Ryan Patrick Hanley

Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the most important elements of Smith's thinking about religion: namely his treatment of ‘the natural principles of religion’ in TMS 3.5. What follows aims to reconstruct this treatment and thereby shed light on what Smith might have meant by ‘the natural principles of religion’, and how he understood the relationship of religion and morality more generally – an understanding, it is argued, that significantly differs from Hume's, and reveals Smith to have been a critic of Hume's vision of the relationship of religion to morality, for all their agreements on other fronts

Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illuminates marriage's role in a liberal society of free and equal persons. Third, in appropriating Rousseau's egalitarianism for his theory of marriage, Kant transfers his foundational concern with equality from the public to the private sphere: a move that suggests liberal political institutions require more than mere commitment to procedural neutrality for their perpetuation but require also a commitment to equality best cultivated by certain types of private associations and personal relationships.

The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation can be found in the modern aspiration to judge the outcome of institutions or processes only with regard to efficiency. While the tenet that efficiency is preferable to inefficiency is central to Scottish social thought, the Scots regarded maximization of quantifiable returns as only one among three ends that well-functioning institutions and processes promote. Scottish social science speaks also of virtue and liberty where ours speaks only of utility. This essay develops these differences in three sections. Its first section compares Scottish and contemporary understandings of social science methods. Its second section examines how these differing methodologies inform their differing conceptions of human flourishing and particularly led Scottish social science to focus on virtue and freedom in addition to wealth. The essay concludes by calling attention to three movements in social science today which might help us recover the best features of Scottish social science

A number of prominent moral philosophers and political theorists have recently called for a recovery of love. But what do we mean when we speak of love today? Love's Enlightenment examines four key conceptions of other-directedness that transformed the meaning of love and helped to shape the way we understand love today: Hume's theory of humanity, Rousseau's theory of pity, Smith's theory of sympathy, and Kant's theory of love. It argues that these four Enlightenment theories are united by a shared effort to develop a moral psychology that can provide both justificatory and motivational grounds for concern for others in the absence of recourse to theological or transcendental categories. In this sense, each theory represents an effort to redefine the love of others that used to be known as caritas or agape - a redefinition that came with benefits and costs that have yet to be fully appreciated.

Magnanimity is often regarded as the heroic virtue of glory-seeking warriors and honour-loving aristocrats. But in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents magnanimity as a civic rather than a heroic virtue. By attending to Aristotle's often overlooked accounts of his indifference to honour and his attitudes towards fortune and towards others, I aim to show that so far from seeking only glory or self-sufficiency, the magnanimous man realizes his true greatness and nobility in his beneficence towards his fellow citizens