## 1. Methodology



Smith's *Theory of Moral Sentiments* (TMS) tends to
arouse sharply divergent reactions among the philosophers who pick it
up. Kant is said to have considered it his favorite among Scottish
moral sense theories (Fleischacker 1991), but others have dismissed it
as devoid of systematic argument, or derivative, in its theoretical
aspirations, of Hume. What explains these disparate reactions is one
and the same feature of the book: that it consists largely of what
Smith himself calls "illustrations" of the workings of the
moral sentiments (TMS, "Advertisement")--short
vignettes, elegantly described, that attempt to show what frightens us
about death, what we find interesting and what dull or distasteful
about other people's love affairs, how moral luck factors into
our assessment of various actions (Garrett 2005; Hankins 2016), or how
and why we deceive ourselves. To some, this provides the detail and
psychological acuity that they find lacking in most moral philosophy;
to others, it seems something more properly taken up by novelists or
empirical psychologists, not the business of a philosopher. Indeed,
one prominent view of TMS is that it is a work in descriptive
psychology or sociology, not a contribution to normative moral theory
(Campbell 1971; Raphael 2007). This reading is hard to square with
the many normative judgments in TMS (see Hanley 2009, chapter 2 and
Otteson 2002, chapter 6). It also misses the force of Smith's
insistence that the proper way to make normative judgments is to
consider the details of a phenomenon from an impartial perspective: to
judge the workings of our moral faculties, then, we need to consider
*them*, and their uses, in appropriate detail. Laying out in
detail how they work can help us see how they can be corrupted, and
therefore to avoid that corruption, at least to some extent (see TMS
61-6, 92-104). If this was Smith's goal--and it
fits the text of TMS very well--then he was engaged not in the
sociology or psychology but the *phenomenology* of morals,
describing the workings of our modes of moral judgment as carefully as
possible from within, and believing that the comprehensive view that
results can itself help guide us in moral judgment. Moral
phenomenology *is* normative moral theory, for him, and there
is no more foundational theory--no set of general
principles--of which we might avail ourselves. Justification for
how we make moral judgments can only be found within the way we
actually do make moral judgments; both moral justification and moral
critique must be immanent to, not transcendent of, our moral practice
(compare TMS 313-4).



A few implications of this approach. First, Smith is an
anti-reductionist. He does not think morality can be reduced to a set
of natural or divine laws, nor that it is simply a means for producing
"the greatest happiness for the greatest number of
people," in the phrase coined by his teacher, Frances Hutcheson.
He indeed says explicitly, against the proto-utilitarianism of
Hutcheson and Hume, that philosophers in his day have paid too much
attention to the consequences of actions, and he wants to focus
instead on their propriety: the relation they bear to the motive that
inspires them (18-19). At the same time, he argues that the
moral systems proposed by Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston, and Lord
Shaftesbury overstress propriety, which is just one "essential
ingredient" in virtuous action (294; see also 265 and 326). His
own view attempts to take account of all the essential ingredients in
virtue and moral judgment, and to resist the temptation to reduce
those ingredients to a single principle (see 326-7).



Second, and relatedly, Smith's way of approaching virtue often
resembles Aristotle's--who has also sometimes been seen as
too fond of the description of virtue, and who tried to acknowledge
the many diverse elements of virtue, and the judgment of virtue,
rather than to reduce them to a single principle. Smith says at the
end of TMS that his system corresponds "pretty exactly"
with Aristotle's (271). The attentive reader of TMS will have
noticed this earlier: when he characterizes propriety as lying between
the excess and defect of passion (27), for instance, or when he
distinguishes the restraint of appetite out of self-interest from the
virtue of temperance (28), or when he emphasizes habit (152, 324), or
the superiority of friendships of virtue over friendships of pleasure
(224-5).



Finally, Smith's phenomenological method is interwoven
with his strong leanings toward particularism. He insists that general
moral rules are "founded upon experience of what, in particular
instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and
propriety, approve, or disapprove of" (159; see also 160 and
320), and that our notions of right and wrong bottom out in these
reactions to particular cases (320; see also 187 and Gill 2014). His
account of virtue as depending on our attempts to adjust ourselves as
closely as possible to the feelings of the particular others we
encounter also suggests that what is virtuous in one set of
circumstances may not be so in different circumstances. These
commitments entail that moral theorists will give us little moral
guidance if they present just the general structure of right and wrong
(and Smith thinks that moral theory *should* help guide moral practice:
TMS 293, 315). A fine-grained phenomenology of how we carry out
various kinds of moral judgment, and the errors or infelicities to
which we are prone in this process, will be far more helpful.


## 2. Summary of Smith's Moral Philosophy



With these methodological points in mind, let's proceed to the
contents of TMS. Smith begins the book with an account of sympathy,
which he describes as arising when we imagine how we would feel in the
circumstances of others. (A rich discussion of Smith on sympathy can
be found in Griswold 1999, ch.2; see also Fleischacker 2019, chapter
2.) This is somewhat different from Hume's account, on which
sympathy normally consists in feeling what others *actually*
feel in their circumstances. Hume's may be called a
"contagion" account of sympathy, while Smith's is a
"projective" account (see Fleischacker 2012 and
2019). Smith's projective account opens up the possibility that
our feelings on another person's behalf may often not match the
feelings she herself has. Indeed to some extent they will never match,
since imagining oneself into a set of circumstances will always lack
the intensity of actually experiencing those circumstances (TMS
21-2). This difference is of great importance to Smith, since he
maintains that trying to share the feelings of others as closely as
possible is one of our main drives in life. We make constant efforts
to adjust our feelings, as spectators, to those of the people
"principally concerned" in a set of circumstances
(importantly, these include people acted upon as well as agents), and
to adjust our feelings as people principally concerned to a level with
which sympathetic spectators can go along (110-13,
135-6). It is this process of mutual emotional adjustment that
gives rise to virtue: the "awful" virtues of
self-restraint, insofar as the people principally concerned keep
themselves from feeling, or at least expressing, the full flood of
their grief or joy, and the "amiable" virtues of
compassion and humanity, insofar as the spectators strive to
participate in the joys and sufferings of others (23-5).



