Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is best known for the idea in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations that self-interested behavior leads to the best outcome for society as if through the working ...

So-called evolutionary error theorists, such as Michael Ruse and Richard Joyce, have argued that naturalistic accounts of the moral sentiments lead us to adopt an ...

Reviewing Prof. Glory Liu’s “Adam Smith’s America” (Books, Dec. 17), Barton Swaim shares his judgment that Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” “isn’t very good,” adding: “It’s mostly unreadable, to ...

The oft-cited theatricality of Adam Smith's impartial spectator is contentious and rests on a generalized notion of theatre. This essay argues both that Smith, like his predecessors in sentimental ...

Where do your moral values come from? The intuitive answer—and a popular assumption both at large and within the field of psychology—is that you learn morality from your culture, usually by way of ...

A portrait of Adam Smith, 1795. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers ...

Despite all the attention to domestic oil drilling, Obama and McCain are not that far apart on climate change—both candidates support a cap-and-trade system to limit U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. And ...

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ...

During this time he published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). For three years (1763-1766) he traveled throughout Europe as the private tutor of a young British nobleman, ...