"One source of misunderstanding is that many of the commentators have been economists who have looked at the Moral Sentiments simply in order to find some relevance for The Wealth of Nations. This gave rise to the so-called Adam Smith problem, a supposed inconsistency between the psychological assumptions of the two books. Another source of error has been a failure to note whether a particular passage was written for the first or for the sixth edition."

“The sixth edition includes a whole new part, on the character of virtue, and some drastic revision elsewhere. My co-editor of the work, the late Professor A. L. Macfie, was apt to say in consequence that the sixth edition is a different book. That is an exaggeration, but the sixth edition is certainly a much altered book.”

“Smith certainly thought he was reflecting on general human experience, and his evidence was not limited to his own society. He had a fairly wide knowledge of history, including the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and he took a keen interest in such anthropological reports as were available, notably reports about the indigenous inhabitants of North America. He knew that the behaviour and the ethics of the American Indians differed markedly in some respects from what was found in Europe, and he knew, too, that the ethics of ancient Graeco-Roman civilization differed, in other respects, from the ethics of Christianity. He was also aware of minor differences in the mores of at least some European societies .”

“Justice, like Janus, has two faces, one conservative, the other reformative.  These two faces are apparent both in the law and in the thought of social and political ethics.”