In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), Adam Smith set out to analyze the
principles by which human beings naturally
judge the conduct and character of others and,
afterwards, of themselves.
Nature
was the key to this project, as he saw it.
Nature was authored by God. Men were
endowed with the intelligence (reason) to
understand what God had authored in the make-up
of human beings and in the worldly realm that
they inhabited. By proposing to analyze
comprehensively the basic principles of human
moral conduct, Smith was acting in the spirit of
his times, at the rise of the modern secular
world. As Isaac Newton had discerned
universal laws governing the physical world, so
Smith would elucidate the universal laws
governing the moral behavior of humankind.
Smith
identified general rules of morality through
experience and observation. In doing so, he
believed that he was behaving as Nature designed
him and all humankind to behave. He was
exemplifying modern thinking when he equated
empirically-derived rules of morality with
“commands and laws of the Deity.”
(232)
(In
another place, I would like to connect
Smith’s hoary deistic foundation for
this-world experience to the genetic foundations
for moral rules advanced by E. O. Wilson and
other sociobiologists.)
Smith
doubtless thought that the general principles
that he was explaining were consistent with the
Biblical precepts of traditional
Christianity. But to understand what he was
doing, we have to remember that he was not mining
sacred texts for answers; he was looking around
him at the actual behavior of his fellow Scotsmen
in Kirkaldy. He could see a divine source
driving that everyday behavior. This made
him confident of his own rational power (itself
of divine origin) to translate it into the
general principles of his system.
2. THE CAUSE
OF MORAL SENTIMENTS IN THE SOCIAL DRAMA
To
get into Smith’s strategy for expressing the
natural laws of moral sentiments, it is best to
begin where he began—with the essential
concept of the “propriety of
action.” He devoted Part I, the first
ninety pages, of his book to it.
Smith’s
first finding was that “sympathy”
between human beings was the operative faculty in
determining moral propriety. He
found it, of course, rooted in human nature.
In giving sympathy a privileged
position in his scheme, Smith immediately
demolished any expectation that moral sentiments
derived from pure self-interest or
self-love. We see this in 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. (3)
(From
the start, then, Smith’s early work raises
an apparent contradiction in the mind of someone
trying to reconcile his theory of moral
sentiments with his later economic theory, which
depended critically upon self-interest.
This apparent contradiction I hope later to
examine in the context of a reading of The
Wealth of Nations.)
Armed
with the faculty of sympathy, a person is able to
imagine what he would feel if he were in the same
situation as that of the persons he is
observing—both the person acting and the
person who is being acted upon. Smith spoke
of the sympathetic spectator having a
“fellow-feeling” with that of the other
persons. (5)
Smith
found, however, that sympathy is an imperfect
tool. As a separate being, the spectator
can never fully replicate in himself the feeling
that he imagines in the other person. It is
always approximate. The spectator’s
feeling approaches accord with the other’s
feeling depending on the situation.
(7) Moreover, the spectator’s
imagination may lead him to have feelings that
the other person could not have: Smith cited
lunatics, infants, and dead people as objects of
sympathy with which the spectator could not
possibly achieve concordant feelings. (8)
Still,
“mutual sympathy,” not a one-sided
effort to “feel your pain,” was central
to the process as Smith developed it.
Mutual sympathy gave people a pleasure that
transcended their private feelings. People
were pleased when they observed others having the
same emotions they were having. When they
told others about their griefs or joys, it
pleased them to see that others sympathized.
(10-12)
Smith
sought to explain how judgments about the
“affections” or feelings of others
depended on this impulse toward mutual sympathy.
He
said, “We judge of the Propriety or
Impropriety of the Affections of other Men, by
their concord or dissonance with our own.”
(14) If a person was joyful or sorrowful
and perceived that a spectator’s
“fellow-feeling” was in congruence with
his own feeling—that he was really
sympathetic--, this congruence would signify
“propriety.” The less there was
of a concordance between the feeling of the
spectator and the person observed, the less would
be the propriety, the greater the impropriety.
(14)
So,
if a spectator approved another person’s
passion, this approval was equivalent to entirely
sympathizing with him. Conversely, his
disapproval of that passion was equivalent to a
total lack of sympathy. (14)
In
other words, propriety occurred when the
sympathies of the spectator were proportionate to
the feelings of the person observed.
Impropriety occurred when those sympathies were
disproportionate to the feelings of the person
observed. Mutual sympathy led to propriety;
lack of it led to impropriety. (14-15)
Proportionality
was the key indicator of propriety. When a
person’s feelings (affections, to employ
Smith’s commonly used term) were
proportionate to the cause or the object in
another person that excited them, propriety
prevailed. This led to social decency and
gracefulness. When they were
disproportionate—when they were either too
strong or too weak--, impropriety reigned.
This meant social indecency and ungracefulness.
(17)
On
these mechanisms of sympathetic feeling, then,
Smith constructed a whole “natural”
system of social behavior. That system
produced social judgments about the behavior of
individuals. It made society go forward
harmoniously in accordance with the natural laws
that God had authored. (23)
Taught
by their very nature to seek this harmonious
outcome, people strove to put themselves in the
situation of others in order to create proper
sympathy with their feelings. The persons
who were the objects of this striving, Smith
said, knew that spectators could sympathize with
their feelings only to a degree, never perfectly.
Smith
then hit upon an insight into the persons being
observed that had powerful ramifications.