Neither the feelings we seek to have nor the standards
by which we judge feelings need be identical with the feelings
and standards that are actually current in our society. We know that
many actual spectators misjudge our situations out of ignorance or
interest, so we seek to judge, and act on, just the feelings that a
well-informed and *impartial* spectator would have (TMS 129,
135). Smith thinks that to sympathize with another's feelings is
to approve of those feelings (17), and to sympathize as we think an
impartial spectator would is to approve *morally* of
those feelings. Moral norms thus express the feelings of an impartial
spectator. A feeling, whether on the part of a person motivated to
take an action or on the part of a person who has been acted upon by
others, is worthy of moral approval if and only if an impartial
spectator would sympathize with that feeling. (Again, people acted
upon are subject to moral judgment as well as agents; reactions can be
judged as well as actions.) When achieving a morally right feeling is
difficult, we call that achievement "virtuous"; otherwise,
we describe people as acting or failing to act within the bounds of
"propriety" (25). Thus do moral norms and ideals, and the
judgments by which we guide ourselves towards those norms and ideals,
arise out of the process by which we try to achieve mutual
sympathy.



Smith distinguishes two kinds of normative guides to action: rules and
virtues. Moral rules, formed on the basis of our reactions to specific
instances (we say to ourselves, "I'll never do
*that*"), bar certain especially egregious kinds of
behavior--murder, rape, theft--and provide a framework of
shared expectations for society (156-66). They are essential to
justice, especially, without which societies could not survive. They
also enable people who are not fully virtuous to behave with a minimum
of decorum and decency (162-3), and help all of us cut through
the "veil of self-delusion" (158) by which we misrepresent
our situations to ourselves. Virtue requires more than simply
following moral rules, however. Our emotional dispositions need to be
re-configured so that we do not merely "affect" the
sentiments of the impartial spectator but "adopt" those
sentiments: identify ourselves with, become, the impartial spectator,
insofar as that is possible (147). If we are truly virtuous, a
submission to certain rules will constrain everything we do, but
within that framework we will operate without rules, trying instead to
mold ourselves with the know-how by which an artist molds his clay,
such that we develop dispositions to proper gratitude, kindness,
courage, patience, and endurance.



This is a picture that owes a great deal to Hume and Joseph Butler,
but gets worked out by Smith in much greater detail. It has been
hailed by some as an especially sensible recognition of the kind and
degree of virtue appropriate to modern liberal politics and commercial
society (Berry 1992; McCloskey 2006). Others see a darker, more
pessimistic attitude towards virtue in Smith, echoing the kinds of
worries to be found in Rousseau about the corruption wrought by
commerce (Dwyer 1987, chapter 7). Still others argue that
Smith's account of virtue re-works but to a remarkable degree
also retains the highest ideals of both the Christian and the ancient
Greco-Roman traditions, suggesting that his willingness to uphold such
an ideal of character even in modern commercial societies should be
understand as a critique rather than an endorsement of Rousseau
(Hanley 2009).



In any case, Smith gives us more a virtue ethics than a rule-based
moral system along the lines proposed by Kant and the utilitarians.
Nevertheless, he tries to incorporate some of the intuitions that
generated these other systems. As we have seen, he thinks that we need
to submit to general rules, and his reasons for supposing that relying
on sentiment alone can feed our self-deceit anticipate Kant's
critique of moral sentimentalism in the *Groundwork* (see
Fleischacker 1991). Smith also acknowledges that we in fact judge
actions by their effects as well as their intentions, and thinks this
sort of judgment is appropriate as long as we look at effects
*as* they are intended, and not just as they happen to occur.
The "merit" of actions, he says in Book II of TMS, depends
on their consequences, even if their propriety is independent of
consequences; the point, for him, is just that these are two
*different* elements of moral judgment and the first is of
greater importance than the second (188). Having insisted on this, he
grants that in some cases the consequences of an action--where
they threaten the very survival of our society, for instance--may
trump all other considerations (90-91).



In line with his concern for accurate moral phenomenology, Smith also
tries to make sense of the role that religion and culture play in our
moral lives. He handles the first of these by explaining why people
who come to believe in higher powers will naturally attribute virtues,
and a concern for our virtue, to those powers (163-6). He also
says that it adds to the sacredness we attribute to moral rules to see
them as laws of the Deity, and to the importance of morality as a
whole to see it as a way of "co-operat[ing] with the
Deity" in the governance of the universe (166). And he shows how
a belief in an afterlife may be necessary if we are to see the
universe as just, which in turn is important if we are to maintain our
commitment to the value of acting morally (168-70). In all these
ways, but especially the last, he anticipates Kant's moral
argument for belief in God, without ever quite saying that there
*is* a God. At the same time, he makes clear that any religion
that gives priority to ritual or creed over morality is baleful, and
poses grave dangers to a decent and peaceful society
(TMS 176-7; cf. WN 802-3).



Smith handles the importance of culture under the heading of
"custom and fashion." Book V of TMS takes up this topic,
acknowledging the influence of prevailing opinions in each society
over all sorts of value judgments, and granting that what is regarded
as virtuous will vary to some extent in accordance with this
influence. The French value politeness more than the Russians, and the
Dutch value frugality more than the Poles (TMS 204). The leisured
classes in every country tend to be less strict about sexual mores
than the working classes (WN 794). These are easily explicable
differences, and not worrisome ones: they are matters of emphasis, and
cannot affect "the general style of conduct or behaviour"
of a society. That general style of conduct cannot vary in its
essentials. No society could survive otherwise (TMS 209, 211).



Part VI of TMS, added in the last edition, presents the virtues of
prudence, benevolence and self-command by way of a series of elegant
character portraits, and part VII offers a short history of moral
philosophy, which stresses the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, and
the Stoics. This way of concluding the book reinforces the emphasis on
virtuous character, as opposed to a decision-procedure for specific
actions, and indicates that we might gain by returning to the ancient
schools of moral philosophy that shared this emphasis. Smith does not
endorse any ancient moral theorist uncritically, but--like
Shaftesbury and Hume--he seems to look forward to a revival of
ancient Greek ethics, a modern retrieval and re-working of the
character ideals on which those schools had focused.


