The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Part 1

This posting and the postings over the next week reflect the preparation for the Liberty Fund colloqia dealing with Adam Smith that I completed back in 2009.

For anyone interested in a discussion of the impartial spectator what James Otteson calls the moral procedure of THS - I can recommend his book - Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life. Otteson is a philosophier who, amoung other things in this book reflects on the Adam Smith problem and the nature of Smith's philosophy and rhetorical project.

Part 1 - Propriety

Section 1

Chapter 1 - sympathy

1. Imagination key to setting up process of impartial spectator

2. Need to place ourselves in position of person to determine propriety

3. Dread of death (pain a great incentive)


Chapter 2 - Pleasure in mutual sympathy


1. Moral context that of community/society and therefore part of body politic

2. Pain > pleasure

Chapters 3 and 4 - judge propriety/impropriety of others

1. Golden Mean (page 17) - not moderate but appropriate response

2. Actions judged by cause and effect

3. Key point - page 20 - we judge as proper those things first that we see as true and real, then that have utility, but utility is secondary.

Chapter 5 - amiable v respectable virtues

1. Soft v awful virtues

2. Soft - humanity

3. Awful - self denial (self command?)and self government

4. Perfection of human nature cannot be attained - perfect self command - 25

5. Virtue > propriety (25) - huge distance between admired/celebrated and "merely" approved

Section 2 Passions that have propriety

Chapter 1 - Passions from the body

1. Examples - hunger, sex - need virtue of temperance

2. Passions can come from imagination - love, etc. ..

Chapter 2 - Passions from the imagination

1. Love (33)

2. Great line - page 34 - use reserve when discussing friends, studies, profession



Chapter 3 - Unsocial Passions

1. Hatred, anger and resentment must be brought down to an appropriate level

2. 37 - hatred and anger the greatest poison to happiness

Chapter 4 - Social Passions

1. Amiable passions - love, benevolent affection

Chapter 5 - Selfish Passions - joy and grief


Section 3 - Impact of Prosperity and Adversity on propriety

Chapter 1 - sympathy and joy

"What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt and has a clear conscience?" - 45

So, most people, according to Smith are in the above state so there is no real additional prosperity prospect, only potential adversity.


Chapter 2 - ambition "the great purpose of life is to bettering our condition"(50)

Chapter 3 - corruption of moral sentiments

Distinction between getting respect via wisdom and virtue or wealth and greatness (62) and the "great mob of mankind" are motivated and corrupted by the former.


Podcast 2

"Daniel Klein writes:
Pietro, yes, I see great parallel between Hayek and Smith, though Hayek never did any moral analysis like TMS, and scarcely refers to TMS (in fact, hardly any of the epic classical liberals of the renaissance period, say 1947-1990, seem to have much grasp of TMS). You suggest that in TMS Smith is trying to do a 'supply and demand' of sympathy. I'd caution against drawing too strong a parallel between the moral dynamics and market dynamics. Yes there are some important parallels, and exit and innovation play key roles in both, and arguably in both a presumption-of-liberty punchline stems from knowledge's richness and particularism, but, as you note, the moral ecology is without money and prices -- or at least goes much farther beyond money and prices. The "culture market" -- from the arts to the most deep-seated, existential sources of meaning and identity -- really is a lot different from the toothpaste market.

Adam, yes, I think propriety has to do with fit with community norms, customs, rules, while (becoming) virtue with going one better. These, however, are frames of analysis. When we go one better we identify or imagine a higher community, and it is propriety to that higher community that makes for (supposedly) praiseworthy becoming virtue in the frame of the lower community. See for example the "exalted propriety" on p. 192.

Adam, yes, I think Smith has a vision (a hope?) of a moral ecology wherein people are prompted to take an ever more impartial view of matters, and in this way continually approach a better sense of moral aesthetics, perhaps like an infinite sequence that converges toward a limit. Arguable, Smith's impartial spectator is that limit, a being of universalist wisdom. I understand that Kant somewhere says that Smith was his favorite among the British moralists. Remember, "the man in the breast," the conscience, is not the impartial spectator, but rather the supposed impartial spectator, the representative of the impartial spectator, etc.

But we never get close to the limit. Moreover, one might argue that as we go along the limit in fact changes. James Otteson's book Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (Cambridge 2002) interprets Smith's moral ecology as an invisible hand process.

Eric H., I like your sentence, "Basically Smith is saying that society is protected by imagination." I find that your comment is getting at the notion that the impartial spectator -- in the sense of a being universally emanating universalist wisdom (though with mixed success) -- corresponds somehow to the being whose hand is invisible.

I now better see, John Strong, your point. Yes, when we disagree significantly with someone over deeper beauties (4th source), we typically moderate in the situation, we temper, we show courtesy, maybe showing more respect for him than we would in other situations. We do this partly out of regard for proprieties at the 1, 2, and 3 sources.

Incidentally, I feel that Smith is somewhat partial toward such bargainers, as opposed to challengers. The challenger is respectful to the opponent, but not deferent. The challenger -- think Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, Frederic Bastiat (often), Lysander Spooner, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Szasz, Robert Higgs -- challenges the opponent's fundamental judgment -- deeper root judgment (hence "radical") -- and doing so challenges the opponent's claim to eminence, and hence challenges the cultural system that confers eminence on the opponent. I find that, at least from our contemporary viewpoint, Smith gives short shrift to challengers.

Adam, regarding the invisible hand of the moral ecology, you write: "communities that approve of destructive behavior will not last long and those that don't will persist." I'm not sure how widely you mean "communities." Say we distinguish between communities within Britain and Britain as but one community within humanity. Within Britain, yes, by and large, to what you say, so long as we confine such communities to voluntary means; the king or civil magistrate, on the other had, might, by other means, do destructive things and prosper by it. At the level of Britain as a "community" among humanity: This very broad "survival of fittest" type mechanism is perhaps more relevant to WN where Smith writes of the stages of society and the emergence of "our present sense of the word Freedom" (WN p. 400). But in TMS, it seems to me that he focuses more on mechanisms internal to a single moral ecology, and ascribes melioristic tendencies to its internal workings. There is very little in TMS that speaks to a successful nation exporting its culture and norms, or morally colonizing its neighbors. And there is little about the global selection of national communities on the basis of the success of their moral ecology -- in fact, at the moment, I can't think of anything along such lines in TMS -- please correct me if I am overlooking anything.

A very important question, in my mind, is the kind of setting TMS is assuming for the moral ecology. Perhaps in some settings the meliorism, the set of moral/cultural invisible-hand mechanisms, is overmatched by counter mechanisms?

Do the invisible-hand mechanisms have the upper hand in the moral ecology of America 2009?"