He
predicated his insight on the assumption that all
persons desired as much sympathy from others as
possible. Persons knew that
observers could never fully match their own depth
of passion about the issue at hand.
Therefore, in order to win maximum sympathy, said
Smith, they would lower their passion to that
pitch “where the spectator can go
along” with them. (23) They would
“flatten” their tone “in order to
reduce it to harmony and concord [with the
emotions] of those” surrounding them.
(23) That is, they would “cool
it,” as we might say today, so as to stay
connected to the sympathy of a spectator.
Otherwise, the spectator might find their passion
extreme. Smith said that these calculations
and calibrations of feeling would occur through
“society and conversation,” the
ultimate generators of the sense of propriety and
of impropriety. (25)
In
sum, Smith was describing a social
drama that exemplified the way human
beings maintained harmony among themselves.
Some played the role of spectator and others the
role of feeling person. Sympathy drove the
action. Propriety or the lack thereof
provided climactic closure. From this
paradigmatic drama, Smith derived a grand
two-fold differentiation of social virtues:
(1)
GENTLE VIRTUES: The efforts of the
spectator to enter the sentiments of
the other person led to “the soft, the
gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of
candid condescension and indulgent
humanity.” (26)
(2)
HARD VIRTUES: The efforts of the person
observed to flatten or lower his
passion led to “the great, the awful, and
respectable, the virtues of self-denial, of
self-government, of that command of the passions
which subjects all the movements of our nature to
what our own dignity and honour, and the
propriety of our own conduct, require.” (26)
(Note
that the feeling person or the actor could play
the role of spectator to his own actions, owing
to the existence of a "judge within"
himself—"the great inmate of the
breast", that is, the conscience. [191])
The
playing out of these grand categories of
behavior, as Smith described them, produced the
harmony, indeed, the perfection, of human nature
in society. Nature guided us to “feel
much for others, and little for
ourselves.” It guided us to restrain
our selfish affections and to release our
benevolent affections. (27) The
virtues of “sensibility and
self-command” (28) became manifest when
human beings of extraordinary quality measured
their actions against a standard of
“complete propriety and
perfection.” (29)
***
Smith
recognized that the palette of human feelings
(affections) ranged widely. His actors did
not attain propriety by the easy and automatic
operation of the basic principles he was
discovering. He had to reckon with the complexity
of human feeling. A spectator might
sympathize greatly with the passion of another
person. But the quality of the feeling that
he shared with that other person would depend
upon the nature of the particular passion being
felt.
Smith
identified several particular kinds of
passion. Passions originating in the body
were one thing (33). Passions originating
from the imagination were
something else (39). There were unsocial
and social passions (44, 52).
There were selfish passions
(55). Across this range of feeling, what
did Smith observe when he put his spectators and
men of feeling into action?
(1)
The spectator was least able to sympathize with
the bodily passions of
another person. He tended to tune out
unrestrained expressions of hunger, lust, or pain
in others because it was difficult to
replicate their precise feeling in himself.
So, he admired people who "tone down"
or restrain their bodily passions. (35)
(The question of pornography would seem to arise
here; but Smith did not deal with the effect of
lustful behavior by others on those who watch
it.)
(2)
In the category of passions originating
in the imagination, Smith included
romantic love between two people and a scholar's
passion for his studies. Nearly as much as
bodily passions, these passions also posed a
barrier to the spectator's ability to
sympathize. The spectator could not get
into the mood of love toward one of the
lovers: he simply was not the lover or the
beloved. (39) Sympathy, however, was
possible for the spectator when he thought about
the hopes and fears that the
romantic lovers were feeling. But these
were "secondary passions" that did not
require sympathy with the immediate desire that
the lovers feel for each other's person. (40)
As
for scholars, Smith said that they should learn
to show "a certain reserve" toward
their personal enthusiasm for their
studies. Others could not possibly feel the
same excitement for their arcane subjects, unless
they too were involved in them. ("A
philosopher is company to a philosopher
only." [43])
(3)
Smith's third category of passions, the unsocial
passions, nicely illustrated the triangular
nature of his model of moral sentiments.
The passion of (a) the actor created a reaction
in (b) the person toward whom he was acting; and
(c) the spectator observed and calculated the
propriety of the actor's passion as well as the
feeling of the person acted upon. When a
person demonstrated an unsocial passion such as
hatred or anger toward another person and that
person in turn felt resentment at the hatred or
anger, the spectator, following a natural
inclination, divided his sympathy between the two
parties observed. (44) Initially, the
spectator would feel disgust at both the hatred
of the actor and the resentment of the person
attacked. (48-9)
Smith,
therefore, advised persons feeling anger or
resentment to restrain these unsocial passions
(tone them down) if they hoped to win the
sympathy of the third person, the judging
spectator. They should guide their
inclinations toward unsocial behavior in a way
that would maintain their "own rank and
dignity in society." He called this
self-guidance "magnanimity." (50)
A magnanimous person maintained
self-control by having the strength of mind to
contemplate and understand the social situation
out of which moral sentiments essentially
emerged. (66)
(Smith
was striving to see into the natural laws of
social behavior. As he presented his
findings, he consciously or otherwise advised his
readers on the application of these supposed
universal laws to the conduct of their particular
lives. This at times gives his book the
appearance of a book of manners.