## 3. Advantages of Smith's Moral Philosophy



Smith's version of moral sentimentalism has a number of
advantages over those of his contemporaries. His approach yields moral
judgments closer to those we already normally make, and makes better
sense of the complexity and richness of both virtue and the judgment
of virtue. He is expressly concerned to do justice to this complexity,
criticizing Hutcheson for reducing virtue too single-mindedly to
benevolence, and Hume for putting too much emphasis on utility.



In addition, none of Smith's predecessors had developed such an
essentially social conception of the self. Hutcheson and Hume both see
human beings as having a natural disposition to *care* about
the good of their society, but for Smith, all our feelings, whether
self-interested or benevolent, are *constituted* *by* a
process of socialization. Smith conceives of humanity as less capable
of solipsism than Hume does, less capable of the thoroughgoing egoism
that Hume, in his famous discussion of the sensible knave, finds it so
difficult to refute (Hume 1777, 81-2). At the same time, Smith
reconciles his social conception of the self with a deep respect for
the importance of each individual self, and the capacity of each self
for independent choice. Ethical self-transformation, for Smith, is
inspired and guided by social pressures but ultimately carried out by
the individual for him or herself. The "impartial
spectator" begins as a product and expression of society, but
becomes, once internalized, a source of moral evaluation that enables
the individual to stand apart from, and criticize, his or her society.
Individually free action and the social construction of the self are
compatible, for Smith, even dependent on one another.



We can more fully appreciate what is distinctive in Smith by comparing
him with Hume. Smith's thought circles around Hume's:
there is virtually nothing in either TMS or WN without some sort of
source or anticipation in Hume, although there is also almost no
respect in which Smith agrees entirely with Hume. Take their accounts
of sympathy, for example. When Hume describes the workings of
sympathy, he says that emotions "readily pass from one person to
another," like the motion of a string equally wound up with
other strings, "communicat[ing] itself to the rest" (Hume
1739-40, p. 576; see also pp. 317, 605). He then explains that
we obtain our idea of the other person's feelings by
inference--from the effects (smiles, frowns) or causes of those
feelings. In both cases, the other's feeling, once inferred,
communicates itself directly to us, and our imaginations only
intensify our idea of that feeling so as to raise it to the level of
an impression (Hume 1739-40, pp. 576, 319-20). For Smith,
by contrast, we place ourselves in the other's situation and
imagine what we would feel if we were there. Imagination is essential
to the production even of the "idea" of another's
feelings, and sympathetic feelings are no longer ones that the other
person need actually have. (Smith points out that this explains how we
sympathize with some people, like gravely ill infants or the insane,
who do not actually experience the suffering we feel on their behalf
[TMS 12-13]). This account allows for us to judge other
people's feelings against the background of our sympathetic
feelings for them. Sympathy is thus not just a way of *sharing*
feelings with others; it also opens a *gap* between their
feelings and ours. And that gap gives us a grip on the
notion--crucial to Smith's theory--that certain
feelings are appropriate to a situation, while others are not.



These seemingly slight shifts from Hume--understanding sympathy
as 1) produced by the imagination and 2) a response to situations
rather than something passed on, causally, from one person to
another--have immense implications for the shape of Smith's
thought. The first of them leads him to give a central place to works
of the imagination in moral development. He frequently brings in
examples from poetry and drama to explain or give evidence for his
points (e.g., TMS 30, 32-3, 34, 177, 227), twice recommends
writers like Voltaire as great "instructors" in certain
virtues (TMS 143, 177), and seems to see moral philosophy itself as a
work of the imagination, a project that needs to draw on imaginative
resources and that properly aims at extending and enriching the moral
imaginations of its readers (compare Griswold 1999, chapter 1). It is
therefore for him a project to which clarity, vivacity and elegance
are as important as good argument, and Smith was in fact very
concerned with finding the appropriate rhetoric--the appropriate
appeal to the imagination--for his works (see Griswold 1999;
Muller 1993; Brown 1994). Both of his books are beautifully written,
and filled with vivid, memorable examples.



The second of the shifts enables Smith to be more of a moral realist
than Hume. Smith finds an ingenious way of importing Samuel
Clarke's concern with "fitnesses" (Clarke 1703) into
moral sentimentalism. On his view, we aim to have, and act on, just
those feelings that an impartial spectator would have in our
situations; the feelings we attribute to such a spectator are then the
ones fitted to that situation. So our feelings have something to aim
at, by which they can be judged or measured. This allows Smith to
talk, as he does throughout TMS, of "fitness" (e.g., 149,
159, 165, 305, 311), of feelings being "suitable to their
objects" (16-20, 40, 70, 73, 102), and, by extension, of
people being suited to the approval or disapproval bestowed upon them
(58, 114, 118, 126). He thereby restores a meaning to our ordinary
view of value judgments as correct or incorrect, and not merely as
fostering or discouraging actions and qualities that may be useful to
society. Relatedly, he sees our sentiments as more flexible than Hume
does, and more responsive to criticism. As socialized human beings, we
do not simply desire certain objects but desire to *have* just
those desires of which an impartial spectator would approve. What are
today called "second-order desires" accompany and shape
all our first-order desires (110-11; compare Frankfurt 1971). This
gives our emotions the internal structure they need to be able to
change in response to norms.



Accordingly, it makes much more sense for Smith than for Hume that we
ought to assess our sentiments critically. Hume grants that we correct
our sympathy for partiality by adopting in imagination a "steady
and general point of view" (Hume 1739-40, p. 581), but for
Smith this concession comes too late. Smith sees sympathy as building
an aspiration to make one's sentiments harmonize with the
sentiments of others *into those sentiments themselves.* If
they did not already have such an aspiration, we would have neither
motivation nor reason to take up the "steady and general point
of view." It makes little sense to treat our sentiments as
baldly given natural reactions, impervious to reason, but then add
that they may need "correction." If sentiments are bald
natural reactions, they can be neither correct nor incorrect; if they
are impervious to reason, then we can have reason, at most, to
*appear* to have sentiments other than the ones we happen to
have, not truly to *change* those sentiments. For Smith, the
aspiration to be worthy of approval belongs to our sentiments from the
beginning, and we have, accordingly, both motivation and reason to
change our sentiments if they keep us from this aspiration. 



