Emotions & Morals, pt. 4: Adam Smith -- British Sense Theorists

Adam Smith is the last of the three major British moral sense theorists that we will examine in this series.  Smith was a friend of David Hume's, whom we discussed last time. Smith, much like Hume before him, saw himself engaged in moral science, the empirical description of how we as humans think about morals, how we make moral judgments, and how we assess the motivations, words, and actions of others.

He begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments by denying the radical selfishness that Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville had variously posited in their ethical outlooks:  "However selfish 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 they derive nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it" (I.i.1.1). The words "evidently" and "principles" in this opening point to his approach:  it is empirical based on evidence observed in the social interaction of humans.  Smith intends it to be a study of moral psychology, a study whose central emphasis is social unity through sympathy.

Adam Smith (1723-1790)

As such a study, the workings of the mind take center stage.  For Smith, the imagination is is a feature of the mind that it uses to make connections in the world to satisfy our human desire for order. The imagination is of two kinds: theoretical, which pertains to objects and events, and practical, which pertains to other persons and ourselves.  When we observe people, we ascribe or impute to them motives for their words and actions.  We assume they have a purpose; we presume they have a point.  Identifying with this purpose -- attempting to understand the point of other people as we try to order experience -- is what Smith calls sympathy.

Hume also used the term sympathy. For Hume sympathy generally meant feeling what others actually feel in their circumstances. For Smith, sympathy is imagined feeling, that is, a trading of places, what we would feel if we were in those circumstances (see Samuel Fleischacker, "Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy").  The important assumption of Smith's view of sympathy is that we may not or do not immediately feel what others do.  Our feelings and those of others may not correspond; they may not perfectly match.  Getting outside of ourselves lies at the heart of Smith's moral theory.  It involves both not being selfishly preoccupied with ourselves so that we can and looking at ourselves from another person's perspective.  This strikes me as a powerful and instructive feature of Smith's moral vision.

Smith conceives of sympathy as the means that will allow us to approve or disapprove of another's actions or standpoint.  Sympathy in this technical sense is not the assessment itself.  He will use the term sympathy in its normal sense, but it is important to note that it also often carries this precise meaning. It is also worth noting that Smith believes there is pleasure to be had in so sympathizing with others.

This passage from early in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments gives a flavor of his conception:

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. ... this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels... (III.i.2.3)

In another place, Smith makes vivid the imaginative exchange involved in his conception of sympathy:

When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstance with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your own account, and not in the least upon my own. (TMS, VI.iii.1.4; emphasis mine)

How does this apply to Smith's moral theory? The idea of sympathetic imagination runs not just from ourselves to the motives, feelings, and actions of another person in a particular situation.  It runs from an imagined observer to us. We imagine an ideal observer, an impartial, external spectator whose assessment of our motives we attempt to anticipate and to which we adjust our words and actions.  Smith, as MacIntyre explains,

... appeals to sympathy as the basis of morals.  He makes use of a figure who also appears in Hume -- the imaginary impartial spectator of our actions, who provides the standard by which they are to be judged.  Smith disagrees with Hume on the question of utility; when we morally approve of a man's conduct we approve of it primarily as fitting or proper, and not as useful.  The discernment of propriety in our own actions is the guide to right conduct; or, rather, we must ask whether the imaginary spectator would judge our actions to be proper.  By so doing, we overcome the bias of self-love. (MacIntyre, Short History of Ethics, p. 176)

Unlike Hutcheson and, in his own specific way, Hume, Smith is not positing a separate sensory faculty specific to morality. One might see Smith's theory as offering an account of how our internal psychology, or "conscience," works inside us to motivate our actions and then to approve or disapprove of them in ourselves and others.

It is worth mentioning at this point a certain debate about Smith's moral theory. On the one hand, there are those who argue that Smith is not offering a normative argument for how we ought to conduct ourselves; he is, on this reading, merely providing an explanatory account of how he thinks that we in fact do conduct ourselves.  On this view, in other words, he is not arguing for how people should think about morals, make moral judgments, and assess others.  On the other hand, a contrasting view is that Smith's theory is in fact normative in a certain way. The move from description to prescription may be subtle, but it is nevertheless present.

It is this latter reading of Smith, namely, that he offers an indirect normative ethical theory, with which I am inclined to agree. Isaac Newton's scientific approach to discovering laws of nature that form a basic for fixed patterns of behavior, or principles by which we can interpret that behavior, influenced eighteenth-century philosophers in ways that most of us probably forget. Newton's revolutionary way of thinking extended not only to Scotland (and to Hume and to Smith) but also to Germany (to Kant).  Kant oriented his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics around it, and he believed himself to be doing for understanding rationality and its grounding for ethical action what Newton did for the mechanics of motion.  The normative element indirectly appears because Smith seems to suggest that we ought to adjust our motives, words, and actions to fit those of which the impartial spectator approves.  We do not merely do so.

