The Theory of Moral Sentiments

"That’s right. It wasn’t published until he’d been a professor for about seven years. So the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was published in 1759. It went through six editions during his lifetime, the last and most substantial revision appearing in 1790, just before he died. This was one of the only two books he published during his lifetime. If his contemporaries are to be believed, he always thought that this was the better, more important of the two books, despite the fact that The Wealth of Nations eventually became so much more famous. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of moral theory, looking at where our sense of morality comes from and what morality consists of. Throughout, Smith treats morality as an eminently practical, human phenomenon, rather than one based on any kind of sacred, mysterious, or other worldly authority. He argues, as Hume had before him, that morality comes from us, from human sentiments, above all our feelings of approval and disapproval, and that right and wrong are established by the sentiments that we feel when we adopt the proper perspective, one that corrects for personal biases and misinformation. “ The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of moral theory, looking at where our sense of morality comes from and what morality consists of ” This is, in many ways, Smith’s fundamental claim in the book, that the ultimate standard of moral judgement is set by what he calls an ‘impartial spectator’— meaning a spectator who’s both fully informed and disinterested. So, actions and character traits that would earn an impartial spectator’s approval are morally right, according to Smith, and those that would earn such a spectator’s disapproval are morally wrong. I think it is more an apparent than a real contradiction, but certainly The Theory of Moral Sentiments highlights human sociability from the very first sentence of the book. He talks about the fact that we, as he calls it, ‘sympathise’ with others, we identify with others, we put ourselves in their shoes. He sees people as social to the core. One of his main opponents in the book is what he calls the ‘selfish system’ of morals, which he associates with people like Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. They say all sentiments come from self-love and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that people truly have any other regarding sentiments. Smith thinks, ‘Well of course we do.’ We genuinely care about other people, especially family, friends, those who are close to us, but even others more generally. To me, it’s a strikingly modern moral theory in that it doesn’t—like many moral theories of Smith’s time—rely on God or principles written into the fabric of the cosmos. Nor, like Kant and Kant’s followers, does he say that morality comes from reason. That it comes from the sentiments is, in some ways, a strikingly modern thing to say. Of course, there are many Kantians in the academy today who see this as utterly ridiculous and unhelpful, but I find it to be quite compelling. Maybe not in all the details, but the broad gist of it. Wow! Karl and me, on the same page. In some ways, Smith’s moral theory is a revision of Hume’s moral theory. Hume, too, takes a human rather than transcendent view of morality. He, too, says that it comes from the sentiments. Hume also says that right and wrong are established by the right kinds of sentiments. He calls it the ‘general point of view’ or the ‘common point of view,’ instead of the impartial spectator, but the basic idea is the same. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For much of the 20th century, Smith’s moral theory was seen as little more than a series of footnotes to Hume, but I’d argue that, in several respects, Smith’s theory is more nuanced and more sophisticated than Hume’s. He has, I think, a richer conception of sympathy, which is the central concept for both of them—it’s what allows us to transcend selfish concerns and to make our sentiments truly moral sentiments. He has a critique of what he says is Hume’s overemphasis on utility as a key source of moral norms. “For much of the 20th century, Smith’s moral theory was seen as little more than a series of footnotes to Hume, but, in several respects, Smith’s theory is more nuanced and more sophisticated than Hume’s” Smith also sees religion more positively. I don’t think Smith bases morality on religion in any way—moral right and wrong don’t come from the will or word of God—but he does seem to think that belief in God, or in an afterlife, helps to at least buttress moral norms. It helps people to follow moral norms, to regard them as sacred, whereas Hume sees it as mostly pernicious, morally speaking. So there are a number of ways in which he modifies or revises Hume’s view."