When we remember that Smith's database came from
his observations of 18th
century Scotsmen, we rightly suspect a circular
process. The specific norms of behavior
that he studied in that time and place became the
universal rules of his moral theory; and then he
fed the moral theory back to the people of his
time and place, thus validating their
"proper" bourgeois behavior as examples
of natural law itself! Nothing illustrates
this process better than Smith's prescriptive
thoughts on the virtue of magnanimity. How
should the magnanimous person manage his
resentment at the anger of another person?
Smith gave a classic description of the bourgeois
gentleman of his time: His "style and
deportment" must be "plain, open, and
direct; determined without positiveness, and
elevated without insolence; not only free from
petulance and low scurrility; but generous,
candid, and full of all proper regards, even for
the person who has offended [him]."
[See pages 50, 60, and 66])
(4)
The social passions elicited
initial pleasure rather than the disgust elicited
by the unsocial passions. They included "generosity,
humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship
and esteem…" (52) This
pleasurable feeling came from the way they
created mutual harmony between
the person displaying them and the spectator or
the person who was the object of the
passion. They created "happy
commerce." (52)
(5)
Smith identified the selfish passions
mainly as personal grief and joy.
He situated them somewhere between the unsocial
passions and the social passions. They therefore
did not stimulate an immediate feeling of
disagreeableness; nor did they stimulate an
immediate feeling of pleasure. It all
depended.
If
a person's grief was small
(someone was bothered by bad weather, say), the
spectator was likely to be slow to sympathize
when the person complained too
loudly. But if he had large grief, a
"deep distress," he would attract
sincere sympathy. (58)
The
reverse held, said Smith, when a person expressed
joy. Small joys evoked great
sympathy. Great joys (as when a person
celebrated a sudden acquisition of great wealth),
however, failed to win great sympathy from
others. (55-56)
If
we step back and look at these five categories of
passion in action among people, we see Smith's
basic principle of "propriety" at
work. How do we feel about the way other
people in our social setting feel? We
derive the answer by calculating
"in our breast" whether the feeling
being expressed is proportionate to the cause of
the feeling.
Smith
finished his study of propriety by looking
specifically at the way opposing social
conditions—prosperity
on one hand and adversity on
the other--affected the sense of propriety.
(60-90)
He
first established that spectators sympathize more
readily with joy (prosperity) than with sorrow
(adversity) in others because they felt better
when doing so. (60-69) Knowing this, people
paraded their good fortune but concealed their
poverty as they tried to gain sympathy.
(70-83) And, indeed, Smith saw that people tended
to sympathize with the rich and great, to admire
them. They tended to be unsympathetic
toward the poor and the mean, to neglect
them. (84-90)
From
the emulation of the rich and great arose the
pull of "fashion," with all the vanity
implied in the term. (87-88) Those admired
and their admirers both tended to sacrifice
virtue when vanity gripped them; they thus
corrupted the moral sentiments based on Smith's
fundamental notion of propriety.
(The
great Author of Nature, who in Smith's view laid
down the general rules of moral sentiments, aimed
to create a beneficent social system that worked
through the feelings of propriety implanted in
the breast of human beings. But by
sympathizing more readily with joy than with
sorrow, humans were predisposed, Smith seems to
be saying, to foul up the otherwise harmonious
social system that he described earlier (see
27-28). Smith's theory depended for correct
implementation, it would seem, on stern moral
training grounded in religious dogma.
Magnanimity did not automatically arise in the
human breast.)
3. THE EFFECTS OF
ACTIONS CAUSED BY MORAL SENTIMENTS IN THE SOCIAL
DRAMA
In
studying the "propriety" of action,
Smith was searching for the cause
of moral sentiments. He turned next (in
Part II) to the effects of
actions produced by those moral sentiments. This
led him to study the "merit or demerit, the
good or ill desert", of those actions.
(93) That is, it led him to explain how and
why an actor received rewards
for meritorious action and punishment
for unmeritorious action.
Keep
in mind the triangle involving (a) an actor, (b)
a person he acts upon, and (c) an impartial
spectator who judges the propriety and now the
merit of the action. This was the classic social
drama set up by Smith to explain moral
sentiments. (Because of the conscience
implanted by the Author of Nature in every human
breast, a person could play the role of spectator
to his own role as actor or acted-upon.
Smith shared the bias of his times when he
assumed that it was possible for a spectator to
achieve impartiality, to be unselfish in his
judgment of the others' behavior--and of his own
as well!.)
As
he examined the merits of actions and the rewards
or punishments they earned, Smith looked to the
spectator as the arbiter. His spectator had
to sympathize with both the actions and
the motives of the actor; and he had
to sympathize also with the reactions
of the person acted upon.
(105-6)
Smith
said that the spectator first checked the
propriety (or impropriety) of the actor's
behavior. He felt direct sympathy
(or lack of it) with the sentiments of the
actor. Then he checked the reaction of the
person acted upon to see how thoroughly he could
sympathize with that reaction. The
spectator in this second maneuver was feeling indirect
sympathy (or lack of it) with the
sentiments of the person acted upon. It was
indirect because the spectator first had to
sympathize with the feelings of the actor (as to
their propriety) before sympathizing with the gratitude
or resentment of the person
acted upon. (106-7)
Smith
then ferreted out the values
that influenced the person acted upon when he
reacted with gratitude or resentment. The
person acted upon could see beneficence
(friendship, charity, generosity, kindness); or
he could see the need for justice.
