In my Advocates essay “Self-Command is the Price of Freedom,” I argued that freedom depends on small acts of self-limitation that no law can efficiently command.
Adam Smith’s teaching is not merely that liberty requires restraint. It is that restraint becomes reliable only when it is rooted in duty: a learned allegiance to the general rules of conduct that make life with others possible.
As Smith explored in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, society “cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.” Abstaining from harming others was for Smith the basis of justice, and without a widely shared respect for justice, society must “crumble into atoms.”
Without this justice-based regard for people with whom we have no connection, “a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions.” When we fail to do the inner work that supports freedom, we invite the demand for stronger external authority to keep the lions apart.
When we are ready to stop pretending we are mere victims of circumstance or of other people’s actions, Smith offers us guidance to occupy, rather than vacate, our seat of moral agency.
Smith defines the polar case of perfect virtue as “the man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence.” He doesn’t expect us to reach that state, since our “passions are very apt to mislead [us]—sometimes to drive [us] and sometimes to seduce [us], to violate all the rules which [we] in all [our] sober and cool hours” value.
In short, “the most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable [us] to do [our] duty.”
Smith knew that no one has perfect self-command, but he hoped our “sense of duty” to the rules that make civilization possible would see us through the times when our passions get the best of us. We don’t like to see ourselves as part of the problem, but we can look within to uncover passions that have been shaping our conduct more than we care to admit.
The Willingness to Change
To change, people often rely on willpower, an easily exhausted inner resource, while neglecting the harder-to-cultivate but more leveraged superpower of willingness.
To take a simple example, you may try to deploy willpower not to binge-eat a bag of potato chips, but are you willing to stop stocking them in your home? Do you rely on willpower to behave virtuously, or are you willing to do the inner work necessary to become aware of—and then uproot—the conditioned thinking that causes you to behave unvirtuously when faced with a moral challenge?
Smith wants us to take the latter path. Our nature is to remain blind to our lack of virtue. As he writes, “It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable.”
Purposely is the word to underline. Our ignorance is not innocent; we stay morally blind on purpose.
Are we willing to open our eyes to our own non-virtuous behavior? The answer depends on how much we want to give up our grievances and begin the process of inner reformation. Smith argues that it takes boldness. I would say the boldness comes with willingness. Smith writes:
He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.
And now, for those on the fence about change, comes a blockbuster passage. Smith understood our tendency to hold on to grievances: “Rather than see our own behavior under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavor to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us.”
We double down on our moral weakness:
We endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.
Our faults are relocated into the other person and sustained there by constant effort. This is why grievances are periodically rehashed. When you or others harbor a grievance, notice how often the story has to be retold, as if repetition were needed to keep the grievance alive.
Over a century later, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky understood the same mechanism. Fyodor Pavlovich explains that his terrible behavior toward others was generated not by their behavior, but by his own behavior. Fyodor “wanted to take his revenge on them for all of his own inappropriate actions.” Fyodor “remembered how once, some time ago, he had been asked, ‘Why do you hate such and such a person so much?’”
Fyodor responded, “Here’s why: he really didn’t do anything to me, but I did something indecent to him, and since then I’ve hated him.”
Then he added the zinger of a line: “If I started it, I will finish it.”
Take a moment to reflect on how many grievances, major or minor, you are still trying to finish; how much precious mental bandwidth you use to rehearse them; and how much meaning and love might enter your life if you were willing to drop them.
Are those who can’t drop grievances capable of self-governance? Fyodor is advised by a spiritual elder, above all, “Don’t keep telling lies.” You won’t stop acting out of moral weakness until you stop telling lies about why you are doing it.
This is not to say others are blameless. Smith would allow that we might see others’ faults clearly enough while having purposely turned away from our own—and then, when the discomfort persists, manufacture a grievance to keep our gaze averted.
Our Responsibility Is Enormous
A grievance can feel like moral clarity because it keeps attention fixed on what another person did. But for Smith, that fixed outward gaze becomes dangerous when it relieves us of the harder obligation to see what we are doing.
How many people does it take to save the world from its current rush to illiberal madness? To ask this question is to dodge the responsibility to reform ourselves.
We are full of self-deceit. Smith instructs us,
This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.
Smith does not leave us hanging. He advises, “Our continual observations upon the conduct of others insensibly lead us to form to ourselves certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be done or to be avoided.” We watch what earns praise and blame, derive rules from it, and then apply those rules to ourselves precisely when our own passions would otherwise blind us.
There is an enormous responsibility placed on us when we read Smith. We are either upholding or revolting against the general rules that built and maintain Western civilization. Today, many are in revolt against those rules, and we, not others, must stand strong.
Standing strong requires a sense of duty. Smith writes, “The regard to those general rules of conduct is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions.”
Most decent conduct, he says, comes from people who “acted merely from a regard to what they saw were the established rules of behaviour.” What are we teaching others by our conduct?
So, Smith never offers us a guarantee. The impartial spectator can be drowned out by faction or passion. Thus, a free people governs itself not through a population of moral virtuosos examining their motives in real time, but through general rules internalized as duty. Our sense of duty is the portable form of the impartial spectator, and it governs us everywhere the police cannot.
