Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ part 1
On the first page of Smith's _Theory_, we witness one crucial difference from Kant: Smith wants to afford the passions a place in determining what is moral and what should be persuasive. While Kant continually appeals to reason and freedom, Smith continually returns to sympathy and fellow-feeling. Try to contrast two other ideas: Kant's notion of dignity and Smith's notion of propriety. Here are a few questions to get you started. Feel free to invent your own if you have one:
* What's Kantian dignity? What's Smithian propriety?
*If the principle of dignity requires that we treat every interlocutor as a reasonable subjection to whom we will not pander by raising the passions or exciting the imagination, what does propriety require of us?
*If everyone's innate dignity places us all on the same level in the public sphere, how does propriety set us in relation to one another?
my 2 cents
I think it's worth saying that Smith's idea of propriety is very similar to Gilbert Austin's theory of gestures--for Smith, emotions should be expressed where appropriate. For Austin, gestures (signifying emotions) should also be expressed where appropriate, in order to have maximum effect on the audience. What I like in particular is that Smith, like Austin (and unlike Kant) leaves room for contingency in his theory.
Summary of Rorty, Private Irony and Liberal Hope
Let me start by saying that...I had this summary done on Tuesday. I THOUGHT I posted it on Wednesday, but it seems that when this forum asked me if that was my final answer for the 3rd time, I did not press the yes button. Profuse apologies for my incompetence.
The short and vulgar way of summarizing the overall argument of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, irony, and solidarity is that it is an effort to banish the search for a universally valid foundation for moral judgment from the realm of debate. He insists that the centuries-long attempts to locate universal principles—whether in the Word of God (divine), objective experience (Lockean/empirical), the transcendent nature of human reason (Kantian/rational), or even in communicative consensus (Habermasian)—are irrelevant, and society would be better off (more free and less cruel) if we dispensed with such wild goose chases. Chapter 4, “Private irony and liberal hope,” proceeds from a three-chapter account of the history of the notion of contingency in philosophy, the debunking of essential essences by Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and others, all of which culminates in Rorty’s alternative to foundationalism and description of his utopian view of a liberal society. Therefore, my summary of Chapter 4 will allude back to the portions that proceed it.
Rorty opens Chapter 4 by making a distinction between the ironist, one who recognizes the contingency of all final vocabularies (even her own), and the metaphysician, one who seeks after “real essences” behind the words in his final vocabulary (73-4). The ironist sees intellectual revolutions as “rediscriptions,” the substitution of new words for old words for things that may not be “out there,” while the metaphysician says he does not care about the words used to describe something so long as we are always attempting to approximate Truth. “For a metaphysician, ‘philosophy,’ as defined by reference to the canonical Plato—Kant sequence, is an attempt to know about certain things . . . . For the ironist, ‘philosophy,’ so defined, is the attempt to apply and develop a particular antecedently chosen final vocabulary” (76). The metaphysician searches for universals, while for the ironist, the fashioning of a final vocabulary is largely an individual, though socially conditioned (she knows this), activity. Already, in this distinction between two types of thinkers, we have a split between the public search for universals that will tell us all how to confront our world and behave toward one another and the private endeavor of self-creation.
Hegel in his early writings, for Rorty, (apparently unknowingly) espoused a distinctly ironist tradition, one who engaged in the dialectic of analyzing vocabularies. The latest term for this activity is “literary criticism’ (79). What Hegel made possible, Rorty insists, is an ironist engagement with philosophy that mirrors the way modern critics engage with literature, as “abbreviations for a certain final vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users” rather than as “anonymous channels for truth” (79). Thus, “literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicians,” namely, serve as a moral guide (80). The moral activity of “enlarging the canon” replaces the activity of extrapolating universal moral truths from particular cases (though Kant would say that this is a backwards way of going about it) (81). This explains the success of literary criticism and literary theory, enlarging to the point of encompassing every aspect of culture, in the academy from the standpoint of 1989.