A person who enjoyed another person's beneficence
had reason for gratitude. But he did not
have reason for resentment if the other person
did not extend beneficence to him. Smith
said that "beneficence is always free, it
cannot be extorted by force, the mere want of it
exposes to no punishment." (112)
Exceptionally beneficent action toward another
person brought the highest gratitude from the
person acted upon; but resentment toward less
than ordinary beneficence was not appropriate.
(117)
Not
so justice. If the person acted upon was
the recipient of unjust behavior from the actor,
he appropriately felt resentment.
And he rightly wanted to see the actor punished.
It followed that it was proper for the injured
person to demand justice by force
if necessary in recompense for his feeling of
resentment. (114)
Smith
returned to his basic trope of "the Author
of Nature" to explain this sense of justice:
…[N]ature has
implanted in the human breast that consciousness
of ill desert, those terrors of merited
punishment, which attend upon [justice's]
violation, as the great safeguards of the
association of mankind, to protect the weak, to
curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty.
(125)
The
sense of justice made the guilty feel remorse
after their deed; and it made those who acted
well feel gratified that others approved their
good deeds. (122-123)
Interestingly,
Smith connected his "Author of Nature"
trope to another great metaphor of his age, that
of the workings of a watch.
Each individual conscience "naturally"
worked to detest specific bad behavior and to
approve specific good behavior. But the
final effect of these individual actions (the
workings of the cogs in the watch) was to
maintain the general social order (the pointing
of the hand of the watch to the correct hour).
(126-7)
But
the watch metaphor was inadequate. It
suggested that the workings of the human
conscience produced clear-cut social effects as
crisply as a timepiece. The reality, Smith
acknowledged, was messier than that.
If
the motives or intentions of actors were
transparent, we might have a society as efficient
as a watch. Motives or intentions, after
all, were the only proper measure of merit or
demerit. Alas, they were not
transparent. (134) Participants in every
concrete situation acted and reacted to the immediate
pain or the pleasure that they
experienced. This led them to have
sentiments that did not necessarily line up with
the intent of the actors. And that led them to
act in ways that were not necessarily
proper. (136)
The
world of moral sentiments thus was not a neat
clock-like world. Because intentions were
not necessarily evident and because consequences
of actions led to immediate reactions based on
pain or pleasure, unrelated to intentions, human
beings, Smith said, lived in an "empire
of fortune." (140) In
the empire of fortune, good intentions could lead
to bad consequences. They could lead to
judgments of demerit rather than merit, with
punishment rather than reward resulting, despite
the good intentions. Bad intentions, too,
could lead to good consequences, as luck would
have it; and the bad actor might win reward
rather than punishment. (141)
In
this messy real world, then, Smith said that
people judged actions by the effect that
they created on those acted upon. Results
counted, not intentions. When a
person failed to do a good deed that he had set
out to do, the spectator judged that he deserved
less gratitude than he would have received if he
had succeeded in doing the good deed.
Similarly, when he failed to do something
objectionable, the spectator judged that he
earned less resentment (and thus less punishment)
than he would have received if he had succeeded
in carrying out his evil intent. (141)
In
the empire of fortune, furthermore, where only
results, not intentions, counted, an act that
produced extraordinary pleasure received more
reward than the motive for it might have
merited. The reverse was true for acts that
produced extraordinary pain. (147)
Even when people caused pain through negligence
not intent, they were judged by the results, as
if they intended harm. (141-151)
Smith
ended his analysis of the effects of moral
sentiments with a homily. He attempted to
explain why the Author of Nature installed in
human beings the "irregularity of
sentiments" that often made intentions and
actions in the empire of fortune
disproportionate. This irregularity
("the weakness or folly of men") led
people to judge only actions; and that produced
what God intended, "the happiness
and perfection of the species."
(152) Just imagine, said Smith, if we could
see through other people and base our gratitude
(and rewards) or our resentment (and punishments)
only on their intentions, regardless of what came
of them in action. Not only the emperor but
every last subject would be seen to have no moral
clothes. "Sentiments, thoughts,
intentions, would become the objects of
punishment." "There would be no
safety for the most innocent and circumspect
conduct." (153)
Smith
went on to link this emphasis on actions to the
material well being of the emerging modern
world. He thus gave us a revealing look
into the vision of early modern secular values
that he did so much to forge. Mere good
intentions, he said, will not contribute to
"the prosperity of the world" unless
they lead to production.
(154)
The man who has
performed no single action of importance, but
whose whole conversation and deportment express
the justest, the noblest, and most generous
sentiments, can be entitled to demand no very
high reward….(154)
(One
strives to see in this homily on the virtue of
action a bridge from Adam Smith's vision of moral
sentiments forward to his vision of the wealth of
nations, still to find expression in his magnum
opus a decade and a half later. Production
was the key to the wealth of nations. To
measure a man's success in this world, look at
what he produced, Smith would say. In this
earlier work, we see his empirical frame of mind
already set as it highlighted the adjudication of
moral sentiments. If in 1759 he could judge
a man to have behaved beneficently by the effects
of his actions, Smith in 1776 would also be able
to judge a man's contribution to the public weal
by the productivity of his enterprises. And
he would be able to do that no matter what the
man's intentions might be. The purely
selfish entrepreneur could contribute beneficial
effects to the nation just as surely as an
idealistically motivated person. He would
contribute more, in fact, if the idealist simply
were offering up homilies on the corner instead
of producing good beer in a brewery or fresh
bread in a bakery.)