Relatedly, for Smith but not for Hume there is a lot to learn about
what sentiments we should have. In neither the *Treatise* nor
the second *Enquiry* does Hume spend any significant time on
how we might learn to acquire new sentiments or alter the ones we
have. By contrast, the first five parts of TMS--almost two-thirds
of the text--are devoted to a delineation of the various ways in
which we learn to assess our sentiments, and in which learning to
assess them enables us both to express them with propriety, and to
change them.



There is also for Smith, far more than for Hume, a place for moral
history. Smith's deep interweaving of individuals with their
society, and of socialization with moral development, alerts him to
the many ways in which moral norms and ideals are indexed to
historical circumstances (see Schliesser 2006). This comes out in the
detailed accounts he gives, in his lectures on jurisprudence, of how
notions of property, contract, marriage, and punishment have arisen
and changed in various societies. The idea of a history of morals
opens up here, and Smith--via his student John Millar, who
attended the lectures on jurisprudence--was an important source
of later sociological and anthropological accounts of normative
change.



Finally, Smith is further from utilitarianism than Hume. Both the
notion of sentiments as having or lacking an intrinsic propriety
independently of their effects, and the arguments, in Books II and IV,
against reducing our interest in justice and beauty to our interest in
their useful effects, are meant to counteract the utilitarian
tendencies in Hume. Smith's particularist conception of moral
judgment, and his playing down of the effects of actions in favor of
their motivations, keep him far from consequentialism. He believes
that our faculties of moral evaluation are always directed toward the
motivations and well-being of particular individuals in particular
situations, not to goods that might be possessed jointly by groups of
human beings, and he rejects the idea that our assessments or
decisions should aim at the greatest happiness for the greatest number
of people (TMS 237). In addition, he sees happiness as so shaped by
the possession of morally appropriate dispositions that it cannot
serve as a nonmoral goal that might help us define those dispositions.
It is essential to the hedonic calculus that happiness be defined
independently of morality, so that it can bestow content on moral
claims (see McDowell 1998a). That is impossible, for Smith. Smith sees
meeting the demands of the impartial spectator as intrinsic to
happiness; there is no happiness independent of morality.


## 4. Objections to Smith's Moral Philosophy



Smith's moral theory has been accused of three major failings.
First, it offers us no clear procedure for deciding which actions we
should take in specific circumstances, no guidelines for how we can
tell, in specific cases, what the impartial spectator has to say.
Second, the impartial spectator seems too enmeshed in the attitudes
and interests of the society in which it develops for it to be free of
that society's biases, or to help us care impartially for all
human beings. And third, even if Smith's analysis of moral
claims is correct, even if it is true that moral judgments in ordinary
life consist in attempts to express how an impartial spectator would
feel about our conduct, it remains unclear what justifies these
judgments. Why should we heed the demands of the impartial
spectator?



Smith would probably dismiss the first of these objections, as based
on an erroneous notion of what moral philosophy ought to do. Moral
philosophy can deepen our love for virtue, refine our understanding of
the virtues, and enrich our understanding of ourselves, all of which
can conduce to a firmer moral disposition and to a wiser, more careful
approach to moral decisions, but it cannot and should not replace the
common-life processes by which we actually make those decisions.
Philosophy is an abstract, intellectual, and solitary activity, while
moral decision-making is and should be concrete, driven by emotion as
much as by the intellect, and shaped by our interactions with the
people affected by our actions.



The second and third objections constitute what we might call a
tribalist or relativist and a skeptical challenge. The tribalist sees
no reason to extend moral sentiments or modes of judgment to people
outside his society, and no reason to criticize the basic structures
of moral sentiment in his society. He thereby seems to miss a basic
feature of moral demands. But where is the room for a universalist
morality in Smith's account? Since we construct the impartial
spectator within us out of attitudes in the society around us, how can
that spectator reach beyond our society sufficiently to achieve a
sensitive and impartial concern for members of other societies, and to
recognize where our society's sentiments are biased or
corrupt?



The skeptic represents a yet deeper problem. Smith says that when we
issue a moral judgment, of others or of ourselves, we express the
relationship of one set of sentiments--the cooler, more
reflective sentiments characteristic of a spectator--to another.
This seems a plausible account of what we actually do, when judging
morally; it captures nicely the "feel" of ordinary moral
judgments. But does it give us reason to heed such judgments? Does it
explain the normativity of moral judgments, our sense that we ought to
listen to them?



Smith clearly rejects any tribal limit to the reach of moral demands.
He adopts the Stoic view that each person is "first and
principally recommended [by nature] to his own care" (TMS 219),
and that we similarly care more about members of our own society than
about people far away from us (139-40, 227-8). At the same
time, however--also like the Stoics--he thinks that our
moral feelings extend, if to a lesser degree, to all rational and
sensible beings: "our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary,
but may embrace the immensity of the universe" (235). Indeed, he
regards accepting harm to one's local community, if that is
necessary for the good of the universe, as a mark of the highest
wisdom and virtue (235-6). As Amartya Sen has stressed, Smith
also wants us to evaluate our conduct from the perspective of any
human being anywhere, not just a member of our own society. Sen quotes
a passage in TMS in which Smith says that we "endeavour to
examine our own conduct as we imagine *any other* fair and
impartial spectator would imagine it" (110), arguing that it
implies we should seek to be informed by the views of people far
outside our cultural communities. "The need to invoke how things
would look to 'any other fair and impartial
spectator,'" says Sen, "is a requirement that can
bring in judgments that would be made by disinterested people from
other societies as well" (Sen 2009: 125). And Smith certainly
did aspire to provide such a standard of moral judgment, a structure
for morality that reaches out across national and cultural
borders.



