and liberal society would foster the ideal of an “unfrightened mind,” and who developed his comprehensive account of human nature and human conduct without recourse to the certainties of religious faith or a fixed standard of human perfection.
Even the father of laissez-faire capitalism promoted ‘virtues’ and ‘moral judgment’ as important ingredients in our modern economic life. In today’s materialistic world in which more and more people are discovering that money really can’t guarantee happiness, it’s time that we pause to reflect on what Adam Smith really wanted to say, and whether we have been too dismissive and condescending on religions and philosophies that focus more on spiritual wellbeing than on material wealth.
As the reviewer of Rothschild’s book concludes, “…the danger posed by the veneration of the commercial spirit in our own day is that we will forget that the increasingly quaint-sounding anthem of the 1960s was intended as a criticism of money, not as a criticism of love.”