The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 579 passages
Cite this work
- APAAdam Smith. (n.d.). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments
- MLAAdam Smith. "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments.
- ChicagoAdam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments.
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.
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensations and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His ag