4. THE
MECHANISMS OF MORAL SENTIMENTS IN THE INDIVIDUAL
Up
to this point, Smith mainly tried to show the social
drama of moral sentiments. He
placed three imaginary participants on his stage
to show how the sense of propriety and the sense
of justice operated as people responded morally
to one another. In Part III,
he closed the curtain on that social drama and
focused on the inner man. He sought to show
how men judged their own sentiments and conduct,
how they felt a personal sense of duty.
(161) How did men personally behave when
they were making judgments as players in the
social drama of moral sentiment? What was
going on inside them?
Smith
seems on the surface to have arrived early at the
threshold of Freudian psychology, where the
analyst could look behind the curtain of personal
behavior to find buried motive. But, of
course, his idea of the dynamics of personal
morality reflected eighteenth century Scottish
notions of human behavior, not the behavior of
nineteenth century Viennese.
Moreover,
Smith explained the personal behavior of the
individual by retaining the structure of his
social drama, explained in the previous two parts
of the book, with its three characters in action
(actor, acted-upon, and impartial
spectator). He simply installed in the
"breast" of all characters the power to
assume the role of spectator of their own
actions. They could approve (or disapprove)
of their own conduct, just as they had the power
to judge the conduct of others. This
involved them in a maneuver that made them the
object of their own "fair and
impartial" observation. Smith imagined
that they could judge the propriety of their own
actions by stepping out of their own passions and
seeing them from the outside. They would go
through the process, familiar from the previous
parts of the book, of determining merit or
demerit and assigning reward or punishment
commensurate with the gratitude or resentment
aroused through sympathy or lack of it.
(161-162) The conscience, then, the sense of
duty, was at bottom thoroughly social,
even when it operated in the solitary
consciousness. (162-163)
In
other words, the opinions of others profoundly
determined humans' opinions of themselves.
The Author of nature made them this
way. He gave them the equipment to
"respect the sentiments and judgments of
[their] brethren." (185) And he gave
them the ability to objectify themselves, to
become their own brother, so to speak, standing
in the docket to receive their own judgment.
(165)
Because
of this equipment and ability, humans loved
to receive praise and dreaded the hatred of
others. They would strive to
bring praise to themselves and avoid being
blameworthy, even when they were directing the
praise or blame at themselves. (166-170)
The
Author of nature, furthermore, made sure that
this desire for praise did not just deal with
appearances. God made humans such that they
desired to BE praiseworthy, not just to appear to
be such in order to attract others' praise.
(170) And they likewise desired to avoid
attracting hatred and contempt by avoiding
despicable action. (171-2) Smith
played the changes on these natural endowments as
he considered how people felt about receiving
merited and unmerited praise or blame.
(173-187) He finished his analysis of the
mechanisms of moral sentiments in the individual
by connecting them to the ultimate
"all-seeing Judge of the world."
(187) In the end, happiness for the
striving moral human being came from the
knowledge that he would receive a just evaluation
of merit in the life to come, no matter how
accurately he or others judged him in this life.
(187)
Smith
again connected the human process of moral
sentiments directly to the cosmic purposes of
God. He made man this way "after his
own image, and appointed him his vicegerent upon
earth, to superintend the behaviour of his
brethren." (185)
(Society,
that is, acted for God through the norms that it
created and infused into the individual human
conscience or sense of duty. In a dark
reflection, we can see in Smith's model the
demand for conformity to conventional morality
being carried to extremes. It makes us
wonder about the autonomy of the individual in
free social conditions such as those envisioned
in Smith's later theory of economic
laissez-faire. How did a tough-minded
entrepreneur square his inhumanity to fellow
human beings in his workplace with the sentiments
for his brethren installed by the Author of
nature? Any attempt to integrate Smith's
theory of moral sentiments with his theory of the
wealth of nations through laissez-faire economies
must confront this question, I think. )
Continuing
in Part III to examine in detail the mechanisms
of moral sentiments in the individual, Smith
dissected the conscience, the "judge
within," "the great inmate of the
breast." (191) He considered in
particular the way a person achieved
"self-command." Nature showed people
how to acquire virtue by paying "regard to
the sentiments of the real or supposed spectator
of our own conduct." (203) Indeed, the
constant study of those sentiments tamed
selfishness and built a person's sense of general
rules of morality. Smith exalted these
social rules, accurately observed, to the divine
level. A person could justly regard them
"as the Laws of the Deity." (229)
Interestingly,
the picture of a man of conscience that emerged
looks like a social conformist, acutely attuned
to the opinions of others. Human beings in
the moral universe of Adam Smith did not want to
be great or to be free "but to be
beloved" by their fellows. (236)
They would go to great lengths to win
approbation. This honed their sense of duty
into a powerful instrument of self-control.
Nevertheless,
Smith allowed that persons could act on motives
that were not always linked to this sense of
duty. He admitted the passions into
approved action under some circumstances.
Rules of gratitude, for example, could be loosely
and inaccurately connected to duty.
