The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Human beings crave sympathy, for “nothing pleases us more” than to find that others share “a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast” (22). Comedians tell jokes so the audience will join them in laughter. A reader finds satisfaction in sharing a book with someone who has never read it. Sympathy “enlivens joy and alleviates grief” (23). It is worth noting, however, that those afflicted by sorrow crave sympathy far more than those who feel happiness.

Sympathy conveys approval. Indeed, “[t]o approve of the passions of another […] is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathize with them” (25). Sympathy, in other words, is the mechanism by which one person judges another’s behavior, and no other mechanism is available, for “[e]very faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another” (27).

There are two general circumstances under which people judge each other’s sentiments. The first occurs when neither person is directly involved in the matter at hand, as in “general subjects of science and taste” (28). The second, “vastly more important,” occurs when one of the two individuals is directly involved in the matter at hand (29). In the first instance, they are both spectators. In the second instance, only one is a spectator, and in this instance the person directly involved earnestly craves the spectator’s sympathy. If the spectator withholds sympathy, then all communication between the two will eventually end. On the other hand, if the person directly involved happens to have suffered some misfortune, then the spectator’s friendship will bring a measure of peace, “for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous” (31). Most critically, in the second instance, both the spectator and the person directly involved naturally strive to view the circumstances through the other’s eyes.

In the act of viewing circumstances through another’s eyes (what the modern world might call empathy), Smith identifies the foundation of “two different sets of virtues”: those of “candid condescension and indulgent humanity” on one hand, and those of “self-denial, of self-government,” of what Smith calls “self-command,” on the other (32). By these virtues, we “feel much for others and little for ourselves” (33). Alas, such qualities are elusive, which helps explain why they are so virtuous. Humanity, for instance, “requires, surely, a sensibility, much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind” (33). Magnanimity, likewise, “demands much more than that degree of self-command, which the weakest of mortals is capable of exerting,” for “[v]irtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary” (33).

In this brief introduction to Section 2, Smith reiterates a key point from Section 1, Chapter 4: If the spectator is to “go along with” the passions experienced by the person directly involved in the circumstances that occasioned them, then these passions must be expressed with “a certain mediocrity,” never “too high” or “too low” (35). This mediocrity, Smith argues, “is different in different passions” (35).

Strong expressions of passions originating with the body often strike the spectator as indecent, though the circumstances that give rise to those passions might evoke a degree of sympathy. Smith offers three examples: hunger, sexual desire, and physical pain. At best, the unaffected spectator feels those passions in the imagination only, and even then, in the case of pain, for instance, it is the fear of pain produced by the imagination, not the actual pain itself, that produces sympathy. Indeed, “[t]he little sympathy which we feel with bodily pain is the foundation of the propriety of constancy and patience in enduring it” (38).

Smith devotes this entire brief chapter to romantic love, the “strong attachment which naturally grows up between two persons of different sexes, who have long fixed their thoughts upon one another” (39). This kind of love “appears to everybody, but the man who feels it entirely disproportioned to the value of the object” and is “always laughed at, because we cannot enter into it” (39). Still, unguarded expressions of love seldom strike the spectator as improper. Unlike the passions described in the previous chapter—hunger, lust, and pain—love is “graceful,” “agreeable,” and evinces a “strong mixture” of other admirable qualities with which “we have the greatest propensity to sympathize” (41).

Hatred and resentment constitute the unsocial passions. Unlike the passions that originate in the body or in the imagination, described in the previous two chapters, the unsocial passions tend to startle and disgust. The spectator’s “sympathy is divided between the person who feels” those passions “and the person who is the object of them” (41). Injustices do occur, of course, and some resentments can be both legitimate and useful. The spectator’s sympathy, however, is not directly proportional to the intensity with which the injured person expresses resentment. In fact, it is the reverse. The greater the injured person’s fortitude, the deeper the spectator’s sympathy. No matter their cause, however, “[h]atred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind” (45). Because they are so toxic, these unsocial passions require the injured person “to consider what will be the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator” (45).

The social passions—“[g]enerosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship, and esteem”—almost always excite the spectator’s sympathy (46). In this brief chapter, three paragraphs in length, Smith observes that “love is, in itself, agreeable to the person who feels it,” in part because it “sooths [sic] and composes the breast” and because these “amiable passions,” even when “excessive,” are never “ungraceful or disagreeable” (47).

Between the unsocial and social passions lay the selfish passions, which Smith identifies as “[g]rief and joy, when conceived on account of our own private good or bad fortune” (48). The spectator, however, does not sympathize with these passions in equal measure or necessarily in direct proportion to their magnitude. A “sudden revolution of fortune” is a source of immense joy to the “upstart,” but the spectator likely feels more “envy” than sympathy (48). On the other hand, the spectator will “more readily sympathize with those smaller joys which flow from less important causes,” which Smith calls a “happy disposition” (49). Unlike joy, grief does inspire sympathy proportioned to its magnitude; the greater the misfortune, the stronger the spectator’s sympathy.

Smith both qualifies and expands upon his observations regarding grief and joy, described in Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 5. Substituting “sorrow” for “grief” (he does not explain the reason for the change), Smith argues that “when there is no envy in the case, our propensity to sympathize with joy is much stronger than our propensity to sympathize with sorrow” (52). From a state of emotional equilibrium to “the lowest depth of misery the distance is immense and prodigious,” so the “spectator […] must find it much more difficult to sympathize entirely, and keep perfect time with his sorrow, than thoroughly to enter into his joy, and must depart much further from his natural and ordinary temper of mind in the one case than in the other” (53). The sorrowful person often realizes as much and thus refrains from burdening the spectator with sorrows the spectator cannot feel. Finally, though the spectator cannot follow the sorrowful sufferer into the emotional depths, the spectator nonetheless regards as “more than mortal” (54) the sufferer who so “commands” emotions as to make “no demand for that more exquisite degree of sensibility” that the spectator cannot muster (55).

Smith’s assertion that the spectator sympathizes more with joy than with sorrow explains why people devote so much time and energy to the accumulation of wealth. It is a matter of “vanity,” the mere idea of “being the object of attention and approbation” (57). When referring to the “fortunate and the proud,” Smith, of course, has in mind the 18th-century world of royalty and nobility (58). Commoners see “the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it” (58). On this sympathy with monarchs and aristocrats “is founded the distinction of ranks, and the order of society” (59).

For aristocrats and commoners alike, perpetual cognizance of their respective places in society dictates every aspect of public behavior. The “young nobleman,” for instance, “conscious how much he is observed,” moves through the world with “that graceful and elegant sense of his own superiority” (60), while the commoner, “whom nobody thinks it worthwhile to look at, must “distinguish himself […] by more important virtues” (61). The aristocrat, who commands the world’s attention with such entitled ease, dreads “the thought of any situation which demands the continual and long exertion of patience, industry, fortitude, and application of thought” (62). The commoner, on the other hand, requires all these qualities. Whether or not he possesses them, he might be consumed by “ambition” (63) in search of “place,” a government office or “situation” from which to command “general sympathy and attention” (64).

The basic human tendency to admire rank and wealth, rooted in a natural inclination to sympathize with joy over sorrow, constitutes “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (66). The spectator, who craves “the respect and admiration of mankind,” has “[t]wo different roads” to that “desired object” (66). The first is to pursue rank and wealth, to emulate it, or to get as close to it as possible, but this is dangerous. History shows that kings and queens tend to surround themselves with fools and flatterers. Merit has no place in such courts. All but the best monarchs demand deference even at the expense of truth. The second road to respect and admiration, and by far the preferable one, is through “wisdom and the practice of virtue” (66).