Alexander Smith (philosopher)

Alexander Smith (philosopher)
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Born	(1796-06-17)June 17, 1796
Died	1851
Nationality	Scotland
Alma mater	The University of Aberdeen
Occupation	Philosopher

Alexander Smith of Banff in Scotland was born on the 12th June 1796 and died in 1851. He is buried in the same grave as his half-sister Bathia, his father John, and his step-mother Mary Milne. The grave is about 100 metres from the house in Carmelite street which, apart from a spell at The University of Aberdeen, he spent his life. Writing his obituary, the editor of the Banffshire Journal, William Barclay, noted that he had 'an extensive and accurate knowledge of music'.

As a boy, he was included with 5 others as precociously talented, and well-served by the excellent Banff education system. The other "5 boys", as they were called, went on to high achievement. George Smith and Alexander Elder went on to found the London publishing giant Smith, Elder and Co who published almost every famous name in 19th century literature and were a major Scottish cultural network there.Besides Smith and Elder, there were also William Bartlett (eventually, it seems, related by marriage to Smith) who became the proprietor of Banff brewery, Lewis Forbes, son of sheriff-substitute Forbes, eventually minister of Boharm and Moderator of the General Assembly in 1852, and James Anton, later a parliamentary secretary.In 1810, Alexander Smith set up a literary society, along with the other boys, which held meetings in the Town House of Banff for the delivery of essays and the discussion of literary subjects. They also began to form a library and this collection of books was eventually gifted to the town library in 1899, by which time it held 6000 volumes and journals, many supplied via their publishing connection in London.

Studies and work

Smith went to King's College, Aberdeen, from where he graduated an M.A. in 1814.At that time the existing moral philosophy course had been taken over by Dr William Jack, then Principal of King's, who was a clergyman and doctor of medicine, filling in for the recently deceased Robert Eden Scott. Jack had himself studied at King's at the same time as the 'Whig Cicero' Sir James Mackintosh and shared Mackintosh's politics. This is evident from his resistance in law to the appointment of his replacement, Daniel Dewar, (father-in-law to James Clerk Maxwell) most likely on the grounds of the latter's evangelical politics. Dewar, a viciously anti-Irish Common Sense philosopher besotted with predestination, was eventually Professor of Church History, and published extensively with such titles as The Glories of Christ's Kingdom (1820), Elements of Moral Philosophy and of Christian Ethics (1826) and The Nature, Reality and Efficacy of the Atonement (1831). This resistance by William Jack to evangelicalism (especially the emphasis on depravity and irrationalism) is perfectly consistent with Alexander Smith's philosophical liberalism, suggesting a possible degree of influence.

Smith was able to find a job immediately on leaving Aberdeen, as parochial schoolmaster at Rothiemay, and then, while he was studying for his license as a minister, at a 'private academy' in Forres. Smith's trials for his license were taken over from the Presbytery of Forres to that of Fordyce in 1820. It should be said incidentally that if Banff was not actually the Arcadia its official historians wished to represent it as, Fordyce could have certainly qualified in its stead. The Fordyce Kirk goes back to 1272 and the graveyard has Sinclair graves in it with all the carved paraphernalia of 'engrailed crosses' and so on. The presbytery (who had licenced Smith's juvenile co-literatus Lewis Forbes in 1814) heard him deliver first of all 'two Discourses, viz., a Homily from Heb:11 chap.60. and a lecture from John, 1 chap. from the 1st to the 12 verse…with which Discourses the Presbytery were well pleased'.

He was licenced on the 29th November 1820, being warned about 'simoniacal practices', and, after a 'notable address', preached the Gospel to the satisfaction of the Presbytery. He preached again, this time for a congregation, at Fordyce, Oldequhit, Bundie and Cullen, to 'approbriation', but for whatever reason, was never able to further his ministerial career. In a letter to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, MacVey Napier, in 1837, he states that although he was 'bred a clergyman' his 'hopes of patronage' had failed him.

He went on to teach English at Banff Academy at a salary of £21.12, until his health failed him in 1827 and he had to resign. It seems that he walked into the job at Banff Academy almost as a matter of course, but when it was re-advertised there was a great deal of competition for it. At this point he was able to get a bureaucratic post that accommodated the recurrent breakdown in his health, which was that of the local postmaster. He performed this duty uncomplainingly for the rest of his life. On his death, on the 12th February 1851, the MP, George Duff, recommended the job go to his sister Bathia, who then had it for the rest of her life, sharing thus his occupation as well as his grave.

