ADAM SMITH: THE MORAL SENTIMENTS

Copyright © 1996 R.J. Kilcullen


Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723 (Source on Smith's life: E G West, Adam Smith). He entered Glasgow University in 1737, aged 14. This university still followed some practices of the medieval universities, for example in admitting students at age 14. Its professors still took fees directly from students: that had been the original practice in medieval universities, but in more famous universities rich people had endowed colleges within the university, which paid lecturers' salaries. The Glasgow timetable was still medieval. The main lecture took place at 7.30 am in the cold and dark, at 11 the students were quizzed on the mornings lecture, at 12 there was a lecture on an optional topic. This was the typical student's day in the thirteenth century. But the curriculum was modern: besides philosophy (the main medieval subject) students took Greek and Mathematics. The philosophy was modern. At Glasgow Adam Smith studied under Francis Hutcheson (see extracts from his works in Raphael British Moralists vol.1, p.261ff.)). Hutchison taught in English (not Latin) and was a vivid lecturer. Moral philosophy, or ethics, was a flourishing subject at the time. The main division was between two schools of 'intuitionists' (as they would now be called). To remind you: Ethics is concerned with what is good and bad, better and worse, in human conduct - in the ends we seek, in the actions in which we seek our ends. Intuitionism is the doctrine that in the last analysis we simply 'see' that some way of acting is good or right, or the opposite: that basic ethical assessments cannot be justified by argument, and do not need to be. 'See' of course is a metaphor. Many 18C moral philosophers held that it is reason that 'sees' what is good and right. Hutchison said that it is a moral sense: not reason, and not the bodily senses of vision, hearing etc., but something more like a bodily sense than like reason. On Hutchison's analysis, ethical judgement is a specific kind of emotional reaction to a contemplated act. We do not apprehend by cool reason that some act is good or bad, but 'feel' it. David Hume and Adam Smith were both influenced by Hutchison's views, but Smith rejected the doctrine that there is a special moral sense.

From Glasgow University Adam Smith went on a scholarship to Oxford in 1740, aged 17. He entered Balliol College. At this time, in fact until the 'Oxford Movement' (the religious revival in the University of the 1840s), College fellows did not take their teaching seriously. A fellowship was like a prize, membership of a wealthy club, which some enjoyed for a few years until they wanted to marry. Effectively it had no duties - fellows might spend their time travelling. If they read or wrote books that was a private hobby. Adam Smith wrote to a friend: 'It will be his own fault if anyone should endanger his health at Oxford by excessive study, our only business here being to go to prayers twice a day and to lecture twice a week' (quoted West, p.45).

Adam Smith left Oxford in 1746, before his scholarship ran out, and two years later became a public lecturer in Edinburgh. He had sponsors, but it was essentially a private enterprise: he was not attached to any university, those who attended the lectures got no qualification, no 'privileges of graduation', and they paid him a fee. His lectures were at first on rhetoric, style and English literature, and then on the history of philosophy of law.

The lectures on law or jurisprudence eventually developed into the Wealth of Nations. But notice the other topic: Smith was always interested in rhetoric, style, literature, as you might expect a free-lance lecturer to be: he must have been a good speaker. The changes made to successive editions of the Wealth of Nations (see Cannan's footnotes) show him polishing the language. In fact Wealth of Nations is an elegantly written work, though perhaps not well-organised.

After several years as public lecturer in Edinburgh, Smith was elected (1751) to Glasgow University, where he again lectured on rhetoric and/or jurisprudence, and also lectured on moral philosophy. His lectures on moral philosophy were the origin of his first famous book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), about which I will say something shortly. Student lecture notes on his rhetoric course were discovered in 1958 and published as Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (PE/1407.S47 - you might be interested in his comments on the speeches in Thucydides, p.157(f). Student notes on the jurisprudence course were discovered in 1895, and another set on a different version of the course were discovered in 1958, and these have been published as Lectures on Jurisprudence (K/230/.S6/.L4).