Objections to this situation abound. Rorty’s defense hinges upon an argument with Habermas, continued from the preceding chapter. Habermas views ironist thinking as “destructive of social hope” (83). Rorty responds by defining irony as a largely private, academic endeavor, irrelevant to politics. The key mistake that liberal intellectuals searching for universal foundations make is conflating the private self-creation of vocabularies with political action. As he says in Chapter 3, “Habermas thinks it essential to a democratic society that is self-image embody the universalism” and approximates Marx in his “assumption that the real meaning of a philosophical view consists in its political implications” (67, 83). In other words, Habermas is still participating in the irrelevant search for an equivalence between particulars and universals, private philosophy and public action. Rorty fully admits that Nietzschean irony is unproductive in politics, but that isn’t the point. Insofar as the goals of the ideal liberal society ought to be the diminishment of cruelty and suffering, those goals are, in fact, ONLY insured if we “privatize the Nietzschean-Sartrean-Foucauldian attempt at authenticity and purity, in order to prevent yourself from slipping into a political attitude which will lead you to think that there is some social goal more important than avoiding cruelty” (65). My guess is that metaphysical Marxism, which destroys that function of private irony, is how we get Stalinist purges and the systematic, willful starvation of Ukrainian farmers.
In Rorty’s ideal society, irony would be the reserved space of private intellectuals. The regular folks would not necessarily be ironists, though they would still be “commonsensically nominalist and historicist” just as “more and more people in the rich democracies have been commonsensical nontheists” (87). The objection that such a non-universalist ethics would be insufficient to keep us from killing each other would be irrelevant. In fact, liberal irony contains a kind of formula for human solidarity insofar the literature, ethonography, and journalism that it produces a “heightened awareness of the possibility of suffering. It will not produce a reason to care about suffering. What matters for the liberal ironist is not finding such a reason but making sure that she notices suffering when it occurs” (93). In order to notice, the ironist must be open toward and respectful to the infinite variety of final vocabularies. In short, the ironist must have an imagination. While ironist philosophy may be private, unproductive of political ends, literature is inherently public, capable of alerting us to suffering by engaging the imagination.
I believe we can chalk Rorty up in the “friendly to rhetoric” column, so long as we are speaking of a particular kind of rhetoric. For Rorty, it does indeed seem that we can’t get outside of rhetoric, dialectic, and literary criticism “the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another” (78). These seem to be the ideal pursuits of the intellectual and the “strong poet,” whose job it is to find the most compelling words to describe the human condition regardless of whether or not there is anything universal about that condition. Rhetoric, however, in the ideal liberal society, must never be used to dominate, to assert the primacy of one final vocabulary over all others. In Chapter One, Rorty himself states that “I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics” (9). The very seductiveness of Rorty’s style may in itself be a part of such a strategy. Indeed, the idea of a liberal, pluralistic society in which literary criticism is the new religion, in which we all respect one another’s vocabularies, in which we engage in discussion among equals without attempts at domination, in which we consciously attempt to reduce cruelty and suffering seems a very attractive idea to me.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Beauties of the Ape
So, I have been looking into some 18th c. work on association, mind, and development -- here is a gem that feeds back into the earlier monkey-child conversations. enjoy.
Priestley, Joseph, "David Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind" (London 1775)
section vii: of other motions, automatic and voluntary
"It is remarkable, that apes, whose bodies resemble the human body, more than those of any other brute creature, and whose intellects also approach nearer to ours, which last circumstance may, I suppose, have some connection with the first, should likewise resemble us so much in the faculty of imitation. Their aptness in handling is plainly the result of the shape and make of their fore legs and their intellects together, as in us. Their particular chattering may perhaps be some attempt toward speech, to which they cannot attain, partly from the defect in organs, partly, and that chiefly, from the narrowness of their memories, apprehensions, and associations; for they seem not to understand words to any considerable degree. Or may not their chattering be an imitation of laughter?
