This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 18th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Adam Smith was more than an economist.

He was a moral philosopher, and how he examined the world around him laid the

groundwork for economists today. James Oddison is a professor of philosophy and

economics at yeshiva University in New York. We spoke following a forum on the life of Adam Smith held

last week.

In reading theory of moral sentiments, Smith asks a question that you wouldn't expect to be asked and that sort of lays a

foundation for the book and it's not how can we be moral it's why are people moral? And that seems like a very odd way to go

about it, but as was pointed out at the forum, Smith was an empiricist. So that would seem to serve an effort in answering this question rather than that question.

Quite right. There are actually two questions that are related to that that animated Smith in the book.

So two phenomena that he noticed that he wanted explanations for.

One was why is it that people seem, in fact for every single human being, you go over the course of your lifetime from a baby,

from when you're an infant, to when you're an adult.

You start out having no morals whatsoever, no notion of morality, proper, improper merit,

nothing like that as an infant

to an adult with a very sophisticated system

and set of moral judgments.

So what explains that transition? That's the first

question. And the second question is why is it that across times and cultures and

nations it seems like there is significant overlap in moral judgments.

There isn't exact correspondence, but there's significant overlap.

...