(248) (Rules of justice, on the other hand,
had to be precise and accurate,
duty-driven. [249])
(Smith's
description of the conscience seems to anticipate
in eighteenth-century terminology the basic
argument of twentieth-century sociobiologists
such as Edward
O. Wilson. Smith thought
that "nature" prompted human beings to
acknowledge important rules of morality, to
follow them in social intercourse. Wilson
translated "nature" into genetic
codings that predisposed human beings to develop
enduring cultural norms for guiding
behavior. It might be productive to pursue
this apparent parallelism.)
5. UTILITY & BEAUTY,
CUSTOM & FASHION INFLUENCE MORAL SENTIMENTS
In
Parts IV and V, Adam Smith attempted to connect
his model of moral sentiments, described as a
social and then an individual process, to the ways
of the world. How did the
model operate when placed within the complex
milieu of work and custom?
First,
he found that people saw an esthetic
value in the way the sentiment of approbation
manifested itself. People saw and approved
of the appearance of utility
when others produced material works,
“productions of art.”
…[T]he fitness of
any system or machine to produce the end for
which it was intended, bestows a certain
propriety and beauty upon the whole, and renders
the very thought and contemplation of it
agreeable….(257)
Smith
was describing a value, the “beauty of
order,” the “love of system,”
(265) that modern people found in a balanced and
pleasing material world. (The esthetics of
the machine in Robert Pirsig’s book, Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
comes to mind.) People
conferred the moral sentiment of approbation on
such order and system, not primarily because it
was useful but because it pleased them.
However, their esthetic sense had the ultimately
utilitarian effect of urging people on to work
and to do. Nature in a sense tricked people
into being industrious and productive.
Smith
offered up a moving paean to this moral
basis of productivity.
(263-265) To our ears, it takes on the
sound of a celebration of the energy that
Europeans would expend in the capitalistic
industrialization beginning to happen as Smith
wrote. It conjures the efficiency of Henry
Ford’s production line, which was a
beautiful thing to behold. In this passage,
we discover the metaphor of “the
invisible hand” (264) that would
figure so importantly in Smith’s economic
vision in The Wealth of Nations.
It is a remarkable expression of Smith’s
optimistic view of production, based on the moral
sentiment that arose from the love of
system. He said that the rich, although
selfish and rapacious, were led by an invisible
hand to employ the poor and to produce
improvements that were distributed to all.
The poor participated in this orderly system of
production that benefited all, almost as if they
were equal! (264-5)
The
modern Promethean exploitation of the natural
world, which was speeding up as Smith wrote,
received his enthusiastic approval because it
displayed the beauty of orderly systems of
production. Here is a taste of this thought
that would help justify the modern industrial age
and rationalize the behavior of the enterprising
middle class:
[This sense of beauty
in utility] first prompted [mankind] to cultivate
the ground, to build houses, to found cities and
commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the/
sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish
human life; which have entirely changed the whole
face of the globe, have turned the rude forests
of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and
made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of
subsistence, and the great high road of
communication to the different nations of the
earth. The earth, by these labours of
mankind, has been obliged to redouble her natural
fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of
inhabitants. (263/4)
Here,
certainly, Smith was anticipating his economic
vision, which would appear in 1776 in The
Wealth of Nations and greatly affect
the way Europeans imagined the dawning modern
age. This passage is especially valuable to
anyone who is seeking to find the common ethical
ground for Smith’s early vision of moral
sentiments and the later economic vision of The
Wealth of Nations. I find it
exciting to think that Adam Smith did not advance
a utilitarian argument to justify material
productivity. He grounded it on an esthetic
argument, which in essence was a moral sentiment!
Smith
went on to include human character
in his esthetic argument, along with the
"contrivances of art, or the institutions of
civil government." (269) "The
prudent, the equitable, the active, resolute, and
sober character" resembled "the most
perfect machine" in its usefulness to
society. The actions of a person with such
qualities therefore merited approbation, for they
aroused an immediate sense of beauty (the beauty
of proportion) in the breast of the
spectator. Smith underscored this point by
examining the virtues of "superior reason
and understanding", self-command, (271),
generosity, and public spirit (274-276).
His
thoughts on self-command are
especially interesting because, again, they give
us a glimpse into the character values of
capitalistic modernity that would come into full
light in The Wealth of Nations.
(272-273) The person with self-command denied
present pleasure for a future pleasure that
promised to be greater. In the social
drama, spectators approved of this behavior
because it displayed "a steady perseverance
in the practice of frugality, industry, and
application, though directed to no
other purpose than the acquisition of fortune."
(273; my emphasis) Spectators, in other
words, experienced an esthetic feeling of
appreciation when they saw the acquisitive
entrepreneur in action.
(A
picture of the senior John D. Rockefeller almost
materializes from Smith's paragraph.
Presumably, Smith expected the downtrodden
working poor to admire their masters without
resentment because they appreciated the beauty of
their great work and their character.
Everyone was part of a social machinery that in
essence all could appreciate as beautiful.
We brush here against the intellectual conflict
that Karl Marx would ultimately precipitate: he
would condemn as esthetically (and therefore
morally) ugly the social machinery of capitalism
and seek to reconstruct it into a new form that
would have the attributes of beauty, as he newly
perceived them.)
The
virtues of generosity and public
spirit, Smith went on, similarly led a
person in command of himself to sacrifice his
immediate self-interest for other persons or for
his community or nation. (274-76) The
same esthetic decisions on propriety of action
operated when a person exposed his life for that
of a friend or took a bullet in defense of his
nation.