Philosophy

Despite his reputation for resilience, Smith's letters to MacVey Napier betray an unmistakable sense of isolation and loneliness. Still, whatever his motivation, it produced in 1835 the two volume work The Philosophy of Morals.

Given that Smith was an Aberdeen graduate it is certainly to be expected that his is likely to be just one more variant of Thomas Reid's Natural Realism (or "Common Sense") and certainly this is true to a point. The difference is, in fact, that finding Reid politically unpropitious he seems to have been influenced at least as much by William Paley's theological (i.e. non-secular) utilitarian liberalism. This is not in itself such a great departure because in the 1830's and 40's Paley's work was still thoroughly popular. Indeed the 1835 edition of Paley's Discourse carries an introduction by Henry Brougham. But Smith's version of it is fundamentally different because it is wholly opposed to the characteristic voluntarism of the theological utilitarians.

Smith had high hopes indeed for this work. It was given an advance notice of publication on May 13th 1835 in the Aberdeen Journal and then followed on August 5th 1835 with the advertisement proper, in which the publishers were given (unsurprisingly) as Smith, Elder and Co. in London, and Brown and Co. in Aberdeen. But it sank without trace.

The subtitle reveals its scope and ambitions: an investigation, by a new and extended analysis, of the faculties and the standards employed in the determination of right and wrong: illustrative of the principles of Theology, Jurisprudence, and General Politics.

As a moral realist, what vexes Smith is the problem of sentimentalism or emotivism - a disproportionate importance attached to the notion of moral feeling and intuition which developed completely out of hand by his own day. When, he asks, did obligation come to mean inclination?

Thus he addresses the problem which J.S.Mill also attempted to overcome, the heterogeneity of aims and practices which potentially undermines the simple schematism of the terms of utilitarianism and so requires refinement on its part. He presents this as a basic division within the inquiry, firstly as the question of (moral) epistemology, and secondly as that of the generic qualities of its objects.

His contention is that these related divisions have been crudely formulated. The operating terms he uses for the perception of good and bad are 'approbation' and 'disapprobation', where a good action 'promotes' the comfort of sentient beings and is better in proportion to the number and degree. The unconscious execution of such an action renders it less good in comparison to the intentional and knowing execution of such action.

There are two further categories, one of partial and possibly conflicting motivation, and one of self-overcoming (i.e. going against one's inclination). And there is a separate fourth category of returning a good favour.

These four categories of goodness are, respectively, fitness, virtue, merit, and obligation; each of these categories provides criteria of measurement of good action, and 'the proportion in which an action possesses any one of these qualities, may have no correspondence with that in which it possesses another'. And so, for example:

To save the life of twenty persons is a better action (more fit) than to save one. To save the life of one, may be a better (more virtuous) action than to save the life of twenty: it may be performed more exclusively from motives of duty, - under circumstances evincing a greater regard to duty. If regard to duty is so strong as at once to overcome all opposing motives of ease or safety, the action is better (more virtuous) than in a case of a different kind, where these opposing motives must be overcome by a strong mental effort: yet in the latter case again, the action is better (more meritorious) than when the regard to duty spontaneously prevailed. To pay a shilling that I owe to a neighbour, is a better action (more obligatory) than to distribute five pounds among the poor: yet to distribute a considerable sum of money among the poor, is better (more fit) than to pay a trifle to one who has perhaps little use for it. Either of these two actions again may, in other senses, be better (more virtuous, more meritorious) then the other.

Smith deploys this schema sharply against the controversial Common Sense philosopher Thomas Brown in particular but it is the history of modern moral philosophy hitherto he has in his sights. Smith divides existing moral theory roughly into two camps, under the auspices of the question of whether the perception of moral distinctions is a rational judgement or an emotion.

On the one side we have sentimentalists - Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, Brown, and on the other, rational (he later calls it 'intellectualist') side, Clarke, Cudworth, Price, Butler, Reid and Stewart.

Neither camp has stated the problem sufficiently clearly, indeed Hutcheson's term 'moral sense' is occasionally disowned by his own camp and claimed by the opposing one, but on three points at least there is absolutely no agreement, roughly -

• Whether there are any immutably true moral propositions.

• If such were admitted, would it entail a disproof that approbation/disapprobation are simply emotions?

