The Good of the Individual as the Good of Society or the Good of Society as the Good of the Individual? George Berkeley and Adam Smith on Perception and Morality

Abstract

The article focuses on the rarely discussed issues of George Berkeley’s social philosophy and Adam Smith’s epistemology. When it comes to epistemology, Berkeley’s and Smith’s regards on vision and their judgements about the magnitude and distance were common. They had led the philosophers to some considerations of parallel issues in their social philosophy, i.e. the role of an impartial spectator that judges from a certain distance and the question of the common good. As it is shown, the relevant answers given by Berkeley and Smith are different: according to Berkeley, the most important was altruism and aiming at the happiness of the whole which included the individual happiness, whereas Smith claimed that the order was different: pursuing one’s own interest led to the common good.