"Parrots appear to have far less intellect than apes, but a more distinguishing ear, and, like other birds, a much greater command of the muscles of the throat. Their talk seems to be devoid of all connection of ideas. However, in respect of sounds, they imitate as much as children, or as apes in respect of other actions. And indeed the talk of children, by outrunning their understanding in many things, very much resembles that of parrots."
Adam Smith seems like such a
Adam Smith seems like such a snuggly philosopher, at least so far. He just wants to get together and talk about how we feel.
I see a major point of commonality between Kant’s dignity and Smith’s propriety in ye olde Golden Rule. Kant’s all about respecting each other as free moral agents, and Smith says, “that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature….As to love our neighbor as we love ourselves” (25).
However, Kant’s dignity is based on the fact that we all have freedom and the same a priori concepts, and because of that we should respect each other. Smith’s propriety is about how we can all empathize with each other through our common experiences of emotion—although our feelings are much more intense when we are feeling them, than when we are sympathizing with them in others. And propriety requires us to negotiate differences in audience (we can be more open about our emotions in front of friends than in front of strangers). Propriety also values mediocrity—taking the middle ground in all things. I guess this is where we get our skepticism of people who are over-emotional as irrational, and therefore discount them from the conversation.
I guess propriety would value us in the public sphere based on the sophistication with which we can control our own emotions and accurately predict the sympathies of others. Propriety values decorum and those who can understand the nuances of what is considered decorous in different situations.
Snuggly goodness
I think it's fun to think of Smith as our snuggly philosopher. His sense of sympathy reminds me of Hegel's discussion of the purpose of art- to heal the spirit that is alienated from itself. We seek collective education and healing by viewing art in which we all collectively seek truth and hope that our views are the same as the views of others.
For Smith, we seek the "healing consolation of sympathy" (15), which by its very nature is an effort that requires more than one, hence my thoughts on the human spirit and collectivism.
If we think of Kant's dignity, as Lauren says, as related to the respect that all people should have for each other as individuals with the same a priori concepts, then Kant too becomes cuddly. However, I'm not sure the sense of individuality in Kant lines up directly with the discussion of propriety and sympathy in Kant, because Smith's propriety can be so relativistic depending on the situation and the emotions and the expression of those emotions.
If, as suggested in class, Kant's superhero metaphysician would control morals by setting the boundaries of metaphysics AND is hostile to rhetoric, Smith's sympathy and propriety is completely opposed due to its snuggliness and friendliness toward rhetoric. Smith allows for some sense of relativism of emotion and comments that the use of emotion can bring people together or drive them apart based on propriety of action in any given situation. The situational aspect allows for that friendliness to being convnced by rhetoric.
The Invisible Hand of Empathy
In my reading of Smith the key to propriety is displaying the proper amount of sentiment such that the people around you can perfectly empathize. This puts the focus of one’s actions on the effects they will have on others. One must have sufficient self-control such that one is not excessive in the display of passion neither should one be perceived as cold or unfeeling. The idea echoes the Greek Golden Mean.
Kant’s idea of dignity suggests that one should never influence others emotionally as it imposes on their dignity. Dignity, here, is the ability to choose or think for oneself. According to Kant we shouldn’t influence the way others think by influencing how they feel. Smith obliges us to do so.
There is a fundamental difference in the way they view the individual’s place in society. I would link Adam Smith’s view of human nature to his view of the invisible hand. Compassion, commiseration, sympathy, empathy are the social equivalents of invisible hands connecting humanity together. Kant attempts to sever these invisible ties of emotion while Smith accepts and describes them. Nevertheless, Kant’s idea of universal categorical imperatives leaves room for a universal reason even if he dismisses the undignified influence of the passions. Therefore, there is a bit of the Golden Rule but in strikingly different variants. Kant says, “Do unto others as you would have everyone do.” Smith says, “Do unto others to the extent that the majority of them would be able to empathize.”