Smith
offered a curious—and significant--final
thought about the esthetics of moral sentiments
in the ways of the world. We saw that
Smith's drama of moral sentiments was social
through and through. It depended on the
interplay of more than one person in society to
produce a sense of the propriety of
actions. However, he ended by saying that
"the sentiment of approbation [arising] from
the perception of this beauty of utility" is
NOT social. An isolated person could feel
it even when thinking solely about his own
behavior—as if it were (shades of Pirsig's
motorcycle) "a well-contrived machine"
commanding selfish admiration. (277)
The
significance, I think, is that Smith did not
argue that morality arose only from the social
condition. It had its roots
firmly in the isolated individual,
who would become the central agent in full-blown
modern life. The individual would initially
see the "beauty of utility." The
capacity to judge life in the most utilitarian
epoch of human history, by Smith's way of
thinking, would essentially start with an esthetic
not a moral impulse.
Far
in the future, beyond Smith's lifetime, I think I
could imagine Friedrich Nietzsche snorting approval.
But, of course, in Smith's view, the great Author
of nature, God himself, would have intentionally
implanted that fundamental esthetic sense.
At that, I can hear Nietzsche scoffing
hysterically.
If
Adam Smith gave individuals
critical control over the esthetic foundation of
moral sentiments, he immediately qualified this
by showing how custom and fashion
influenced their sentiments of moral approbation
and disapprobation. (290) People
imagined that reason and nature guided them in
following rules of conduct; but Smith observed
that “habit or prejudice” also played a
significant part. (283) This was true not
only when they judged works of art and dress but
also when they considered the behavior of people,
“the beauty of conduct.” (290)
Custom dictated how men in different professions
and periods of life should “properly”
comport themselves. Clergymen, for example,
customarily behaved more soberly than military
officers. (294) The old customarily were
more grave and sedate than the young. (292)
Smith also contrasted customs of civilized and
barbarous nations (revealing some interesting
eighteenth-century biases about the undeveloped
regions then just opening to European
expansion). (297-306)
6. THE
CHARACTER OF VIRTUE
What,
finally, did Adam Smith’s inquiry into moral
sentiments, grounded in what he believed to be
natural law, lead to? It led to the virtuous
person in action, described in Part
VI. He described the power of prudence
to guide the virtuous person in securing his own
well being. (311-318) The normally
prudent person was a calculating, self-serving,
though considerate member of society; but he
commanded no great admiration. (316) For
that, Smith pointed to those who combined
prudence with “greater and more splendid
virtues” such as valor,
benevolence, justness. Above
all, admirably virtuous men demonstrated self-command.
(316) The man of superior prudence
displayed “the art, the talent, and the
habit or disposition of acting with the most
perfect propriety in every possible circumstance
or situation.” (316) The
magnanimous person was the person in command of
himself.
Smith
sought then to explain the natural laws—the
principles of order ordained by nature, which
were instruments of God (334)--that guided the
efforts of virtuous men to benefit individuals
and societies. For example, he found that
“kindness is the parent of
kindness.” (331)
He
also found that wise nature equipped mankind in
general to recognize differences of inherited
rank and fortune more readily than differences in
“wisdom and virtue.” If, as Smith
seemed to believe, men of wisdom and virtue
tended to win rank and fortune, this social
shorthand, he felt, was nature’s most
efficient way of preserving “the peace and
order of society”, a top priority in his
view of the world. (332)
(Smith
thus readily rationalized and justified the
perpetuation of a privileged class through
inheritance. His system of laissez-faire
economics would have profoundly disruptive
effects upon the very class structure that he
here supported in the interest of social and
political stability. Years later, in The
Wealth of Nations, he would revise his
assessment of inherited wealth; he would doubt
that the attitudes bred by inherited wealth were
conducive to productivity in a free economic
system.)
The
virtuous person conferred his beneficence on
society in accordance with the same natural
principles that applied in his relations with
individuals. Smith elaborated on this
finding in his examination of men who loved their
country (339) and who displayed public spirit
(340-343). He had unkind words for the
“man of system” who lacked the public
spiritedness of the virtuous man: the man of
system, often found among sovereign princes,
arrogantly insisted that his system was the only
one. (343) Smith here captured the
qualities we would see in modern dictators; and
he also seemed to give voice to an anti-royal
sentiment that would have anticipated events to
come in the later years of the eighteenth
century.
Smith
also condemned pretensions of the wrongheaded to
having “universal
benevolence,” a virtue reserved
for God alone. He said it was acceptable to
contemplate the universal order but not to
presume to run it! A virtuous man did not
have the power, under the rules of nature, to
extend his benevolence everywhere. He had
to limit himself to caring for “his own
happiness” and that of his family, friends,
and country. To try to be universally
benevolent would be like trying to be God—to
preempt God’s order. (345-348)
The
virtuous person seeking to benefit individuals
and his society had to bring his self-command to
bear upon his passions, such as anger and
fear. They interfered with his sense of
prudence, justice, and benevolence.
(349-353) In his exercise of
self-command, the virtuous man applied an ideal
standard to his own behavior and
avoided the easier standard established by actual
practice of others around him. (362)
This led Smith to some thoughts—indeed, to
advice—on how to manage pride and vanity and
to strive for modesty.
