A Smithian virtue-based justification o f money on the ground that it promotes freedom can be found in the same argument for justification o f the independence:
‘commerce and manufactures gradually introduced other and good government, and with them, the liberty and security o f individuals, among the inhabitants o f the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state o f war with their neighbours, and o f servile dependency upon their superiors’ (Smith, 1993 [1776], p. 107, italics added). Smith suggests that commerce promotes freedom in terms o f being emancipated from a state o f war with neighbours and from the domination o f superiors. Smith also considers that the liberty and security o f individuals are rather
compatible with the welfare o f the public: the former indirectly results in the latter:
A revolution o f the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders o f people, who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive o f the greatest proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit o f their own pedlar principle o f turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got.
Neither o f them had either knowledge or foresight o f that great revolution which the folly o f the one, and the industry o f the other, was gradually bringing about.
Smith gives a reason for the compatibility between wealth seeking and moral virtue, from a viewpoint that acting from one’s self interest indirectly promotes the public happiness, which is made o f individual’s independence and freedom from each other.
While commerce may indirectly promote the negative feature o f freedom (e.g. the freedom from a state o f war with neighbours and from the domination o f superiors), it does not promote, and even impedes the positive feature offreedom (e.g. the freedom
to help others or to realise one’s potentiality). Because the spirit o f commerce is fundamentally incompatible with the spirit o f altruism. Montesquieu, a contemporary as Smith in the 18 century, argues as follows:
Peace is the natural effect o f trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling: and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities. But i f the spirit o f commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit o f commerce, they make a traffic o f all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only fo r money. The spirit o f trade produces in the mind o f a man a certain sense o f exact justice, opposite, on the one hand, to robbery, and on the other to those moral virtues which fo rbid our always adhering rigidly to the rules o f private interest, and suffer us to neglect this fo r the advantage o f others. (Montesquieu, 1914 [1748], Book XX, Chapter 2, italics added)
Nations are instrumentally reciprocal through trade in respect that nations are related with each other from their own self-interest.55 Nations are free from an unequal relationship o f domination — i.e. nations can freely trade each other, freely agree on pricing, and freely choose to serve the other in order to serve one’s own purposes. But this instrumental reciprocity is incompatible with a real sense o f mutuality, which involves the mutual enhancing relationship between free individuals — i.e. individuals recognise each other not as a means or an instrumental value, but as an end or a final value, and freely help each other to enhance other’s freedom.
Marx similarly argues that Smith assumes an instrumental and negative account o f freedom:
‘Tranquillity’ appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’. It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual, ‘in his normal state o f health, strength, activity, skill, facility’, also needs a normal portion o f work, and o f the suspension o f tranquillity. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming o f obstacles is in itself a liberating activity — and that, further, the external aims become stripped o f the semblance o f merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual him self posits — hence as self-realisation, objectification o f the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is precisely labour. (Marx, 1973 [1857-8], p. 611)
This passage highlights the different conceptualisations o f freedom defended by Smith and Marx (Gould, 1978, pp. 101-4): for Smith, freedom is identical with ‘tranquillity’ or ‘absence o f toil’ as an adequate state. This entails a negative feature o f freedom and labour: freedom is to be free from externally forced labour (e.g. slave- labour, serf-labour, wage-labour). For Marx, in contrast, freedom is a liberating activity o f overcoming o f obstacles to attain the aim, which is not the external aim, but the internal aim o f self-realisation (i.e. the intrinsic telos). This entails a positive feature o f freedom and labour: freedom is a free activity or labour to achieve the internal aim o f self-realisation. Thus, a Smithian virtue-based justification o f money fails: while money may promote the negative feature o f freedom, it does not promote, and even impedes the positive feature o f freedom.
5.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have examined the most notable virtue-based justification o f money, which can be formed on Smithian lines. We have seen that, corresponding to the Ecclesiastes’ turning over the nihilism for money into the affirmation o f the meaningless life and world, Adam Smith abolishes the Stoic view o f perfect virtue and employs the Calvinist view o f imperfect but attainable virtue. The conversion has lead Smith to moderate his expectations o f positive virtue (e.g. personal independence, positive freedom), and to prioritise negative virtue (e.g. economic independence, negative freedom). While Smithian virtue ethics rather impedes the possible excellence o f human virtues, Aristotelian virtue ethics help us to seek the spirit o f altruism as the fir st priority. In the next chapter, we explore this Aristotelian thought in more detail through an examination o f the importance and the possibility of