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Abstract
In Part III of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith declares that people desire to be both esteemed and to be esteem-worthy, but that the latter desire both does and ought to take priority. The main object of this paper is to challenge that priority claim—mainly in its descriptive aspect. If that claim were true, then: agents would be at pains to eliminate any distortions in their self-evaluations; and the effects of the size (especially of total secrecy) and the character of audience on behaviour would be second-order. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover the normative claim seems to overlook some advantages of inflated self-evaluation; and to allow no independent room for norms of modesty/humility.

AbstractDoing the best we can in the world as it is requires that appropriate account be taken of "feasibility considerations." The object of this essay is to examine what "appropriate account" amounts to — and specifically how "feasibility" should be conceptualized so as to operate most congenially with "desirability considerations." One element in this exercise is to recognize "feasibility" not so much as a category as "coming in degrees" (just as desirability must be recognized). A second element is to specify evaluands as actions — objects that the advisee controls — rather than as objects that lie somewhere intermediate along the path from actions to final desirability principles. This move serves to collapse all feasibility issues to ones relating to the consequences of genuine actions rather than "feasibility of" other kinds of objects of evaluation. A particular problem in the proper treatment of feasibility considerations is the tendency to begin from the "ought-implies-can" principle, a point of departure that frames feasibility considerations in a dismissive or otherwise inadequate way.