Throughout
the application of these natural rules of
behavior, Smith saw the activity of the
individual conscience, “the supposed
impartial spectator, the great inmate of the
breast, the great judge and arbiter of
conduct,” that of oneself no less than that
of others. (385) It determined the sense of
propriety, which controlled prudence or
self-command. (386)
(In
this part of the book, Smith’s role as
“ Mr. Manners” came to the fore.
On the pretext of discovering universal laws of
nature to explain human social behavior, Smith
was laying down precepts that ultimately smacked
of local arbitrariness, taken as they no doubt
were from the actual behavior that he observed in
the bourgeois Scots society in which he
dwelt. Moreover, his “character of
virtue” appears to preempt the maxims of
traditional Christian religion as a moral
guide. God, to be sure, he said,
“authored” nature; and nature ordered
the human behavior that he was describing.
Still, Smith was moving the word of God away from
Biblical text and relocating it in his own
textual explication of natural order in human
sentiment. Here we seem to see a major
maneuver by a major thinker in the making of
secularized modernity.)
Adam
Smith completed his analysis of the character of
virtue by reaffirming the central function of
conscience and the power of the sense of
propriety to control passions and assert
self-command in service to self as well as to
society. (386)
7. SYSTEMS OF MORAL
PHILOSOPHY & PRACTICAL RULES
It
remained for Smith in Part VII of the book to
search the history of moral philosophy for the
essence of virtue—what is it?—and for
the “power or faculty in the mind”
enabling humans to see it. (391) The
nub of his final thought was that, while reason
was “the source of the general rules of
morality,” people formed their first
perceptions of right and wrong not through reason
but through “immediate sense and
feeling.” (470-471) In a
concluding summation of his theory of moral
sentiments, Adam Smith pointed to four sources
for the moral approval that humans gave to any
character or action. By directly citing
them, we can conclude this too-lengthy reading of
his book:
First, we sympathize
with the / motives of the
agent; secondly, we enter into the gratitude
of those who receive the benefit of his actions;
thirdly, we observe that his conduct has been
agreeable to the general rules
by which those two sympathies generally act; and,
last of all, when we consider such actions, as
making a part of a system of behavior which tends
to promote the happiness either of the individual
or of the society, they appear to derive a beauty
from this utility, not unlike
that which we ascribe to any well-contrived
machine. (479-480) (My emphases).
8. MORAL
SENTIMENTS AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
In
summarizing Adam Smith's The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, I have been taking a
preliminary step prior to dealing with his The
Wealth of Nations. I feel the
need to look at the The Wealth of
Nations because in the Western world
the principles of laissez-faire economics
grounded in Smith have acquired new power in the
age of postmodernism and globalization. In
a "conservative" political shift
of historic proportions, leaders since Reagan and
Thatcher have been applying the idea of the free
market far beyond the economic generation of
wealth envisioned by Adam Smith. "The
market" paradigm now defines vast areas of
human endeavor, from the philosophical and
religious to the affective and
recreational. This development cries
out for critical judgment; its redefinition of
self and society raises an array of unmediated
problems. Those studying the meanings of
postmodernism and globalization have been
attempting to address many of these problems
without finding resolution for use in the world
of affairs.
I
have felt impelled to return to Adam Smith, the
original free-market theorist, because of a
suspicion. I suspect that the problems we
now identify in postmodernism and globalization
do not result from mistakes in the thought of
Adam Smith. I suspect that they result from
the misapplication of his thinking to
contemporary conditions that he never would have
imagined or from an essential misunderstanding of
his originally intended meanings.
In
particular, I suspect that Adam Smith's idea of
moral sentiments and his idea of the wealth of
nations did not exist in isolation from one
another. They both were integral
parts of his vision of the best society humans
could devise. In both ideas Smith was
trying to express natural laws devised for humans
by God. By applying those laws in
action, Smith believed-- so goes my suspicion--
that humans would create the best human society
available to them.
If
this view is right, free-market economics could
not be a science devoid of morality. And
morality could not flourish in a world that
shunned the economic system that Smith
conceived—a system in which everyone was
free to put his resources to work to his maximum
advantage. Hence my feeling that Smith's
theory of moral sentiments ought to integrate, if
possible, with his economic ideas, especially as
they influence our lives in the era of
postmodernism and globalization.
This
feeling, of course, grows from a concern about
the current state of the moral order in the
world. The American government and many
other power centers advance laissez-faire
economic principles as the premier instrument for
bringing a better life to people in the US and
around the world. Yet, experience is
showing us how short the reality of free-market
globalization falls from its ideal
formulation. And that ideal formulation
remains solidly grounded in the idea of the
wealth of nations advanced by Adam Smith in
1776. Perhaps if we could better understand
how his idea of moral sentiments integrated with
his idea of laissez-faire economics, we could
correct misapplications of Smith. Perhaps
we could begin to see why current policies,
however well intentioned, are bringing pain not
gain to millions at home and around the
world. And perhaps we could develop
alternative policies that would better serve
humankind.
In
a follow-up project, then, I would like to do a
critical reading of The Wealth of
Nations against the experience of this
reading of The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. Is there a bridge
between Smith's macrocosmic domain of free-market
economics and his microcosmic domain of moral
drama? If we could locate such a bridge,
perhaps we could ameliorate the ideological
rigidity that currently prevents governments, the
US government in particular, from performing for
the maximum good.
29
March 2004 Richard P. Richter
ADAM SMITH'S OTHER VISION: THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS