The table, compared

Reason's four faces: feeling, market, doubt, and duty

This table exists to test what 'think for yourself' actually means once four different reasoners get hold of it. Wollstonecraft, Smith, Hume, and Kant all trusted human reason more than inherited authority — and then built almost incompatible systems on that trust. Convene them to watch the Enlightenment argue with itself.

Who's seated

4 at this table

What each one brings that the others can't.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The claimant

She applies the Enlightenment's own logic — reason and rights belong to all people regardless of birth — to a group the men at this table rarely thought to include, and she does it from lived deprivation rather than abstraction.

Adam Smith

The systems thinker

He supplies the mechanism: how self-interested people, left to specialize and trade, cooperate without anyone designing the cooperation. He also insists, against caricature, that sympathy and moral sentiment underwrite the whole arrangement.

David Hume

The skeptic

He will not let anyone at the table overclaim what reason can establish — not causation, not miracles, not even the leap from 'is' to 'ought' — and he does this without losing his good humor, which keeps the argument from curdling.

Immanuel Kant

The lawgiver

He supplies the one thing this table otherwise lacks: an argument that morality can be binding regardless of consequence, sentiment, or utility, grounded in duty and the demand to treat every person as an end.

Opposite poles

4 seats · 3 axes

80 of 100 — how far apart the table sits, averaged across every axis. This table spans the full range on nearly every axis — the widest counsel you can convene.

Common ground

What they'd all agree on

Rarer with this many voices — which is what makes it worth naming.

Reason over inherited authority

All four made their names by trusting individual reasoning over custom, church, or rank as the final court of appeal — Wollstonecraft against inherited assumptions about women, Smith and Hume against scholastic and religious certainties, Kant against dogmatic slumber itself. It's the one premise none of them would surrender.

Suspicion of ornament and cant

Wollstonecraft attacked the trained vanity expected of women, Hume punctured philosophical pretension with plain prose, Smith distrusted mercantilist self-flattery, and Kant demanded people examine their real maxims rather than their comfortable stories about themselves. Each, in their own idiom, wanted people stripped of the flattering fiction and left with the actual reason for what they do.

A working confidence in ordinary people

None of them believed virtue or capability was the exclusive property of an educated elite or a ruling class — Smith trusted the baker's self-interest as much as the philosopher's, Hume grounded morality in common sentiment, Kant made the moral law accessible to any rational being, and Wollstonecraft insisted this same confidence be extended to women.

Where the table spreads

The questions they'd split on

Each is a spectrum with every seat placed on it. The further apart they sit, the more they'd argue.

01What grounds morality

Spread 85/100

Sentiment and sympathyDuty and universal law

David Hume

Adam Smith

Mary Wollstonecraft

Immanuel Kant

David Hume: Goes further than Smith: reason alone cannot move us to act at all, so morality must rest on sentiment, and no amount of logic bridges is and ought.
Adam Smith: Builds his whole ethics on sympathy — our capacity to imagine how others see us — making feeling, not abstract law, the root of morality.
Mary Wollstonecraft: Argues from rational rights but writes with moral feeling throughout — her case for women's education blends both registers rather than choosing.
Immanuel Kant: Rejects sentiment as a foundation entirely — morality must be a law you could will universally, binding regardless of what you feel like doing.

Why it matters

A reader deciding how to act under pressure needs to know whether they're asking 'what does this situation call for, given who's affected' or 'what would I have to admit if this became a rule for everyone.' The two questions can give opposite answers.

02Confidence that reason can settle things

Spread 85/100

Reason is limited, custom rules most of…Reason can establish firm ground

David Hume

Adam Smith

Mary Wollstonecraft

Immanuel Kant

David Hume: The table's thoroughgoing skeptic — even causation itself is habit and inference, never directly observed, so certainty is mostly an illusion we're comfortable with.
Adam Smith: Empirical and system-building, but wary of grand rationalist claims; his economics describes emergent order rather than designed certainty.
Mary Wollstonecraft: Confident that reason, properly educated, yields clear and actionable conclusions about justice — her case for women's rights depends on this confidence holding.
Immanuel Kant: Spent a decade building an entire architecture to secure both science and morality against exactly the skepticism Hume raised — reason can be put on firm footing, but only after radical revision.

Why it matters

This decides how much weight a reader can put on a clean argument versus how much they should distrust their own certainty and watch what habit and evidence actually show.

03Where the argument for equal standing starts

Spread 70/100

Emergent from system and customDemanded as a right, now

David Hume

Adam Smith

Immanuel Kant

Mary Wollstonecraft

David Hume: Treats social arrangements as products of custom and utility that evolve; he is not the table's advocate for asserting new rights against inherited order.
Adam Smith: Trusts that markets and specialization raise general prosperity over time, improving conditions gradually rather than through direct claims of right.
Immanuel Kant: Insists every person is an end in themselves, never merely a means — a principle with radical implications, even if he did not extend it to a live political fight the way Wollstonecraft did.
Mary Wollstonecraft: Will not wait for gradual improvement — she demands, in print and immediately, that women's minds be recognized as equal now, using the Revolution-era language of rights directly.

Why it matters

This is the difference between telling a reader to trust the slow arc of institutions and telling them to demand recognition outright. It changes whether patience or confrontation is the responsible move.

The fault line

Where this table actually splits

The real break is Wollstonecraft against the other three, on whether justice can wait for systems to mature. Smith trusts emergent order — markets, sympathy, gradually rising prosperity — and Hume trusts custom and evolved sentiment; neither made the leap to argue that women's exclusion demanded immediate redress rather than patient improvement. Kant comes closest to her in principle, since his own categorical imperative — treat every person as an end — logically extends to exactly the claim she makes, yet he built his system without turning it into that fight. Wollstonecraft's position is that a principle deferred is a principle denied, and she has the harder biographical claim to make it: she lived the deprivation the others only theorized around. The steelman for the others is that Smith's and Hume's caution about grand claims came from genuine skepticism about overclaiming reason's reach, not indifference — and Kant's universalism, even unapplied by him, is the very tool later ref…

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