Mediocre Passions
If the low threshold for Kant’s reasonable human being is the capacity for the ‘ought’, then his conception of dignity isn’t that far beyond Smith’s propriety’. Yes, Smith does allow that our emotional states and affectual relations with others influence our ways of seeing. They might even determine them in some ways, since as Todd pointed to, we have no way of judging the other’s situation except through our own experiential faculties. Even so, Smith assumes a normative system (propriety) that safeguards each of us and then society from extreme deviations of emotion or sympathy. All spectators react agreeably to grief, joy, or a smiling face (11). The angry man, however, with his extreme emotions is naturally deprived of sympathy because he threatens the group. Importantly, these situations require socialization and cannot be gained a priori. Smith’s ongoing use of the spectator and the person “performing” indicates that part of our sympathetic impulses come by being taught what it is to be a spectator. In this process, one learns how long to laugh at a joke, who to sympathize with, and how important fellow feeling is. I found particularly interesting the passage on p. 14 about how reading socially develops these faculties. It reminded me that Smith and his cohorts were the first in any university to teach novels as an addition to the classical education.
So in place of Kant’s ‘ought’ that allows for dignity, Smith focuses on a social system that reigns in the passions. Now we might speculate that their different causes have very different effects, but I could see how Smith and Kant’s world could be compatible. After all, as Smith has shown by the several examples of normalizing passion, a person in a Smithian world wouldn’t sympathize with unreasonable passions either too high or too low—they need “a certain mediocrity” (27). Section II will lead into the many bodily passions that are “indecent to express”. To my mind, this starts to look a lot like an ‘ought’. One final moment of disbelief I want to throw out there. Smith says that of course we never come to despise another after a argument over philosophy, matters of taste, or speculation (21). Presumably this is because society and conversation “are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility” (23). Is this really the case? Do the passions never exceed mediocrity during our conversations about philosophy? Maybe so. Who cares, I guess.
(citations from Liberty Fund edition)
The sentiment of dignity
Smith would see Kantian dignity as a pie-in-the-sky distraction from the way human intercourse really plays out. According to Smith there are no reasonable subjections bounded by a priori cognitions. We can't clear away the distractions from reason, as Kant would have it, because such 'distractions' are part and parcel of our way of thinking. Smith isn't dismissing reason entirely, but he is describing it in a far more embodied sense than Kant's treatment: "Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges the 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" (19 / I.i.3.10). Smith doesn't abandon a reasonable pursuit of wisdom and virtue. He just describes how difficult such a pursuit it. To focus on Kantian dignity to the exclusion of (or as superior to) sensation and sympathy, for Smith, would be to ignore critical influences on the way we think.
Granted propriety is a far less grand and noble state than what Kant offers us. Mere propriety is not even as worthy a quality as virtue, as virtue involves "those qualities and actions which deserve to be admired and celebrated" whereas propriety only involves those qualities and actions "which simply deserve to be approved of" (25 / I.i.5.7). But propriety is often the best we can do. If Kantian dignity requires us to address each other as reasonable subjections that shouldn't be pandered to, propriety requires that we keep in mind that 'pandering' often works in that human sensations are susceptible to emotional influence and that such susceptibility isn't necessarily a bad thing (though it can be abused).
Moreoever, not only is the human mind open to the influence of others' emotional states, it is influenced by the conditions in which one finds itself. The world itself 'panders' to us in that as we experience the vagaries of fortune our emotional state rises and falls. The influence of sympathy is inevitable and inescapable, and as such may transcend/disrupt human created standards: Smith describes how we feel less strongly for someone who suffers tragedy than we would if we ourselves suffered. He notes how we might look down on a person who wallows in sorrow on account of a tragedy that affects only him, and that "we therefore despise him; unjustly, perhaps, if any sentiment could be regarded as unjust, to which we are by nature irresistibly determined" (49 / I.iii.1.15). This irresistible determination of nature constrains whatever freedom we attempt to exercise in the pursuit of dignity. If everyone' dignity places us all at the same level in the public sphere [which is a big if], then propriety tries to explain how and why we are not in fact on the same level but are rather scattered to hell and gone. For instance, the sentiment which urges people to strive for "place" causes "all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world" (57 / I.iii.2.8). Propriety gives us a happy medium to which we can strive, which "people of sense" can discern and achieve (57). "People of sense" doesn't seem to get us much further than a critique of reason, but it does afford a more accurate analysis of what's blocking our way.