When, according to Smith, do we approve of motives and actions in ourselves and others according to this view of imagined sympathy?  The key is, first, is propriety, that is, if we believe a motive or action is fitting in an agent to a particular situation.  One hears echoes of Aristotle.  The way that we ought to act in a particular situation for Smith is consistent with how the impartial spectator judges our motives and actions to be, all things considered, fitting. If we think an action is proper, then we grant it moral merit.  Second, a motive or action has merit according to the good or bad effects as intended. Intended, not absolute, effects are the second and subordinate key to assessing moral merit.

The device of an impartial spectator as an explanation of how we make moral assessments taps into our human conception or sense of ideal propriety for motives and actions. Sympathy of Smith's imaginative variety is critical because without that "fellow-feeling," it will be difficult or impossible to know whether something is fitting to the situation. Without sympathy, without possessing all relevant information about a situation and a person's motives and feelings within it, moral assessment will be impaired.

When, as Knud Haakonssen interprets Smith, we evaluate ideally proper actions according to sympathy in this way, "we tend to categorize, generalize, and, ultimately, universalize. This is the source of rules in our moral life" ("Introduction," in Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. xviii).  The origin of our sense of obligation as a result is multifarious. Custom and consequences contribute along with propriety and duty.  "Sympathetic propriety ties us to the particularity of the situation, while the impartial spectator calls for the generality of rules" (Haakonssen, "Introduction," p. xix).  Ultimately, it seems that we feel obligated to act morally in order to receive the approval of our conscience, or the imagined impartial spectator, and the approval of others (or the fear of receiving disapproval of the same).  We sense that we are bound to act as is fitting in a certain situation and as our social relations with others warrant.

Although rules are a guide to moral behavior, the more important (and more interesting) element of Smith's theory is the ongoing reconfiguring of our emotional dispositions, whether as agents or objects of moral action, according to the judgment of the imagined external impartial spectator.  This aspect of reciprocal sympathy points to the centrality in Smith's moral framework of ethics as part of socialization.(It is reciprocal because it applies both to those acting and those acted upon, those viewing and those being viewed.)  An individual evaluates her motives and actions as part of a community, as someone who must get along with others in community (hence, approval and disapproval is key), but also as someone who may cultivate the moral character so as imaginatively to step outside of that social embeddedness and to evaluate it critically.

I initially thought a fine way to approach this series of posts on the major moral sense theorists would be by consulting Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of them in his A Short History of Ethics.  Along the way I have supplemented it with other primary or secondary texts as needed.  It may be fitting, then, to conclude this post on the last of our major figures, with a passage from MacIntyre's After Virtue:

For Smith the virtues fall into two classes. There are on the one hand those three virtues which, if they are perfectly possessed, enable a man to exhibit perfectly virtuous behavior. 'The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly virtuous' (Theory of Moral Sentiments VI. iii. 1). Notice of course that once again to be virtuous had been equated with rule-following. When Smith comes to deal with justice, he makes it a charge against 'ancient moralists' that we do not find 'any attempt towards a particular enumeration of the rules of justice'. But on Smith's view knowledge of what the rules are, whether the rules of justice or of prudence or of benevolence, is not sufficient to enable us to follow them; to do so we need another virtue of a very dif­ferent kind, the Stoic virtue of self-command which enables us to control our passions when they distract us from what virtue requires. (After Virtue, 3d ed., pp. 234-35)

Indeed, for Smith, self-command "is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principle lustre" (TMS, VI.iii.11).  Perhaps here we observe part of the normative dimension of his moral theory, for we need, or must, practice self-command over our emotions in order to understand correctly them and the standpoint of others in a particular situation, as is fitting to the cultivation of our humanity and the beneficial cohesion of society. And this exercise of self-command, which enables imaginative empathy and reasoned reflection, is something that we, as humans with our natural proclivities for social community, ought to do.

MacIntyre in After Virtue faults the Enlightenment for, among other things, both its preoccupation with individual concerns ("my good") over against, or not in proper conjunction with, communal and higher concerns ("the good"), and its rupturing the understanding of the narrative quality and unity of human life. Where Smith gives a place to rule-following, he also recognizes that virtues govern rules that we discover and that the rules are limited in their power to direct us how we ought to act. Smith may not identify a single good or telos after which humans (ought to) aim, but he does emphasize the natural propensity of humans to, and the propriety of, social cohesion.

This cultivation of community comes through the reflective and oscillating understanding of how we (ought to) relate to one another, for instance, by avoiding anger, hatred malice, envy, and revenge and by honing humanity, kindness, natural affection, friendship, and esteem (see TMS, VI.iii.15).  This is as good a springboard as any to turn, in our next and final post in this series, to some reflections on the significance and relevance of the British moral sense theorists to us today.