"For me it was a close call. I felt my list probably accentuated the economic side of conservatism more than it should, but I love The Theory of Moral Sentiments and I read it every couple of years, because I know I don’t fully understand it and if I read it again I will get some new insight on it. For me the essential part of it is his description of human nature, that there really is inherent in every human being, a striving to win the favour of others by doing right things. I think it’s a complement to Wealth of Nations – I don’t think you can have a society as he describes in The Wealth of Nations, without also having understood the nature of human striving. Look, a young man who dropped out from Harvard, didn’t go to Albuquerque New Mexico in order to build a personal computer operating system in order to make ten gazillion dollars. He did it because he wanted to win the favour of others by doing something that he enjoyed, that he found stimulating and saw value and worth in, and the fact was he then made a gazillion dollars. Exactly. This is also why the impulse towards charity and service and love your neighbour as you’d like to be loved yourself is so important, because those moral strivings to win favour of those with whom we live, in the communities in which we exist, is a vital part of what it is to live in a free society. Absolutely. In fact, they have to go hand in hand. He is caricatured as the high priest of soulless, money-grubbing, uninterested, individualistic enterprise. Instead he says that that is truly soulless without the sympathy that we naturally feel towards those with whom we live. These two works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, are distilled quite well in Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. I picked my five in terms of what they did in forming my political and philosophical beliefs but, as an adult, one of the most powerful books that I’ve read is Michael Novak’s – in part because I was sensitised by having read these two previous volumes by Adam Smith. As a political expression, no. But as a living expression, yes. Arthur Brooks, for example, made that interesting observation in one of his books, that conservatives of all income levels give more generously to philanthropic activity and implicitly give more of their personal time to charitable activity than do liberals of the same income level. Poor conservatives give more than poor liberals; rich conservatives give more than rich liberals. I think that says something about the accuracy of Smith’s observation. I think there is a natural tendency for conservatives to have a deeper sympathy for their neighbour, and to feel an obligation to take some of the fruits with which they’ve been blessed and provide them in support, and this is where it all fits together, through the associations that Tocqueville described. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I do. Look, compassionate conservatism was an attempt, in a political vein, to use the natural strength of conservatism and draw attention to this very attractive feature of conservatism. Being a conservative is fundamentally a compassionate philosophy. What is better to say to someone than, we want to construct a society in which you have every opportunity to achieve the best that you can possibly be in life and to be exactly what it is you want to be in life… Exactly."

"As I tried to say in the book, there is more than one Wollstonecraft. She is pragmatic, she’d like something done to improve the condition of women, and indeed men, and to end the slave trade and abolish slavery. What she thinks really needs doing is probably a step too far in our civilization. Insofar as one can reconstruct the world as she would have liked it—and that’s probably one of my small contributions to the literature—it would be a world in which the division of labor would not be as intensive as she saw it becoming. This is where Adam Smith comes in. In The Wealth of Nations , he argues for education for those who are involved in repetitive, menial work, because he says that this kind of work has a detrimental psychological effect, that it atrophies the mind (my words). A very important illustration or image he gives is of the blacksmith. He says the time that the blacksmith spends going from one part of his activity to the other—banging on the iron and then putting it in the fire, I don’t know—is the time he thinks, and his mind is active. “How authors such as Wollstonecraft and Burke are viewed very much depends on the nature of the times in which they are being considered” Wollstonecraft very much believed in this. She understands that we are in a world in which the division of labor is going to become more and more intensive, and this will have a psychologically atrophying effect on human beings. We know that she wants boys and girls to be educated together. We also know that she prefers men and women to work together, that she thinks single sex workshops make for lasciviousness, that she wants early marriages. That vision, oddly enough, is partly learned through Adam Smith. She is not suggesting that we can stop the clock but, in her view of the world, she implied it. What is more, it would be a decentralized world. She’s very eager, very curious and very interested in what’s happening in France and hoping that this will lead to a decentralized political world, a simpler, purer society. Of course, the very opposite happens. But we can imagine maybe farms with extended families, where the young milkmaids help with the children, then go off and have their own farm or shops, with men and women working together in workshops. That world is not a world of high fashion and pretence and talking about books or poetry one has not read and everything is second or thirdhand. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith wrote very insightfully about the mechanism that I keep referring to, which is this world of appearances, the way in which we seek to appear to be all of what society deems commendable. Then he also says, ‘But of course, fortunately some people don’t just want to appear to be, they actually want to think of themselves as genuinely virtuous.’ That’s an important influence on Wollstonecraft, though, of course, Smith is not the only source for this way of thinking about social beings. The first was the gap that I had created myself. I’ve written quite a lot on Wollstonecraft, and as I started writing the book, I thought, ‘Here I go again, listing all the things she doesn’t like—the world of appearance, women who can, but don’t breastfeed etc.—I’m so bored of this!’ It occurred to me that I didn’t really know what she liked. I decided to start the book by going through what she liked. I happen to have her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters , on my desk, in which there are short essays on a variety of topics. I thought, ‘Great, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to look at music and theatre and nature and that kind of thing. And that’s what I did.’ And then I thought, well, what’s her view of human nature? What did she think we were like? Some of these things have been written about, but they’ve not really been brought together. Having started with the view that she thought of herself as a philosopher and a moralist, I also looked at her theory of the mind, and how we come to have the ideas that we have. This was important to me because she didn’t think of herself as a feminist. That’s not because she’s not a feminist, but it’s not helpful to think of her as one. If you write about a philosopher, you write about their epistemology, their ontology, their theory of the mind, and so forth. So this is what I did. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the course of that, it was evident that she thought we are naturally benevolent. So, if we are naturally benevolent, and believe in providence, and a creational world, what happened? That then led to chapter three, about how it went wrong. One of the things that has not been written about extensively is her view of the history of civilization, at what point we went off the rails. So that’s the aim. Then I end with, ‘okay, if the world is wrong, how can it be made right?’ What I wanted was to show her in the main, that she wasn’t just a critic of everything that she cast her eye on. That she had views about a great number of topics, that she was, in her mind, a philosopher, and yes, she hasn’t written extensive treatises. She wasn’t a professor of philosophy , with a salary and tenure. She had a vision of what could be done relatively easily and of a realistic utopia, should one ever be in a position to approximate it. Yes, the second edition of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman is dedicated to him because she’s disappointed that the French Revolution had not thought enough about education. She’s hoping that he’s going to make a real difference when he’s put in charge. Not only did he not do that, but the French Revolution was regressive in terms of women’s rights. What I wanted to do was to give a sketch of her as an intellectual and keep her away, as much as possible, from any label. I used the word radical a few minutes ago, but I wouldn’t normally—or conservative, or liberal, or any -isms. Those terms are anachronistic. They mean that we don’t listen to her. And then we have to qualify, ‘Yes, while she was a feminist, she didn’t think this, she didn’t believe that’—this constant checklist, judging her by one set of standards, then moving the goalposts. That, to me, is deeply un-feminist because it refuses to listen to her for what she is, which is a perennial problem that women face."