In 1764 Smith left Glasgow University (insisting on refunding the fees his students had paid, though he was providing a substitute - see West, pp.151-2), and went to France as tutor to a young Scottish nobleman on his travels. In France he met, among others, members of the 'Physiocrat' school of economic theory (their theory is the 'agricultural system' criticised in WN IV.9). Smith, like his friend David Hume, had a long-standing interest in economics. While in France (1764-67) he began to write the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (published finally in 1776): his leaving Glasgow University was probably to get time to write it. It developed out of part of his Glasgow lectures on Jurisprudence - the part dealing with 'police', which in those days meant partly what it now means, but more what we call economic 'policy' (the same word, as is 'polity', all from Greek politeia).

I will discuss WN in the next lecture. I want to spend the rest of this one on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For extracts see Raphael, British Moralists vol 2, p.201 ff. For the full book (referred to below as TMS) look up BJ/1005/.S6. For a good discussion see K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator, chs. 2 & 3 (K/457/.S572/HS). There are essays by Campbell and by Raphael in A S Skinner and T Wilson (eds) Essays on Adam Smith.

'Sentiment' means here feeling or emotion. The moral sentiments are feelings or emotions of approval, disapproval, gratitude, resentment and so on. The book is also concerned with the dispositions relating to such feelings. 'Theory' derives from a Greek word that meant being a spectator or observer. It was used, for example, of the ambassadors sent by the cities to the Olympic Games. The contrast is with practice - with being a participant in the games. In Aristotle theoretical knowledge is contrasted with practical, knowledge oriented to action; and Aristotle classes ethics as practical. Smith's book is not ethics, it is not practical, it is theory of moral feelings - what would now be called moral psychology. 'Theory' is not meant to suggest a contrast with fact - as we often expect 'theoretical' studies to be highly abstract, abstruse, hypothetical, speculative. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith gives a commonsensical and accessible analysis of various feelings and psychological dispositions relating to morality, an account which readers are invited to test against their own experience of these feelings. In a secondary way the book is also an ethics, since A. Smith regards the moral sentiments as the sufficient basis of moral judgement. We judge that some action is wrong when we feel a sentiment of disapproval when we consider the action.

The analysis of sentiments and dispositions had a long history. Book III - VI of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the 'characters' of old men and young men in Aristotle's Rhetoric, the 'characters' of Theophrastus. Christian literature contains a lot of such analysis: sermons and books explained and warned against self-deception for example, or analysed pride and vanity, anger and hatred. In the 17C historians and essayists wrote 'characters', and philosophers wrote treatises on 'the passions' (i.e. on the emotions). There were attempts by Hobbes and others (Mandeville) to reduce apparently altruistic behaviour to disguised egoism, and attempts by their critics to show that this reduction was impossible, that there are in human nature other emotions or feelings besides the selfish ones. Adam Smith with his friend David Hume belonged to the anti-egoist school. The very first sentence of the book: 'How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it'. (Of course the pleasure it takes in seeing the happiness of others, even when we expect to get nothing else from it, is not evidence of selfishness - as if we wanted them to be happy so that we could get pleasure - but evidence that we do care about their happiness). (On Hume's view of 'the selfish system' see here, here and here)

The first topic of the book is 'propriety of action'. 'Propriety' is a vague word which has acquired connotations of snootiness. He means just whether the action is right. He suggests that when we judge the propriety of an action we are judging the appropriateness of the motives of the action to the agent's situation. The motive is a sentiment - anger, love, gratitude etc. The agent feels this sentiment because of something in the situation - anger for example because of something hurtful. The propriety of the action depends on the appropriateness of the motivating sentiment to the situation that caused it - e.g. was his anger proportionate to the provocation? How do you decide? Initially, by imagining your own reaction to such a situation: if you would react the same way, you approve. This initial assessment may have to be corrected, by imagining how someone more impartial than you are yourself would react. Imagining yourself in the situation, and imagining what your emotional reaction to it would be, Smith calls 'sympathising'. (On this word see Raphael's index vol 2, pp.421-2. Note that the numbers refer to paragraphs not pages). The word means literally 'feeling with'. Usually it means feeling pity for the hurt of another person, but Smith extends its meaning to include feeling pleasure when another is pleased, and so on with all the other feelings. 'Sympathy', then, means fellow-feeling induced by imagining yourself in another's place and imagining how you would feel. We approve of another's action if it is one with which we can sympathise - we find that when we imagine ourselves into the agent's place, we 'go along with' or 'enter into' the feelings that motivated his actions. If we find we cannot 'go along with' the feelings that motivated the act, we do not approve of it.

