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In addition to being an academic enterprise, the development of conjectural history was intended to provide an account of how social change might have occurred that was more closely related to the available evidence than that of the contract theorists. Smith and his fellow Scots were not the first to attempt something like this, and it is worth pausing to consider the impact of two such influential accounts as they help to set the scene for Smith’s own moral philosophy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review (1756) where he discusses contemporary philosophy, the Encyclopédie, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755).⁴⁶ In it Smith compares Rousseau to Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), the author of the controversial Fable of the Bees, and situates him in the context of a debate about the possibility of virtuous self-interest and its tension with the idea of socially directed morality.

Rousseau had adopted a deliberately contrarian attitude to the Enlightenment notions of reason, science, and progress. In his Discourse and elsewhere, he made the case that the development of modern civilization was not an example of progress but rather a tale of the corruption of humanity from an original innocence to a selfish and vanity-driven modernity. Rousseau’s account dwelt on the idea that the process of socialization had created perverted value systems grounded in envy and self-conceit, where pride and concern for social status had transformed humanity for the worse. As Smith rightly noted, Rousseau’s idea was very similar to that of Mandeville, who had extended his original satirical poem about a beehive, which charted the beneficial unintended consequences of selfish behaviour (burglars make work for locksmiths), into a theory of morality that reduced moral behaviour to a desire for social approbation and an aversion to social embarrassment (the moral virtues are flattery begot on pride). Mandeville’s conclusion that private vices created public benefits signals an issue that clearly came to fascinate Smith: what happens when intentions and outcomes do not obviously cohere?

These ideas are interesting because they provide us with the initial jumping-off point of the Moral Sentiments. Rousseau and Mandeville had focused on how a set of shared beliefs and institutions could emerge from social interaction: for Rousseau, the result was a moral abomination and a deeply corrupted society; for Mandeville, the result was the cynical realization of the unintended generation of wealth and power. Smith had before him a mode of explanation that promised to allow a scientific, evolutionary, and naturalistic account of how human moral practice emerged as an unintended consequence of social life, but he also had before him two quite different conclusions about whether this was necessarily a good thing.

It is clear that Smith had been thinking about the relationship between self-regarding and other-regarding behaviour for quite some time. His teacher, Francis Hutcheson, devoted considerable energy to attacking Mandeville’s theory and developed his own account of a unique mental faculty, a moral sense, that discerned moral truth in the same way that sight and hearing discern external stimuli. Hutcheson believed that the characteristic principle of our moral sense was benevolence, and so Mandeville’s account of the generation of morality was back to front. Hutcheson was contributing to a debate within a particular strain of British moral philosophy. This strain held that morality was best understood as an emotional experience rather than a rational experience. Thinkers such as Lord Shaftesbury who stressed benevolence and self-command might have differed greatly from those like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) who stressed passion and self-interest, but they all operated on the assumption that it was feelings, passions, and emotions that moved human beings. The challenge for these moralists was to come up with a way to reconcile the fact that individuals were moved by feelings with the fact that morality was outward looking. Hutcheson’s attempt at this involved positing a unique mental faculty or sense that was part of human nature. Joseph Butler (1692–1752), on the other hand, sought to distance human morality from self-interest through a reflective process of conscience. They were all involved in seeking an answer to the same basic challenge: how can morality be explained by the sentiments without reducing it to whatever makes us feel good? It was this debate that Smith stepped into when he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759.