Beauties of Kames
Kames’s 1762 Elements of Criticism opens with two lengthy chapters on cognitive and affective dimensions of human understanding. Kames introduces a terminology that will be important to his later discussions of aesthetics and propriety. First, Kames distinguishes perception from sensation, insofar as the former makes external objects known to the mind and the latter attends to internal objects of the mind commonly associated with consciousness. Conception and imagination move between these poles of inner and outer—conception handles ideas mediated through representation and passively received by the mind whereas imagination constitutes an active power capable of producing chimaeras of external objects. Kames adopts a Lockean theory of perception, which informs a train of consciousness akin to William James’s 19th c. model: “the train of our thoughts is in a great measure regulated by the foregoing relations [of external objects]” (I.22). Emotions describe internal states of mind that “may not improperly be denominated tones” and register sensations that may be either pleasant or painful (731). Passions, on the other hand, entail desire for particular objects. Kames defines passions for general objects as appetites and motives, which either “impel us to act blindly” (instinctive) or “admit reason” and “prompt actions with a view to an end” (deliberative).
Kames argues that the deliberative passion of benevolence is intrinsic to human nature and he refutes Bernard Mandeville’s hypothesis that humans are creatures motivated solely by self-interest. The principle of benevolence affords a “means of gratification beyond what selfishness can afford; and…tends eminently to advance the happiness of others” (133). A human agent does not seek to maximize pleasure without consideration for the other people from whom he receives pleasure, but instead “he is prompted by his nature, to desire the good of every sensible being that gives him pleasure” (133). Thus, he does not turn from a person in distress, but attempts to redirect the painful passion. Kames terms this interest in other sensitive beings “sympathy.” For Kames, sympathy is a deliberative passion directed toward the principle of benevolence, “which, tho’ painful, is yet in its nature attractive” (134).
Alongside sympathy, “sentiment” describes thoughts prompted by passions, and sentiments help shape human understanding by means of language (311;349). For example, a person who perceives the external signs of suffering in another person will form ideas of personally experiencing that pain and will desire to relieve the injured person. As one attempts to relieve another person’s pain, one attaches painful sensations to an external object and communicates those feelings through language. Through the exchange, one feels pleased at the other’s relief and the two communicate like sentiments of gratitude (as well as mutual repulsion toward a painful object). Kames suggests that social sentiments structure complex objects of desire such as benevolence. Furthermore, Kames argues that humans will forego immediate pleasure in the service of benevolent relationships based on abstract terms such as nationality, family, and friendship.
According to Kames, human emotions are not simply derived from “a being, action, or quality…supposed to be really existing” (66). Instead, Kames believes that sufficient immersion in a fiction generates an ideal presence “distinguished on the one hand from real presence, and on the other from a superficial or reflective remembrance. In contradistinction to real presence, ideal presence may be properly termed a waking dream; because, like a dream, it vanisheth the moment we reflect upon our present situation” (68). Ideal presence, however, relies upon certain principles of aesthetic form and rhetorical invention. Sights and sounds that generate pleasure are beautiful, and Kames parallels the external relation of objects to the quality of emotions produced in the spectator. Ideal presence pertains to an aesthetic experience, but ethical considerations are also possible in the comparison of “real” and “ideal.” Kames insists that “a treatise of ethics is not my province,” yet he imports ethical obligations based in propriety. Kames figures propriety and aesthetic beauty as parallel species under the common genus of congruity: “Propriety cannot rightly be considered in any other light, than as the natural law that regulates our conduct with respect to ourselves; as justice is the natural law that regulates our conduct with respect to others…It is that very character of ought or should which makes justice a law to us; and that very same character is applicable to propriety” (141;242).