We judge our own actions in a similar way. Of course, we do feel the motivating feeling. But we can ask whether another person could go along with this feeling? The other person in the situation - the person who provoked our anger, e.g. - perhaps could not. But could an impartial spectator - someone well informed about the situation but not related in any special way (e.g. as friend or as enemy) to any of the persons in this situation - could this impartial spectator sympathise with the feelings motivating my act? If so, then I can approve my own action, if not, I cannot. To decide whether the impartial spectator would approve I have to imagine myself in that spectator's place and imagine myself imagining the agent's feelings (mine!), and then consider whether this imaginary person would be able to enter into these feelings. We try to see ourselves as others see us. 'The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we exercise the like judgements concerning the conduct of other people. We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves [i.e. when we imagine ourselves into his situation], we either can or cannot entirely sympathise with the sentiments and motives which directed it. And, in the same manner, we either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, according as we feel that, when we place ourselves in the situation of another man, and view it, as it were, with his eyes and from his station, we either can or cannot entirely enter into and sympathise with the sentiments and motives which influenced it. We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. Whatever judgement we can form concerning them, accordingly, must always bear some secret reference , either to what are, or what, upon a certain condition [e.g. adequate knowledge], or to what, we imagine, ought to be [e.g. they were impartial and fair] the judgement of others. We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves in his situation [of detachment from our situation trying to imagine our situation] we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it [e.g. our own action], we approve of it, by sympathy [fellow-feeling] with the appreciation of this supposed equitable judge' (in Raphael, vol 2, p.226).

Notice that on Smith's account we judge whether the motives of someone's action are appropriate to the situation in which he is moved to act, not by comparing these motives with some rationally apprehended standard, but by an experiment of imagination to see whether we would feel the same motives if we were in that situation (or whether the impartial spectator would feel that way). This is a kind of intuitionism. The sky looks blue to me. If anyone says, 'But is it really blue?' all I can do is look again, and invite them to look. There is no reasoning process from higher or deeper principles by which we can correct a perception, only other perceptions. Similarly we cannot test or correct our judgement of propriety by any reasoning from abstract standards of propriety: we can only try in imagination (or by consulting others) whether a well-informed and impartial human being would feel the same way.

'Upon all occasions his [another person's] own sentiments are the standards and measures by which he judges of mine. To approve of another man's opinions is to adopt their opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it... To approve or disapprove, therefore, of the opinions of others is acknowledged by everybody, to mean no more than to observe their agreement or disagreement with our own. But this is equally the case with regard to our approbation or disapprobation of the sentiments or passions of others' (Raphael p.207). If some sceptic suggests that perhaps what seems blue to us, or what seems an appropriate emotional response to a situation, would not seem so to some other being with a different sensibility - different sense organs, different emotional reactions - Smith would not, I think, try to argue that what seems so to us must be so. If after careful consideration it seems so to us, then we must think and act accordingly, however it might be supposed to seem to some non-human being. As Protagoras said, 'Man is the measure', for man. 'Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them' (p.209). There are indeed some cases in which we seem to approve without any sympathy or correspondence of sentiments. But in those cases we base our approval or disapproval on previous attempts to sympathise in similar cases. 'We know that if we took time to consider his situation, fully in all its parts, we should, without doubt, most sincerely sympathise with him [in a case where we approve]. It is upon the consciousness of this conditional sympathy ['if we took time...'], that our approbation of his sorrow is founded, even in those cases in which that sympathy does not actually take place: and the general rules derived from our preceding experience of what our sentiments would commonly correspond with' are the basis of judgement in such cases (Raphael p.208). This is the status of general rules in Smith's theory: they are generalisations based upon our attempts to sympathise with particular actions: 'They are ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve or disapprove of. We do not originally approve or condemn particular actions because upon examination they appear to be agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general rule. The general rule, on the contrary, is formed by finding from experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of' (p.236) - i.e. that the impartial spectator can or cannot sympathise with their motivation. Some 'very eminent authors' have been misled, supposing 'that the original judgements of mankind with regard to right and wrong, were formed like the decisions of a court of judicatory, by considering first the general rule, and then, secondly, whether the particular action under consideration fell properly within its comprehension' (p.236).