But is Smith's impartial spectator capable of doing this?
Consider two of its features. First, it uses sentiments rather than
reason as the basis of its judgments. It is not like Roderick
Firth's ideal observer, dispassionately watching people from
above the emotional fray (Firth 1952). Rather, Smith follows Hutcheson
and Hume in tracing moral judgment, ultimately, to feelings. The
impartial spectator is supposed to be free of *partial*
feelings--feelings that depend on a *stake* it might have
in a dispute, or on blind favoritism or dislike for one party or the
other--but it is not supposed to be free of feelings altogether,
nor to reach for a principle it might derive from reason alone,
independent of feeling (see Raphael 2007, chapter 6). But our feelings
are notoriously shaped by our societies, and it is not clear how a
device that depends on feelings could correct for biases built into
them. 



Second, the impartial spectator develops within us as part of our
efforts to align our feelings with those of the people immediately
around us. The "chief part of human happiness," for Smith,
comes from the consciousness that we are "beloved" (TMS
41), but that is not possible unless our feelings, and the actions we
take on those feelings, meet with other people's approval. The
search for feelings we can share--for mutual sympathy--is a
basic human drive, and it leads among other things to the rise of
morality. Of course, that eventually means that we correct the modes
of approval of people around us for bias and misinformation; we seek
the judgment of an impartial spectator within rather than partial
spectators without. But Smith never suggests that this impartial
spectator uses different *methods* of judging, appeals to
different sorts of norms, than our neighbors do. It arises out of the
actual process of moral judgment around us, and we heed it as part of
our drive to find a harmony of feelings with our actual neighbors. It
is very unlikely, then, to use a method of judging radically unlike
those of our actual neighbors, or perceive, let alone correct for, a
systematic bias in the sentiments of our society. If sentiments of
condescension or dislike toward poor people, or black people, or gay
people, pervade our society, then there is every reason to expect that
many of us, especially in privileged groups, will build an impartial
spectator within ourselves that shares those biases rather than rising
above them. 



These are the sorts of considerations that led Smith himself to worry
about the danger that "established custom" can distort
moral judgment (TMS 210), and that nature may lead people, foolishly
and unjustly, to admire the rich and despise the poor (50-62).
Smith also worried that political faction and religious fanaticism can
"pervert" our moral feelings (155-6, 176-7),
and did not suggest ways to correct for that danger. It is unclear how
his moral theory might supply such a corrective.



Moreover, much that is attractive about Smith's theory is bound
up with this limitation; his relativistic tendencies are not a mere
mistake but a consequence of the structure of his theory. The absence
of transcendental principles in favor of judgments rooted in our
everyday sentiments, the view of individuals as aiming, by way of
morality, for emotional harmony with their neighbors, the
psychological insight of his view of moral development--all these
things go together with a picture on which we are deeply shaped by our
local societies in the way we make moral judgments, and can turn those
judgments on our society only with difficulty. It has been suggested
that Smith thought better information about the lives of poor people
could help well-off people judge the poor more favorably (Fleischacker
2004, chapter 10), and perhaps he thought that slavery and other
injustices could likewise be overturned by better information:
information enabling people to project themselves into the lives of
slaves, and other victims of injustice, and thereby to sympathize with
them. Sometimes Smith also drops proto-Kantian hints that a concern
for the equal worth of every human being lies at the basis of all
moral sentiments (TMS 90, 107, 137), and Stephen Darwall and Remy
Debes have brought out a latent egalitarianism in the structure of
Smith's moral theory that could be turned against inegalitarian
social institutions (Darwall 1999; Debes 2012). But even a commitment
to the equal worth of every human being can be interpreted in ways
that support local biases--Kant, notoriously, maintained racist
and sexist views long after coming up with his arguments for equal
worth--and Smith in any case says little to justify his
egalitarian tendencies. So it must be admitted that the tribalist
challenge brings out a weakness in Smith's theory, and cannot
easily be answered without sacrificing some of its central elements.
(For more on these issues, see Forman-Barzilai 2010).



Smith does better with the skeptical challenge. To the person who
asks, "why be moral?," Smith essentially provides what
Christine Korsgaard calls a "reflective endorsement"
argument (Korsgaard 1996: 19, 49-89). Reflective endorsement
theorists--Korsgaard gives Hume and Butler as
examples--substitute the question, "are the claims of our
moral nature good for human life?" for the question, "are
moral claims true?" They identify a certain faculty for approval
or disapproval as giving force to moral claims, and then ask whether,
on reflection, we can approve of that faculty of approval itself. This
test requires in the first instance that the faculty of moral approval
approve of its own workings. It then looks to whether our other
faculties of approval can approve of the moral one: we seek a
comprehensive endorsement, by all our modes of approval, of moral
approval in particular. The second part of the test asks above all
whether the faculty for prudential approval--the faculty by which
we applaud or condemn things in accordance with
self-interest--can applaud the moral faculty, since the latter
often requires us to override our self-interest.



We should not assume that the first part of the test is trivial.
Korsgaard quotes Hume's declaration that our sense for
morals



> 
> 
> must certainly acquire new force, when reflecting on itself, it
> approves of those principles, from whence it is deriv'd, and
> finds nothing but what is great and good in its rise and origin, (Hume
> 1739-40, pp. 267-8) 
> 
> 
> 



and contrasts this with Hume's earlier demonstration that the
understanding, when reflecting on its own procedures, undermines
itself (Korsgaard 1996, p. 62). So a faculty can fail a purely
reflexive test: it can fail to live up to its own standards for
evaluation. But the moral sense, for Hume, and the impartial
spectator, for Smith, pass their own tests. Indeed, a good way to read
TMS is to see Smith as demonstrating, to an impartial spectator in a
moment of reflection, that the impartial spectator we use in the
course of action operates in a reasonable and noble way--that, in
particular, it is not just a tool of our self-interest.



