Half a century later Adam Smith spoke of the Glasgow Chair of Moral Philosophy as an “office to which the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson had given a superior degree of illustration.”
But while we may well believe that Adam Smith was influenced in the general direction of liberalism by Hutcheson, there seems no reason for attributing to Hutcheson’s influence the belief in the economic beneficence of self-interest which permeates the Wealth of Nations and has afforded a starting ground for economic speculation ever since. Hutcheson, as some of the passages just quoted show, was a mercantilist, and all the economic teaching in his System is very dry bones compared to Smith’s vigourous lectures on Cheapness or Plenty, with their often repeated denunciation of the “absurdity” of current opinions and the “pernicious regulations” to which they gave rise. Twenty years after attending his lectures, Adam Smith criticised Hutcheson expressly on the ground that he thought too little of self-love. In the chapter of the Theory of Moral Sentiments on the systems of philosophy which make virtue consist in benevolence, he says that Hutcheson believed that it was benevolence only which could stamp upon any action the character of virtue: the most benevolent action was that which aimed at the good of the largest number of people, and self-love was a principle which could never be virtuous, though it was innocent when it had no other effect than to make the individual take care of his own happiness. This “amiable system, a system which has a peculiar tendency to nourish and support in the human heart the noblest and the most agreeable of all affections,” Smith considered to have the “defect of not sufficiently explaining from whence arises our approbation of the inferior virtues of prudence, vigilance, circumspection, temperance, constancy, firmness.”