The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 579 passages
Cite this work
- APAAdam Smith. (n.d.). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments
- MLAAdam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments.
- ChicagoAdam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Adam Smith's first book, of 1759, explaining how moral judgement arises: not from reason nor from a commandment, but from the capacity to put oneself in another's place.
Context and history
The mechanism is sympathy, which here does not mean compassion but the faculty of imagining what we should feel in the other's situation. Out of this operation comes the impartial spectator, the inward figure against whom we measure our own conduct and who serves as conscience. This book is better read before 'The Wealth of Nations' than after: for a long time people spoke of an 'Adam Smith problem', as though the author of sympathy and the author of self-interest were incompatible. Smith did not see it so, and he went on revising this work until the year of his death, thirty years after the other. He was a professor of moral philosophy, not an economist: this is his central book.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner. The very force of this conception is sufficient, in their feeble frames, to produce that itching or uneasy sensation complained of. Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate than any other part of the body is in the weakest. Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain or sorrow, that call forth our fellow-feeling. Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator. Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness. We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived them. In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines, should be the sentiments of the sufferer. Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.…