"This is a remarkable book because, although in some cases it’s outdated, he has an interest in exposing human traits that are relevant to thinking about our daily lives. He has a surprisingly insightful ability to do that. He doesn’t have any of the research methods of the modern social sciences; it’s all casual observation, and reading, I suppose, of other people and literature. But there are observations and conclusions in there that I never had before. They’re focused on a purpose, which is understanding how our society works and how people get a sense of mission, of purpose, that somehow makes things work as well as they do. Well, if you put it that way, it’s going to be disappointing – because your readers will say, ‘Yes I had thought of that before!’ It’s a personal thing. But the thing he starts the book off with is sympathy. He uses the word sympathy and he’s really focused on selfishness versus social consciousness. He sees that sometimes people are completely selfish, and that’s the problem for any economic theory: how to make a society work when people are completely, unremittingly selfish. But he also notes something else. He doesn’t use the word empathy, because empathy hadn’t been defined yet, but he makes a very important observation about human behaviour, which is that we are wired to feel each other’s emotions and to have a theory of other people’s minds (not that he would have used the words wired or theory of mind either). The English word empathy was coined around 1900, in a translation of the German word Einfühlung from a German book by psychologist Theodor Lipps. What it means is that it’s not that I feel bad because I observe that you are suffering, it means I actually feel your feelings. So people may often be selfish, but they also have empathy. Smith also talks about a selfish passion, which is a desire for praise. He argues that people instinctively desire praise, but that, as they mature, this feeling develops into a desire for praiseworthiness. This is a little bit different, and I haven’t seen it written about anywhere else. He points out that, suppose you were praised for something that you knew you didn’t do: It was a mistake, people thought you did something, so they’re praising you, but in fact you didn’t do it. It wouldn’t be such a good feeling – even if you could keep the lie going, and continue to receive the praise. He uses that to show that what people really want is to be deservedly praised. And that turn of mind, which develops as people mature, is what makes us into people with integrity. “That’s the problem for any economic theory: how to make a society work when people are completely, unremittingly selfish.” I think this underlies how the economy works. We start out with selfish feelings, which are intermixed with feelings of empathy for others, and then we develop this mature desire to be praiseworthy. I think it is central to our civilisation that people do that. Adam Smith uses the example of mathematicians. Mathematicians seem to be, in his observation, totally unconcerned with popular praise. That’s because they know they’re doing good work in their mathematics, but also that the public will never appreciate them for what they do. They live in relative poverty, and they don’t seem to care about praise, except from their fellow mathematicians. And yet they’re doing all of this work which benefits humanity. This is something that happens in our society, and it makes the system work. He doesn’t go on, in this book, to explain how this develops into something that works. But this does mark the beginning of the thought process leading to his later book, The Wealth of Nations , in 1776. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I didn’t see a contradiction between the two books. The Wealth of Nations is realistic about human behaviour and argues that a reasonably free enterprise system works well because it combines the different, sometimes conflicting passions of man, into something that is well-directed. I once did a search for the “invisible hand”, and it was actually used before Adam Smith, but not in an economic context. I think Adam Smith was just using an expression of his time. I wouldn’t attach a whole lot of importance to it. My book with George Akerlof is Animal Spirits , and we say Keynes used that term. But he used it in a totally offhand manner. Everyone was using it; any literary person knew that expression."