At the same time, to meet the full reflective endorsement test, Smith
needs to show that heeding the impartial spectator does not, overall,
*conflict* with our self-interest. In order to show this he
tries, like many ancient ethicists, to get us to re-think the nature
of self-interest. If we consider our real interests, Smith maintains,
we will see that the very question, "why should I be
moral?," with its implicit supposition that being moral is
something I might want to avoid, is based on a misconception of
self-interest. "The chief part of human happiness arises from
the consciousness of being beloved" (TMS 41), Smith says, and
being beloved normally requires acting in accordance with the demands
of the impartial spectator. Violating those demands will also normally
bring on internal unease--fear of discovery, pangs of conscience,
and other disturbances--making it difficult to achieve the
tranquility that Smith takes to be a prime component of happiness (TMS
149). Finally, if one fully incorporates the impartial spectator into
oneself, one will discover that moral self-approbation is itself a
great source of happiness. But if happiness consists so centrally in
the approbation of others, and in self-approbation, there can be no
reasonable conflict between pursuing happiness and pursuing morality.
So the demands of our moral sentiments are justified, capable both of
endorsing themselves and of being endorsed by our nonmoral
sentiments.



It should be clear that this argument does not involve any reduction
of morality to self-interest. For Smith, the agent who supposes that
self-interest can be defined independently of morality, and morality
then reduced to it, misunderstands the nature of self-interest. Such
an agent lacks a well-developed impartial spectator within herself,
and therefore fails to realize that acting in accordance with moral
demands is essential to her own happiness. She will gain a better
understanding of happiness only once she starts to engage in the
pursuit of virtue. Smith explicitly says that the virtuous agent sees
things that others do not (TMS 115-7, 146-8). Like the
contemporary philosopher John McDowell, he thus suggests that the
virtuous agent can properly see the point of virtue, and how virtue
helps constitute happiness, only from a perspective within the actual
practice of virtue. But, as McDowell says, there is no reason to think
one can find better arguments, or indeed any arguments, for seeking
virtue from a perspective outside of such practice (McDowell 1998a,b).
There may therefore be a certain circularity to Smith's defense
of morality, as some of his critics have alleged, but the circularity
is not a vicious one, and an entirely nonmoral defense of morality,
which the critics seem to want, may be impossible.



Smith himself does not clearly spell out the responses proposed here
to the philosophical problems that his theory raises. His strengths as
a moral philosopher lie elsewhere. Moral philosophers need not be
concerned solely with the grounds of morality. Displaying, clarifying,
and showing the internal connections in the way we think about virtue
is already a philosophical task, even if we set aside the question of
whether that way of thinking is justified. There are indeed
philosophers who reject the idea that philosophy is well-suited to
offer justifications. Smith's work fits in with the view of Iris
Murdoch, who understood moral philosophy as consisting in the attempt
"to fill in a systematic explanatory background to our ordinary
moral life" (Murdoch 1970, p. 45). His astute and nuanced
analysis of what goes into moral approval--of the sorts of
factors the impartial spectator considers, of how it can deceive
itself or otherwise go wrong, of how it develops and how it judges
different virtues in different ways--is accomplishment enough,
regardless of whether he adequately justifies the fact that we engage
in such approval at all. 



## 5. Smith's Political Philosophy



It is clear from the end of TMS that Smith intended to complement it
with a system of political philosophy, and it is clear from the
Advertisement to the last edition of TMS that WN represents the
partial but not complete fulfillment of that plan. Strikingly, what
got left out was the part of political philosophy that most concerned
Smith at the end of TMS, and that has most concerned other moral
philosophers who turn to politics: a systematic account of justice.
Smith's lectures on jurisprudence dealt with this topic, and
from the notes we have on those lectures, he seems to have hoped to
build a comprehensive, universally-applicable theory of justice out of
impartial-spectator judgments about property, contract, punishment,
etc. But the manuscript drawn from these lectures was never finished,
and he had it burned at his death. Some scholars speculate that the
failure of this project was fore-ordained: the moral theory of TMS is
too particularist to sustain a universally-applicable theory of
justice (see Griswold 1999, pp. 256-8 and Fleischacker 2004,
chapter 8). Others have tried to re-construct such a theory for Smith
(see Haakonssen 1981 and 1996).



In any case, Smith concluded his lectures on jurisprudence with some
extended remarks on "police"--public policy
--and this he did, of course, work up into a book of its own. It
is unclear, however, how much WN has to do with his philosophical
concerns. Smith became increasingly interested in political economy
after completing TMS, and WN can be seen as the fruition simply of a
new direction in his research, unconnected to his moral system. He did
come to a comprehensive, one might say philosophical, view of
political economy: from his understanding of the workings of
economics, he thought that states could foster the productiveness of
their economies only by the rule of law, accompanied by a few
limitations on banking practices, and should otherwise lift measures
that restrict or encourage particular enterprises. The practical point
of his treatise on economics was to urge this restrained, modest
approach to economic intervention on governing officials. Smith did
not favor *as* hands-off an approach as some of his
self-proclaimed followers do today--he believed that states could
and should re-distribute wealth to some degree, and defend the poor
and disadvantaged against those who wield power over them in the
private sector (see Fleischacker 2004, SS 57)--but he
certainly wanted the state to end all policies, common in his
mercantilist day, designed to favor industry over agriculture, or some
industries over others. Smith believed strongly in the importance of
local knowledge to economic decision-making, and consequently thought
that business should be left to businesspeople, who understand the
particular situations in which they work far better than any
government official (on this Hayek understood Smith well: see Hayek
1978 [1976] and C. Smith 2013). By the same token, governance should be kept
*out* of the hands of businesspeople, since they are likely to
use it to promote their particular interests, and not be concerned for
the well-being of the citizenry as a whole: Smith's opposition
to the East India Company is based on this principle (see Muthu
2008).



Smith's political views tend more generally towards a minimalist
state. He did not want the state to micro-manage the economy, and he
also did not want it to promote religion or virtue. He was suspicious
of the motives and skills of politicians, and their ability, even when
well-meaning, to change society (see Fleischacker 2004, chapter 11).
And he did not believe that the political life was the crown of the
moral life, or that law or political institutions can help people
develop virtue.



