Abstract: The relation between modernity and tradition is crucial to ethics in the transitional age of enlightenment. The two great figures in Scottish Enlightenment, that is, D. Hume and A. Smith, created a double track model with “justice and goodness” dichotomy, responding effectively to the issue of the moral transformation from the ancient to the modern along with the rising of a commercial society. This double track model has been echoed in East Asia in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “personal virtue-social morality,” Liang Qi-chao’s “personal virtue- public virtue” and “moral - ethic” and Li Ze-hou’s “social moral-religious moral.” In the enlightenment in Scotland, Japan and China, the double track with “public ethic and personal virtue” provided us with a theoretical framework to dialectically deal with the debate of the invariable and the variable in morality and that of creating modern public ethic and inheriting traditional virtues.