Why Smith’s book of vignettes splits its readers

Smith’s book consists largely of what he called “illustrations”: short, elegantly described vignettes about what frightens us about death, what we find interesting and what dull or distasteful about other people’s love affairs, how moral luck factors into our assessment of actions, and how and why we deceive ourselves.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry treats that same feature as the explanation for the book’s disparate reactions. To some, the vignettes supply the detail and psychological acuity they find lacking in most moral philosophy; to others, they seem like material for novelists or empirical psychologists, not the business of a philosopher.