Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith is considered the founder of modern economics for several reasons. He seems by temperament to have been well-suited to be an absent-minded professor, walking from Kirkcaldy to Dunfermline in his dressing gown while he was thinking about something, or in animated conversation with a colleague and falling into a tanning pit. These are the kinds of fits of abstraction that showed how deeply focused on creation of ideas and new knowledge Smith could be. He views man as a social being, and his life's work was devoted to developing a coherent theory of the systematic understanding of man's nature as a social being and how humans operate in society. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, he lays out the foundations of that systematic science of man, starting with moral philosophy and human nature. And he grounds his idea of moral philosophy in something that he characterizes as sympathy, which was a very hot topic among Smith and his friends David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson in the 1750s and 60s. Sympathy for Smith combined empathy, the emotional connection, emotional interconnectedness that we feel with other human beings, with the judgment and evaluation of individuals' behavior in particular situations. Smith definitely argues that individuals make decisions and make choices based primarily on self-interest, but his definition of self-interest is very broad. Smith's definition of self-interest includes this idea of sympathy and mutual sympathy and the fellow feeling that you feel with others who matter to you, or even some of the small things like the slight smile you get from a stranger when you pass them on the street. But he also recognizes, and this is a time when Smith is writing with folks like Rousseau and Hobbes as counterpoints, that other scholars are arguing that selfish desires can harm and injure other people. So in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he has to confront this question of how do we contain the selfish desires of individuals that may injure others while still enabling individuals to thrive. He develops a very interesting psychological metaphor called the spectator. And the idea is to think of the spectator as an observer of your behavior, observer of the behavior of others. So in part, when you're observing someone take a decision or an action, part of you is judging that action, and that's your spectator, and you judge that action based on your sense of what's proper. We also use that spectator, according to Smith, to evaluate our own actions, and that's how we have self-contained mechanisms and dynamics for controlling our selfish desires. But our internal spectator is by nature going to be very partial. Although perfect impartiality, Smith would say, as a Scottish Enlightenment empiricist, perfect impartiality is of course impossible, but that should be the goal. One of the most important distinctions that Smith draws in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the distinction between justice and something he calls beneficence. Beneficence is just benevolent activities towards others without any sense of any repayment or reciprocity or benefit to yourself. Smith argues that justice, which he defines as commutative justice, so both informal social norms and formal laws and rules that protect the negatively defined rights to individuals to be free from harm to life, liberty, or property, those institutions of justice are very important. In fact, they're necessary for humans to live together in civil society. When Smith argues that justice is necessary for people to live together in civil society, but beneficence is only nice, he's arguing that the absence of justice would mean that it's a society that has injustice. Whereas if you have a society without beneficence, it's not necessarily a pleasant society. It's not one that people would really want to live in, but it's not one that is characterized by injustice. For him, justice is the primary important institutional moral foundation of living together in society. This will feed into his argument that the most important fundamental role of government should be to protect those negatively defined natural rights and therefore to provide the rules and enforcement rules to uphold a system of justice. And that any government involvement in what we would call beneficence is unnecessary and he would argue could actually be positively harmful because it could crowd out, to use a modern term, crowd out more beneficent behavior and benevolent activity on the part of other individuals. These formal and informal institutions grounded in the fact that man is inherently a social being and that we as humans strive for sympathy and mutual sympathy, disciplined by the existence of that spectator, which we try to make as impartial as possible, and that our social norms and our laws feed into that impartiality. That's his vision of the moral underpinnings of a free society of responsible people living together peacefully and harmoniously. One of the most interesting passages in the Theory of Moral Sentiments comes fairly late in the book and it picks up on these themes where Smith is exploring how these institutions emerge and how civil society can emerge spontaneously, by which I don't mean quickly, I just mean can emerge without some kind of hierarchical top-down creation or design. And so he's exploring these themes throughout the entire work and in the course of this he has a fascinating passage where he explores what happens when someone who has very good intentions and wants to come in and has a vision for how to make the world a better place, how this person can try to implement that vision through political means, through his political processes, and this person he calls the man of system. Now clearly Smith thinks system is a good thing, he's trying to set up a systematic science of man, but the man of system he cautions us against because the man of system looks on and approaches the other individuals living in society, as Smith says, as chess pieces on a chessboard. And the man of system who comes with this vision of how to create a perfect civil order tries to institute rules to move these people around like pieces on a chessboard. It's very important that our civil institutions, be they formal or informal, respect the fact that those chess pieces, individuals living together in society, have their own laws of motion and that that is something that should be respected in the system of institutions that will enable us to live harmoniously together.