Daily Inspiration Quote by Adam Smith

Adam Smith is needling the smug moralist, not celebrating depravity. The line lands because it flips a comfortable assumption: vice is obviously dangerous, but virtue feels self-justifying. When people sin, they usually know theyre sinning; even a compromised conscience can still register shame, limits, risk. Virtue, by contrast, comes with an internal permission slip. If I believe I am righteous, my restraint stops being ethical and starts being optional.

Smiths target is moral certainty as a political force. In an 18th-century world of religious faction, imperial expansion, and state-building, appeals to virtue were the premium currency of public life. Reformers, churchmen, and patriots could frame coercion as care and punishment as purification. The subtext: conscience is a poor regulator when it has been recruited as a lawyer for the ego. Vice tempts; virtue authorizes.

The rhetorical trick is the phrase "excesses of virtue". It treats goodness not as a stable category but as a variable that can be overdosed. That is an economists move: thinking in marginal terms. Past a point, the good motive produces bad outcomes - fanaticism, persecution, moral licensing, the sort of cruelty that insists its victims should be grateful.

Read alongside Smiths moral philosophy (not just The Wealth of Nations), it is a warning about spectatorship and self-deception: we calibrate our behavior to approval. Virtue, performed and applauded, can expand into a mandate. Vice rarely gets parades. Virtue does - and that is why it can become more frightening.