Achieving Social and Economic Equality by Unifying Business and Ethics: Adam Smith as the Cause of and Cure for the Separation Thesis

Adam Smith's famous argument that self‐interested decisions will ultimately improve social welfare seems inconsistent with the social and economic inequality characterizing Smith's time and today. I contend that these inequalities are the result of Smith's failure to explicitly situate the economic man he describes in The Wealth of Nations within the broader social context he articulates in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments , an omission which...