Adam Smith · Economics
Smith the moral philosopher - on sympathy, the impartial spectator, and why the man famous for self-interest founded morality on fellow-feeling.
Most people know Smith only as the author of The Wealth of Nations, the prophet of self-interest and the market. But seventeen years earlier, in 1759, he wrote a work of moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that he considered his finest achievement and revised throughout his life, right up to the end. And its very first sentence seems to contradict the selfish economist of legend: it begins not with self-interest but with our deep concern for others. The man remembered as the theorist of selfishness was, first and throughout, a moral philosopher who grounded human society in fellow-feeling.
Sympathy, for Smith, is the basic fact of our moral nature and the mechanism of all moral judgement. We approve of others’ feelings and actions when we can enter into them - when, imagining ourselves in their place, we would feel the same. We judge an angry man’s rage excessive if, putting ourselves in his situation, we would not feel so much; we judge a grief or a gratitude ‘proper’ when we can share it. Morality is thus not a set of rules handed down from outside, nor the conclusion of abstract reasoning, but grows from this constant, mutual imaginative exchange of feeling - we are forever imagining our way into one another’s situations, and approving or disapproving according to whether we can go along with what the other feels. We are, Smith says, fitted by nature for this fellow-feeling, and it binds us into a moral community.
The impartial spectator is Smith’s great contribution to moral philosophy, and his account of how it arises is profound. We are not born with a conscience; we learn it, socially. As children, we discover that others judge our conduct - they approve and disapprove, praise and blame - and we naturally desire their approval and dread their censure. Gradually we internalise this external gaze: we learn to see ourselves as others see us, and to judge our own conduct as an outside observer would. The impartial spectator is this internalised social gaze, raised to its ideal form - not the actual opinion of our actual neighbours (who may be biased or ill-informed), but the judgement of a perfectly fair, fully informed observer whom we imagine and consult. Conscience is this spectator made our own. And crucially, this means morality is fundamentally social: we become moral beings, capable of judging even ourselves, only by first living among others and learning to see ourselves through their eyes. The solitary individual, Smith says, could no more form a judgement of their own character than of their own face without a mirror - and society is that mirror. We carry the judge within, but the judge was built from the gaze of others.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned about Smith’s impartial spectator. Explain how this idea complicates the popular image of Smith as a champion of pure selfishness.
Leads to David Hume.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.