Kames’s combination of aesthetic feeling and moral sensibility follows upon David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” which proposes, “the perfection of man, and the perfection of the sense of feeling, are found to be united” (Hume 143). Kames diverges from Hume’s commonsense philosophy concerning the influence of “applause and approbation” for certain actions rooted in custom and the commonplaces of language (Hume 135). Kames comprehends a much more bodily source, “Here it would seem, that the change is not made upon the mind, which is commonly the case in passive habits, but upon the body” (288). By distinguishing “specific” from “generic” habits, Kames emphasizes the primacy of bodily pleasure in social relations, and he offers the untoward example, “the attachment we have by habit to a particular woman, differs widely from the passion which comprehends the whole sex” (286). Habits do not concern the easy exchange of objects but depend upon affection (or aversion overcome) for a particular object through reiterated use. Through a pleasant train of use over a significant period of time, generic habits emerge in the form of bodily needs.
How then, might language, rhetoric, or any other aesthetic form entrain the behavior of individuals who are tied to their bodies? Kames’s text does not simply assess the extent to which language and aesthetics immanently express nature’s laws and render ethical judgment certain and appealing. This is only one aspiration of the Elements. Chapters three through seventeen show how “sentiments ought to be tuned to passion, and language to both,” yet eighteen through twenty-three show how writers accomplish these tasks with varying degrees of success through such devices as imitative words, artificial connections between words, due arrangement of words and sentences, syllabic riffs, pauses, and accents, figurative speech, and formal consistency (349). Kames offers rhetorical and aesthetic invention a power outside nature: “Language would have no power, were it confined to the natural order of ideas. I shall soon have opportunity to make it evident, that by inversion a thousand beauties may be compassed, which must be relinquished in a natural arrangement…the mind of man is so happily constituted as to relish inversion, tho’ in one respect unnatural; and to relish it so much, as in many cases to admit a separation of words the most intimately connected” (408).
The intimate connection between pleasure, sentiment, and habit provides for rhetoric’s central position in Kames’s Elements: “for in discoursing of thoughts, it is difficult to abstract altogether from the words; and still more difficult, in discoursing of words, to abstract altogether from the thought” (611). When Kames discusses language explicitly, he accentuates moral and political philosophy: “To connect individuals in a social state, no particular contributes more than language, by the power it possesses of an expeditious communication of thought, and a lively representation of transactions. But nature hath not been satisfied to recommend language by its utility merely: independent of utility, it is made susceptible of many beauties, which are directly felt, without any intervening reflection” (642). Language might aspire to pure performativity not by mirroring nature or conveying useful ideas, but by potential for beautiful language to generate pleasure.
The final chapter of Kames’s Elements investigates standards of taste and poses a problem that still persists in contemporary art galleries and liberal arts classrooms: “‘That there is no disputing about taste,’ meaning taste in its figurative as well as proper sense, is a saying so generally received as to have become a proverb…If man were framed as not to have any notion of a common standard, the proverb mentioned…would hold universally, not only in fine arts, but in morals: upon that supposition, the taste of every man, with respect to both, would to himself be an ultimate standard” (719;722). Kames refutes the particularity of taste and compares a common standard of criticism to natural similarities within organic species. Kames relates defective judgment in aesthetics and morals to abnormality within a species. The analogy of organicism considers different branches of aesthetics and different cultural formations in terms of slight modifications differentiating forms of life. The stakes of such comparisons implicate aesthetic and moral taste in a hierarchy of aesthetic and moral forms akin to Enlightenment notions of a great chain of being. Deviance within a species of morals or aesthetics can be recognized as such by application of the particular to the norm of common judgment operating under the aegis of a universal standard confirmed by nature. In sum, Kames’s Elements of Criticism synthesizes several Enlightenment philosophical traditions: the rationalist derivation of a priori laws through pure reason, the commonsense inquiry into habits and dispositions reified through rhetorical commonplaces, and the empiricist model involving observation, intuition, res, and verba.
