A List
9/22/08

Economist To Discuss Adam Smith In SLU Talk

CANTON - Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will give a talk titled "Smith Was A Virtue Ethicist" on Wednesday, September 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Hepburn Hall at St. Lawrence University. The event, part of the Contemporary Issues Forum and the economics department's Visiting Speaker Series in Political Economy, is open to the public, free of charge.

McCloskey is an economist and economic historian who is also interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in her field, and wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. She has held Guggenheim and National Humanities Fellowships and is the author of many books and scholarly articles, including How to Be Human, Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006). Forthcoming is The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, with Stephen Ziliak.

Of this talk, McCloskey says, "Adam Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher, though he practiced what was considered for a long time after Smith an obsolete sort of ethical philosophy, known nowadays as 'virtue ethics.' From the Seven Primary Virtues, Smith chose five to admire especially. He chose all four of the pagan and stoic virtues of courage, temperance, justice and prudence. To these he added, as virtue number five, a part of the Christian virtue of love. Smith's choice of the virtues makes sense of his writings and career. And it reveals a flaw: the banishment of the monkish virtues of hope and faith, necessary for human flourishing."

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