Adam Smith’s moral sentimentalism and jurisprudence: incorporation of justice and utility

This paper works to elucidate the essence of Smith’s natural jurisprudence. However, as he never wrote down any documents or books of jurisprudence himself, this paper starts to draw an implicit picture of his jurisprudence by using his Lectures of jurisprudence from his students’ note. His jurisprudence plays an important role as a key to render consistent Adam Smith’s two main works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nation. In addressing this problem, what becomes clear is that Smith’s sentimentalism is the core part of his jurisprudence and his well-balanced attitude between justice and utility can bridge the gap between morals and merits corresponding to the two main books. The latter half of this paper clarifies the flexibility of moral sentiments with propriety as more suitable to handling complex legal affairs than principles of traditional natural law theory. Then, we can see that Smith’s jurisprudence, in line with moral sentimentalism as a unique naturalism, is totally different from traditional natural law theory and from naïve naturalism. Subsequently, I illustrate the “sphere of reason” of Smith’s jurisprudence, which is similar to John MacDowell calls “second nature”, unlike naïve law of nature. In conclusion, Smith’s natural jurisprudence based on moral sentimentalism demonstrates a flexible and applicable framework for complicated affairs in modern civilization, and it is a trial to get “law” back to ordinary people from rationalistic elitism.