Summary of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Adam Smith sets out to explain how human relations do and ought to work. For Smith, the key element of human interaction is sympathy—an affective tie that involves attempting to discern both the sentiments of people that have been acted upon in some way and the sentiments and intentions of those who have committed an act (in modern parlance, Smith’s sense of sympathy would be a bit closer to our use of the word “empathy,” however Smith does not suggest that we feel exactly what our observed subject feels, but rather what we imagine they feel).
For Smith, sympathy is not generated simply through reasoning and/or the retrieval of empirical evidence—it is spurred on by an imaginary conception of the sensations that another person is feeling. Furthermore, it need not necessarily be accurate to be of use; for example, while we cannot truly feel what the dead feel, our imagination of what death is like (i.e. our sympathy for the dead) has a social function that keeps humans in line (13). In addition, Smith argues that one of the great pleasures in life is feeling sympathy for another’s good deeds and happiness. Smith also holds that some situations (and people) are easier to sympathize with (or “go along with”) than others and that a failure to form a sympathetic tie can inhibit respectful conversation about differences: “if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered…we can no longer converse upon these subjects” (21). Furthermore, our relative sympathy for someone else (or lack thereof) is ultimately what determines whether or not we judge them as in the right or wrong (i.e. “Our sympathy with the person whose motives we go along with, and whom therefore we look upon as in the right, cannot but harden us against all fellow-feeling with the other, whom we necessarily regard as in the wrong”) (72). Finally, whereas some would privilege inner peace over social felicity, Smith argues that an exchange of affect underlies all positive social relations and fosters happiness: whereas a lonely individual is frequently unhappy, Smith states that “Society and conversation…are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility” (23).
For Smith, The most basic guideline for moral action is what follows propriety, which can be more clearly defined as acts that should be approved of by an impartial observer (real or hypothetical) who is watching a person’s actions and understanding of their intentions. For Smith, we feel “direct” sympathy for a person who performs an action and “indirect” sympathy for someone that is the recipient of the action; this “double sympathy” plays a large role in our examination of conduct and the relative beneficence of an action. While knowing whether or not someone is acting in perfect propriety might be impossible, Smith argues that it is important to investigate what that might be so that one can then judge to what degree the rest of society achieves propriety and see where an agent’s actions measure up: “whatever goes beyond this degree, how far soever it may be removed from absolute perfection, seems to deserve applause; and whatever falls short of it, to deserve blame” (26). As this sense of propriety is developed, it can be used as a focal point from which one can rein in excess of the passions, which can be either negative (or, as Smith calls it, unsocial (34)) or potentially positive, such as the more selfish passions (for example, while Smith argues that pride can have some negative effects, such as making one unlikable, it is far better than an underestimation of one’s abilities, which can lead to unhappiness and underachievement).
Depending upon the relative propriety or impropriety of one’s deeds, Smith states that actions may call for a response from others. If someone has committed a virtuous act and had good intentions in doing so, we can call their act a benevolent one that deserves our admiration and possibly a favorable recompense. On the other hand, if one has behaved maliciously and has succeeded in carrying out a hurtful act, we can say that they deserve our resentment. In extreme circumstances, Smith argues, we carry out revenge to pay back a hurtful act. It should be noted, however, that Smith does not suggest that revenge is always “right,” but instead calls it a matter of “fact” of human conduct (77). Rather, Smith argues that “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved” and one should try to earn that love (41). Indeed, if the basis of our ability to judge the propriety of another’s actions is a matter of imaginative voyeurism, or of feeling that we are “entering into” the thoughts of others, then it is also important that one behaves in a manner that is receptive to the sympathy of others. Part of this involves showing our sympathy to others, but it also involves acting in a “praiseworthy” manner that will instill positive feelings. At times, this also means restraining emotion (for example, Smith mentions that we might feel little sympathy for someone who cries at his own execution [the wimp]—an act that Smith would see as a shameful “exposure” of weakness to the eyes of the world).
