Adam Smith's Social Theodicy

There are two tensions in Smith’s system of ideas: the first is between the postulate of an invisible “noumenal” order of the Universe and the imaginary principles through which we connect the phenomena; the second is between a hypothetical noumenal order of the world where “is” and “ought” converge and the partial and imperfect normative order issued by our sympathetic judgements and a never perfectly impartial spectator. These tensions, which gave occasion to old misrepresentations and recent ones, are tensions in a unitary (though rhapsodically completed) system of ideas where the final unanswered question was the problem of evil. Against a widespread belief, Smith was no secularist but a fideist who took Bayle’s question seriously: why is man wicked and unhappy? The private ethics of prudence, justice, benevolence and the public ethics of liberty, justice, and equality were modest proposals for coping with the problem of social evil, of a “practical” kind, the only one available after Smith’s refutation of natural theology, his last word on the causes for evil.