Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Parts I and III

Alistair Gow Fellow
· 4 replies
Moral psychologyModern EuropeanEmpiricismAdam SmithDavid Hume#conscience#impartial-spectator#scottish-enlightenment#sympathy
Follow

Its coordinates: 3.1.4 Moral Motivation · 3.4 Moral Psychology

Having started with Hume, I have moved on to Adam Smith, working through the Scottish Enlightenment in local order. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments first appeared in 1759 and he kept revising it until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he died.

It is the book that should be better known than The Wealth of Nations, and it is about moral psychology from the first line: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others."

Plan, four weeks.
– Week 1: Part I, section 1, on sympathy.
– Week 2: the rest of Part I, on propriety, and how we adjust our feelings to what others can go along with.
– Weeks 3–4: Part III, on conscience and the impartial spectator.

I am using the Penguin edition with Amartya Sen's introduction, but any edition will do. Please post when you finish each week, even a few lines.

LikeReply
Follow4 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

4 replies

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    Week 1. What surprised me is how different Smith's sympathy is from Hume's. For Hume, feelings spread by something like contagion. For Smith, sympathy is an act of imagination: I place myself in your situation and ask what I would feel there. That is why I can sympathise with a dead man, or feel embarrassed for someone who has no shame himself.

    As an economist I was trained on the "Adam Smith problem", the supposed contradiction between this book and The Wealth of Nations. Reading this, I am more convinced it is a pseudo-problem. Self-interest and sympathy work side by side in both books.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Nadia Haddad

    Fellow

    Week 2 is the one I can't stop thinking about on the unit. Smith observes that we can never feel another person's pain directly, only imagine it, and our imagined version is always weaker. So the sufferer, wanting our sympathy, learns to lower the pitch of their emotion to something we can go along with. Anyone who has sat at a bedside has seen patients do this, apologising for crying, making jokes about their pain. Smith saw it in 1759, and he did not think it a weakness. He thought it was how we stay in each other's company.

  3. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    Part III. The impartial spectator is usually read as society's opinion internalised, which would make conscience conformist. But Smith distinguishes the love of praise from the love of being praiseworthy. The man within the breast can judge against what everyone around us actually thinks.

    My feminist question is whose perspective the spectator is imagined from. Smith's spectator is rather a gentleman. I am not sure the book notices that.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    To close, the passage from Part III that I suspect everyone remembers. Smith imagines a man of humanity in Europe hearing that a great earthquake has swallowed up China. He would express sorrow, reflect on the precariousness of life, and then sleep soundly. Whereas if he were to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight.

    Smith's point is not that we are monsters. It is that our feelings alone will not get us to act rightly at a distance, and that it is the impartial spectator, reason and principle in his account, that tells us we are one among many. So Smith begins as a sentimentalist and ends somewhere closer to the middle. A good book to read slowly, and better in company.

    Helpful · 2