One might therefore wonder whether there is any connection between his
politics and his moral philosophy. Aside from the construction of
theories of justice--which, as we have noted, Smith wound up
*not* doing--there are three main reasons why moral
philosophers write political theories. Some, like Aristotle, see
morality as the cultivation of virtuous character and believe that the
state can help people with this cultivation. Others, like Jeremy
Bentham, see morality as maximizing human pleasure and believe that
legal and political reform can contribute significantly toward that
end. And still others, like Hegel, see morality as the expression of
freedom and believe that states can embody the highest expression of
freedom. But Smith believes none of these things. His conception of
morality is quite Aristotelian, but for him the state can do little to
help people achieve virtuous character. He shares neither
Bentham's reduction of the good life to the pleasurable life nor
Bentham's optimism about the likely effectiveness, for moral or
hedonic purposes, of even much-reformed governments. And he never
describes the state as an expression of freedom.



That leaves us with the possibility that Smith tries in WN precisely
to try to cure his readers of the illusion that states have a moral
function. There is a strong Stoic component to TMS, and we might say,
in Stoic vein, that in WN Smith wants to help us see how much the
society around us is out of our control. WN shows us the great degree
to which social institutions and policies have unintended
consequences, the central role, in particular, of unforeseeable
factors in the workings of the market, and the fact that uncontrolled
markets on the whole do well by all their participants. This allows us
to become reconciled to allowing markets, and other social
institutions, to run unfettered.



Smith is more of an Enlightenment progressive than this reading
suggests, more of a believer that an enlightened understanding of
their circumstances can help people improve those circumstances, but
he had less faith in this notion than did most of his contemporaries.
There are deep roots in his thought for a sceptical attitude towards
progressivism. His belief in local knowledge leads him to be
suspicious of large-scale plans for the reform of society. He also
provides a number of reasons for doubting whether we can successfully
set for ourselves clear goals for such reform. For most enlightenment
thinkers, including Smith's predecessors Hutcheson and Hume,
what human beings desire seemed fairly obvious. For Smith, this is not
so obvious. Smith believes that it is very difficult for us to know
our true intentions (TMS 156-9), and that our desires are
heavily shaped by social interaction. He also casts doubt on the
degree to which we seek things that are truly useful to our ends. In a
famous passage, he says that we are more interested in a thing's
apparent *conduciveness* to utility than in its *actual*
utility (179-80). This observation serves as the jumping-off
point for his first foray into economics. The "poor man's
son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition" pursues
wealth without knowing what it is really like, because it
*seems*--falsely--to be useful (181-3). In
several ways, then, Smith pictures human desires and aims as more
opaque than do most other Enlightenment thinkers. This picture informs
his distinctive account of society and history, moreover, according to
which unintended consequences tend to be more important than intended
ones and the course of history is correspondingly unknowable in
advance. On such a view, it is futile for politicians to try to
determine the future development of their societies. They do better
restricting their activities to protecting individual liberty against
violence--to defense and the administration of justice.



We might call this the libertarian reading of Smith, and it certainly
captures an important element of his political philosophy. Smith gives
justice priority over the other virtues in TMS (86), he begins his
lectures on jurisprudence by saying that the maintenance of justice is
"the first and chief design of every system of government"
(Smith 1978, p. 5), and he brings in justice as a constraint on
economic activity many times in WN (e.g., WN 157, 539, 687). But he
does not say that the enforcement of justice is the sole job of
government. The third of the tasks he gives to government in WN
consists in "maintaining and erecting" a broad range of
"publick works and ... publick institutions" for the
good of the whole society (WN 687-8). In TMS, the chapter often
quoted as claiming that justice is the only virtue that may be
enforced actually maintains only that "kindness or beneficence,
... cannot, *among equals*, be extorted by force"
(TMS 81). In a state "antecedent to the institution of civil
government," Smith says, no impartial spectator would approve of
one person's using force to make another act beneficently. But
once civil government has been established, people may legitimately be
forced to carry out at least the greatest and most obvious duties of
beneficence. Smith says that



> 
> 
> [t]he civil magistrate is entrusted with the power *not only of
> ... restraining injustice, but of promoting the prosperity of the
> commonwealth*, by establishing good discipline, and by
> discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety; he may prescribe
> rules, therefore, which not only prohibit mutual injuries among
> fellow-citizens, but command mutual good offices to a certain degree.
> (81, emphasis added)
> 
> 
> 



Smith warns against taking this license for a general promotion of
virtue too far--that, he says, would be "destructive of all
liberty, security, and justice"--but he also says that
neglecting it will lead "to many gross disorders and shocking
enormities" (TMS 81). These enormities may well include the
misery of the poor, a central concern of Smith's in WN. Smith
had no principled objections to government power being used to help
the poor, and indeed proposed a number of policies with that in mind.
It should be remembered that the idea that governments might massively
re-distribute wealth out of fairness to the poor was not on the agenda
in Smith's time. Only in the 1790s, after Smith died, did Jeremy
Bentham and Tom Paine offer their groundbreaking poverty programs; the
socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier lay another generation in
the future. Until the late eighteenth century, most writers on the
role of government vis-a-vis the poor maintained that
governments should keep the poor in poverty, so that they show proper
respect to their superiors and not waste money on drink. Smith had
more influence than anyone else in changing this attitude--he was
one of the earliest and most fervent champions of the rights and
virtues of the poor, arguing against wage caps and other constraints
that kept the poor from rising socially and economically (see Baugh
1983 and Fleischacker 2004, chapter 10).



Smith also had a more restricted conception of individual rights than
do contemporary libertarians. Taxation does not count as any sort of
threat to property rights, for him--he indeed describes paying
taxes as "a badge ... of liberty" (WN 857)--nor
does the government's mere support for certain ideas and values
count as an infringement of the right to conscience. Although it may
be inefficient and otherwise unwise, it is not *unjust* for the
government to intervene in the economy on behalf of one or another
commercial interest, to spread propaganda for one or another
conception of virtue, or even to establish a religion. Smith of course
opposes economic intervention of this kind and thinks it better if
governments do not establish religions, but his views on these issues
stem from concerns other than justice. Moreover, he favors militia
training to instill courage in people, state incentives urging people
to study science and philosophy, and state encouragement for secular
amusements--the latter two as an "antidote to the poison of
[religious] enthusiasm and superstition." (WN 796) So
Smith's state is not a neutral one, in the modern sense, and it
is not wholly uninterested in the promotion of virtue.



