Love Thyself

The philosophical apostasy of self-interest did not go unnoticed by the Church of England, but elicited more cooptation than confrontation. In his Rolls Sermons, preached in the period immediately following publication of the Fable of the Bees, Bishop Joseph Butler reframed Mande­ville’s argument by arguing that self love, could, under some circumstances, represent a virtue rather than a vice: a man may be impulsively tempted to indulge an immoral desire, but if he reflects in a calm and considered way upon the likely outcome, he will realize that the virtuous decision serves his long run interests.

Like Shaftesbury, Butler believed duty and self-interest would always coincide. Unlike Shaftesbury, he invoked both the prospect of salvation and the commandments of Christ. One must love oneself even as one loves one’s neighbors. There is, in Butler’s view, no trade-off between the two. Providence itself ensures that self-regarding actions lead to unintended social goods.³⁰

Butler’s brethren chimed in on the same note. Reverend Joseph Tucker anticipated Adam Smith even more directly: ‘‘The Self-Love and Self­Interest of each Individual will prompt him to seek such Ways of Gain, Trades and Occupations of Life, as by serving himself, will promote the public Welfare at the same Time.’’³¹ The use of the masculine pronoun was hardly incidental. Neither Butler nor Tucker urged women to ways of gain, to trades or occupations. Most religious instruction for women urged them to love their families, not themselves. Women’s primary virtue was ‘‘domes­tic love and Care, as the first Duty of her life, the very purpose of her being’’.³² Only among evangelical groups such as the Methodists were women allowed to preach on the same terms as men—and to generalize the feminine rhetoric of love and care.

Anglican approval gave the discourse of male self-interest a powerful boost.³³ Still, disagreement with established religious views could hurt a man’s career. Frances Hutcheson, who held the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, was arraigned before the Presbyterian Church for promoting the dangerous doctrine that the standard of moral goodness was the ‘‘promotion of the happiness of others’’, which could be ascertained without God’s explicit assistance.³⁴ Hutcheson succeeded professionally in part because he placed many of his ideas within a Christian context. David Hume was not so lucky. Though a great fan of Bishop Butler, his efforts to develop what he called ‘‘the moral sciences’’, along with his religious skepticism, contributed to his failure to secure the Chair of Moral Philoso­phy at Edinburgh in 1744.³⁵

Hume developed Butler's arguments in more secular terms, reassuring his readers that self-interested men were not necessarily selfish and describing friendship and generosity as human passions. Criticizing Hobbes and Locke as advocates of the ‘‘selfish system of morals'' he wrote, ‘‘I esteem the man whose self-love, by whatever means, is so directed as to give him a concern for others and render him serviceable to society, as I hate or despise him who has no regard to anything beyond his own gratifications and enjoyments.''³⁶ In another famous quote, he referred to the ‘‘particle of the dove'' that softened the elements of wolf and serpent in human nature.³⁷

Another influential figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Fergu­son, reiterated Shaftesbury's argument that benevolence gave pleasure to the giver, as well as the receiver.³⁸ The image suggests a pleasurable intercourse, an exchange in which the boundaries of the self become, at least temporarily, redefined. Adam Smith's first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, lay squarely within this optimistic tradition.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.⁴⁰

Smith dismissed Mandeville as a scandalous thinker and adopted a far more refined approach. In the first chapter of the Moral Sentiments he announced that it was rude to eat voraciously, and that all strong expressions of sexual passion were indecent, even between married persons.⁴¹ He praised sym­pathy, but argued that feelings alone mattered little: They should always be refracted through the eyes of an impartial spectator.⁴² He explicitly con­trasted the emotional (and feminine) trait of humanity with the moral (and masculine) trait of generosity, echoing the traditional distinction between the natural and the social.⁴³

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. The fair sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity... Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow­feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune.⁴⁴

On matters pertaining to women's rights, Smith was more conservative than his most famous Scottish predecessors. In his lectures on moral philosophy, later amplified and published in 1755, Francis Hutcheson had rebutted Locke’s argument that men had a natural right to command within the family, and criticized civil laws that deprived women of property, as well as attacking the sexual double standard. Even David Hume had spoken out briefly but decisively against ‘‘male tyranny’’.⁴⁵ Smith never expressed opin­ions on such matters, and in one of his few references to sexual intercourse, described any breach of female chastity as an ‘‘irreversible disaster’’.⁴⁶

Either because he was a bachelor or because he wanted to avoid mention of the bodily passions, Smith seldom alluded to the love of a husband for his wife, or vice versa.