• Whether the discovery that certain truths are immutable necessarily obliges us to resort to reason as the faculty by which truths are discovered.

For Smith, there are a priori self-evident necessary moral truths identical to those of mathematical axioms 'because what we affirm in each proposition, is involved in the very notion of that whereof we make the affirmation - the subject of the affirmation would cease to be what it is, were that not true which is affirmed of it'.

Thus far, Smith observes, the Common Sense school has argued both for the self-evident necessary truth of moral distinctions and for a special inward faculty returning objective reports. He then also goes further to finely disambiguate the term 'sense' and show how its unreflective use has led to significant error in both camps. Likewise he shows how the meanings of duty and right have been bent right out of shape, and obligation lost altogether. Rights and goods, in fact, are both accommodated in Smith's philosophy. He retains common-sense intuitionism while at the same time tacitly agreeing with Thomas Carlyle that when Reid 'let loose the ban-dog Instinct' he could not have anticipated how it would be used in all manner of bad faith.

As an intuitionist he has of course a set of non-inferential first principles. They differ from Reid's however. In total they amount to seventeen, with an auxiliary eight auxiliary truths, so twenty-five in total, the first of which is "it is fit that every sentient being should be happy, or enjoy pleasure, rather than be miserable or suffer pain".

The core of Smith's rational vindication of morality, then, is a set of propositions about right, obligation, duty, justice, injury, compulsion, education, and desert.

As a moderate Scottish Calvinist there is of course no sense of anything perfectible, utopian, or pantheist about Smith's moral theory. Evil exists, God's purposes are obscure, but the rational ends of human agency in happiness are fixed in time. His moral philosophy then extends seamlessly into liberal political philosophy. Elsewhere he notes, for example, that the two great aristocratic landowners in the area (and all the patronage attached to them) were seemingly intent on crowding Banff into the sea.

Like the slightly younger but much more famous James F. Ferrier, Smith develops the resources of the tradition of Scottish philosophy in a rationalist direction without, however, merging it into 19th c. Idealism. In the 21st century his philosophy is of interest to the New Intuitionists, who are similarly committed to moral facts and first principles, and who are thereby keen to develop the moral philosophy of Smith's 20th C. fellow Scot from the North-East, W.D.Ross.

Works

• 'Evangelical preaching' in the Edinburgh Review Jan.1837.
• The Philosophy of Morals (London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1835).
• 'Douglas on the philosophy of mind' in the Edinburgh Review Jan. 1840.
• 'Lieber's Political Ethics' in the Edinburgh Review April 1841
• 'Phrenological Ethics', in the Edinburgh Review Jan.1842
• 'The Philosophy of Poetry' in Blackwood's Magazine, Dec.1835.

Sources

• SMITH, Alexander (1796-1851) Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2002) p1033. (eds) Alan P. F. Sell, W. J. Mander.
• SMITH, Alexander (1796–1851) The Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Philosophy (Continuum, 2006; online version 2010) p1034 (Eds) A.C. Grayling, Naomi Goulder, and Andrew Pyle
• 'Smith, Alexander' in Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, (Philadelphia, Vol.2, 1886, p219; p134 in 1870 edition). Allibone, S.A
• The Eclectic Review (1838). Smith's book, The Philosophy of Morals, is reviewed here very favourably, albeit with some regret about the lack of enthusiasm for Paley or voluntarism.
• The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, 1953). Abrams, M.H. Here Abrams makes the striking statement that Smith has anticipated crucial aspects of literary theory by 70 years, in particular that of Rudolph Carnap and I.A.Richards. He also says that Smith is very much a product of the Scottish Enlightenment. See e.g. p151.
• Between Hume and Mill: an Anthology of British Philosophy 1749 – 1843 (New York, 1970). Brown, Robert
• Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1977) Schneewind J.B. Here, Schneewind argues that Smith is plainly the best moral theorist in the long period between Reid and Sidgwick.
• History of Political Thought, Vol.4, No.3, Winter 1983 pp523-550. 'John Brown and the Theological Tradition of Utilitarian Ethics'. Crimmins, J.E.

Further reading

• Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2019). O'Flaherty, N. See especially chapter 3 for the character of non-secular utilitarianism and how it may be potentially detached from voluntarism (which is what Smith does in The Philosophy of Morals when he replaces it with intellectualism) to make a rational case for liberalism.

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