So there is no need for a special faculty of moral intuition for apprehending the general principles of natural law: general principles are generalisations for our own reaction to particular cases. And our reaction to the particular case does not require a special moral faculty: our reaction is an ordinary emotional one - anger, love, etc - and the moral judgement of approval or disapproval is simply the perception of an agreement or disagreement between this reaction and the imagined reaction of an impartial spectator. There is thus no special moral faculty, either for general principles or for particular judgements. Smith makes this explicit in his criticisms of Hutchison - see Raphael pp.248-253. Compare Hume, here. (There is a problem: what distinguishes moral approbation from say aesthetic approval? Is it simply that moral judgement is concerned with the motives of action, whereas aesthetic judgement is simply contemplative, p.210?).

As I have mentioned, Adam Smith and David Hume were friends, and Smith's moral theory (with his economic theory) shows Hume's influence. But Smith disagrees with Hume at a number of points. Perhaps the most important is this. According to Hume, the reason why we approve of the various good moral qualities is because we see their usefulness, either to the person who has them or to mankind generally. Smith rejects this. He does not deny that the moral qualities are useful, but he maintains that it is not the perception of their usefulness that makes us approve them. Those who consider some virtue in the abstract see its usefulness, and do not form a concrete image of any one particular action that comes under that general category. But 'it is only when particular examples are given that we perceive distinctly either the concord or disagreement between our affections and those of the agent... When we consider virtue and vice in an abstract and general manner, the qualities by which they excite the general sentiments seem in a great measure to disappear, and the sentiments themselves become less obvious and discernable'. The effects of virtue and vice 'seem then to rise up to the view, and as it were to start out...' (p.246). The idea that we value virtue because of its useful effects  is a philosopher's illusion, due to his abstract consideration of the matter. Ordinary people approve or disapprove by their immediate emotional reaction to the situation from which the action arises - the object of their judgment is the action in relation to its causes and circumstances, not to its useful or harmful effects. 'The usefulness of any disposition... is seldom the first ground of our approbation'; 'the sentiment of approbation always involves in it a sense of propriety quite distinct from the perception of utility'. (p.246-7)

Similarly, in a passage in TMS pp.85-90 not in Raphael, and too long to quote here, Smith rejects in particular Hume's theory that we value the virtue of justice because of its usefulness to society. The sense of justice is a matter of sympathising with individuals when they are hurt by some action we cannot sympathise with. The rules of justice are based on our reaction to particular cases. Justice is certainly useful to society, but it is not true that the rules of justice have been designed to benefit society. The designer is God, not man. (Smith believed in 'natural religion', and often refers to God.) Our reaction to acts of injustice is natural and spontaneous; that this reaction helps preserve society is not due to any concern for that effect on the part of the person thus reacting. 'When by natural principles we are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God' (TMS p.87). The protection of society is a good unintended consequence of individuals' disapproval of acts of injustice - a consequence unintended by those individuals, though intended by God or nature. Similarly, in Smith's economic theory, various results beneficial to human society are the unintended consequences of individual actions done with other ends in view. See Haakonssen, pp.77-9.

There is a lot more interesting material in Adam Smith's book: a discussion of desert or merit, of self-control, of conscience (how it develops out of our concern to be well thought of, but can become independent of what others do actually think of us), of the diversity of morals in various societies. Part VI is an analysis of the various virtues. Part VII is a discussion of various systems of moral philosophy: Part VII section II ch.1, contains a very illuminating discussion of stoicism in (TMS p.272 ff). Throughout there is a great deal of perceptive psychological analysis, which my summary of some of his conclusions has left out: to support his various theses he draws our attention to various psychological phenomena, to how we react to various circumstances. His various theses are in effect interpretative hypothesis put forward to make sense of the subtleties of our experience, and he does this very well. I commend the book to you.

Reading Guide to Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Lecture and Reading Guide to Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

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