Why, then, does Smith recommend such a minimal state? The
interventions just listed are practically the only ones he urges in
WN, and even in those cases, Smith calls for limited state action. Why
allow governments to go so far, and no farther?



The first answer to that is that Smith did not think government
officials were competent to handle much beside the needs of defense
and the administration of justice. Smith's writings are
permeated by a lack of respect for the sorts of people who go into
politics: for the vanity that leads them to seek fame and power, for
the presumption by which they regard themselves as morally superior to
others, and for the arrogance by which they think they know the
people's interests and needs better than the people do
themselves. He also believes that politicians tend to be manipulated
by the preaching of merchants who do not have the good of the nation
as a whole at heart (WN 266-7), and that they can rarely know
enough to guide large numbers of people. Correlatively, Smith has a
great respect for the competence and virtue of common people. He shows
no trace of the thought, common at the time and strongly held by
Hutcheson, that a class of wise and virtuous people ought to rule over
the common herd.



In addition, Smith holds that social sanctions can do a better job at
many tasks that other thinkers expected of political sanctions. His
rich account in TMS of the way that spectators around us shape us
morally enables him to hold that governments need not teach
virtue. Society, independent of governmental power, will do that on
its own. Thus sumptuary laws are unnecessary because the desire to
maintain or increase one's social status will keep most people
prudent and frugal (WN 341-6). Thus religious groups that
spontaneously arise without government assistance do a better job of
inculcating virtues than their government-supported counterparts (WN
792-6). And thus--implicitly--the civic republican
obsession with a citizen militia is overwrought because the habits of
self-command inculcated by military service can also be achieved, for
most people, by the social interactions of the market (see
Fleischacker 1999, pp. 153-6, 169-72).



Finally, Smith limits the activities of governments because he
considers it crucial to the development of virtue that people have
plenty of room to act, and shape their feelings, on their own.
Becoming a good human being is ultimately a task that each individual
must take up for him or herself. People develop better moral judgment
by actually making moral judgments (WN 782-3, 788), and virtue
requires the practice of virtue (TMS 324); we cannot achieve these
things simply by following the say-so of an authority. So exercises of
power tend to be inimical to moral development, and governments should
use their power mostly to minimize the degree to which power gets
exercised elsewhere. 



Indeed, for Smith, governments can best encourage virtue precisely by
*refraining* from encouraging virtue. In TMS, the person who
merely tries to appear virtuous, whether out of fear of the law or out
of fear of social disapproval, is not really virtuous. But there is a
sliding scale here. One who acts virtuously out of concern for the
praise and blame of her neighbors is not as virtuous as one who is
concerned to be praise-worthy in the eyes of an impartial spectator,
but one who acts virtuously out of concern for legal sanctions is
worse than either of the other two. As long as neighbors know each
other reasonably well, their approval and disapproval will normally
take into account the particular circumstances, the peculiar history
and psychology, of the individuals they judge--their judgments
will reflect, say, the difference in gratitude due to a loudly
self-pitying parent as opposed to a truly long-suffering one. Legal
sanctions are blunt instruments that cannot attend to such subtleties.
So social approval is more likely than legal approval to pick out the
right sort of actions to mark for moral worth. Furthermore, since
social sanctions are milder than legal sanctions--it is much
easier to ignore a neighbor's disapproval than a threat of
imprisonment--people who care about social sanctions display
better character than people who can be motivated to good action only
by the law. The pressure of social sanctions is more like, and more
likely to draw one towards, the pressure of conscience. Even if
concern for social approval is not the ideal motivation for moral
action, therefore, it is at least some sign of good character, and a
step along the way to the motivations of the fully virtuous person.
Legal sanctions by contrast affect our physical well-being and social
standing so severely that they drive out all thought of the sanctions
of conscience. A government concerned to foster virtue in its citizens
should therefore aim as much as possible to remove its own sanctions
from the pursuit of virtue. Governments foster virtue best where they
refuse, directly, to foster virtue at all: just as they protect
economic development best where they refuse, directly, to protect that
development. This ironic conception of government power runs through
Smith's political thinking. Accordingly, his main
political object in writing WN is to instill modesty in policy-makers,
to urge them to take on only very limited, well-defined tasks, and to
recognize that the flourishing of their society does not, on the
whole, much depend on them.



In sum, if Smith's political philosophy looks like
libertarianism, it is a libertarianism aimed at different ends, and
grounded in different moral views, than that of most contemporary
libertarians. Today, many libertarians are suspicious of the notion
that individuals ought to develop virtues expected of them by others:
beyond, at least, those virtues that are needed for the functioning of
the market and the liberal state themselves. Smith does not share this
attitude. He is far from an agnostic about what a good human life
looks like, let alone an enthusiast for a conception of the good life
that eschews virtue in favor of preference-satisfaction. He is not a
positivist sceptical of the significance of moral argument, like
Milton Friedman, nor a hedonist, like Bentham and his followers, nor a
radical individualist, like the followers of Ayn Rand. Any decent
human life, he believes, requires certain virtues, and depends on a
respect and love of individuals for the people around them. If he
encourages governments, nevertheless, to refrain from promoting
virtue, that is because he thinks that social forces can effectively
achieve that end without government help, and that legal sanctions are
in any case useless or counter-productive for the promotion of virtue.
So he may arrive at some libertarian conclusions, but not in the way
that most libertarians do.


## 6. Conclusion



Smith has an account of the nature of moral judgment, and its
development, that is richer and subtler than Hume's; he offers a
prototype for modern Aristotelianism in morality; he brings out the
importance of the imagination to moral development as few other
philosophers have done; he is an early and forceful promoter of the
notion that history is guided largely by unintended consequences; and
he derives from these views an unusual variant of liberal politics.
Few of these contributions are spelled out with the clarity and tight
argumentation that contemporary philosophers demand of their canonical
figures, but Smith compensates for this weakness by the humanity and
thoughtfulness of his views, by their detachment from metaphysical
commitments, and by an abundance of historical and imaginative detail.
The richness of his ideas, and their quiet plausibility, earn him a
place among the most important of modern moral and political
philosophers.