Ultimately though, for Smith the best actions are those that are both perfectly praiseworthy and yet performed regardless of who is watching. And yet, even when one is alone, Smith suggests that we should examine the hypothetical reactions of an “impartial” or “disinterested” observer. Because we cannot completely know how someone might react to our actions or be aware of our intentions, Smith suggests that this observer would have the ability to judge our actions correctly if they were capable of knowing all the relevant information regarding an act. This “impartial” observer, or as I like to call him “hegemony cricket,” is an imaginary being that would watch our actions and judge whether or not we have acted with propriety. Although our imperfect understanding and limited comprehension render this a necessarily imperfect way of attempting to judge one’s actions objectively, Smith states that “this is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct” (113). Furthermore, since this imaginary person has no interest except in propriety, what would please this person is independent of what one’s self-interests are as well as the interests of competing parties. Thus, if one’s self-interest is in line with what is proper, then great; but if one acts in self interest against propriety, then one will feel guilt and remorse (128-131). This “man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct” should ideally also keep our sense of self-love in check because we can use this impartial figure to see ourselves as just one element of a multitude (137). In addition, this supposed observer may also make one realize that one has acted inappropriately and reinforce feelings of guilt and remorse.
The creation of this impartial observer is significant for several key reasons. First, since this impartial figure constitutes our feeling of how society should feel about our actions (or would if they knew all the information we are working with), it operates as a self-defense mechanism that can reward us with self-respect if the deed goes unrecognized by the rest of society. Second, Smith’s creation can also be seen as a splitting up of the subject that operates a bit like an early version of Freud’s superego or whatever happens when the eyes of Texas are upon us. It should be noted, however, that while Smith does hold that custom can have some ability to shape our sense of propriety, we still learn about proper conduct through our own experiences, a matter I will discuss shortly.
Although I have mentioned some of the ramifications of moral judgments and actions, it stands to be mentioned how one learns to determine what actions might be deemed proper. It is important to note that Smith sees humans as imitative creatures that learn from examples of good and bad conduct. For example, Smith argues that “the natural disposition to accommodate and to assimilate, as much as we can, our own sentiments, principles, and feelings, to those which we see fixed and rooted in the persons whom we are obliged to live and converse a great deal with, is the cause for the contagious effects of both good and bad company” (224). But the possible negative results of these interactions can be mitigated by what Smith calls a “virtuous education”— a process that can help us hone our value judgments about the actions of others as well as inform the way in which our imagined observer examines our own actions (163). According to Smith, “general rules of morality are derived from experience and our approval or disapproval of certain actions.” It is important for us to expose ourselves to these emotions because we can thereby determine how we should determine our actions. Again, While Smith does argue that custom plays a role in our conduct, our observations will allow us to access good general rules that come from God, such as the virtues of civility and hospitability (159-162). Although we can view these general rules as ones that all social relations should aspire to, runaway passions still have the ability to twist our judgment and lead us to perform wrongful actions (157). We can only learn to improve our manipulation of these passions through experience and through learning through our sympathetic relations with others (channeling what could be a scene in a gothic novel, Smith depicts the vacillating opinions of someone that hasn’t been exposed to dark feelings before on pages 160-61). This aspect of sympathy is especially important for those who are interested in sympathetic novels. Aside from the fact that Smith himself cites Samuel Richardson (along with Voltaire and Racine) as good moral instructors (143), the power of sympathetic transport is central to the emergence of the early American novel. For example, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, which was released thirty years after Smith’s TMS, can be seen as a corollary of Adams’ philosophy that highlights the dangers and ecstasies of sympathetic transport.
Finally, although it might be tempting to consider Smith’s ur-text of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, to be in contradiction with TMS, it can also be seen as a text that is highly supportive of the capitalist system. For example, Smith argues that harmonious relationships as a type of “commerce” between peoples that serve mutual interest. In that sense, sympathy and production go hand-in hand.