- Length
- 480 pagesRaphael and Macfie, Glasgow Edition, Liberty Fund, 1982 - the sixth edition text
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The book Adam Smith thought was his best, by the professor of moral philosophy the world remembers as an economist. It explains how beings who cannot feel each other's feelings nevertheless judge each other, and it does so with a psychological acuteness that has aged remarkably well.
- Date
- 1759
- Author
- Adam Smith
- Region
- Glasgow and Edinburgh
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 20 years
Famous in Smith's lifetime, eclipsed for two centuries by his book on economics, and read again now by people trying to understand what that book assumed.
What the book says
An account of how creatures as self-interested as we are nevertheless make moral judgements, built on one mechanism. We cannot feel another person's pain directly, but we can imagine ourselves into their situation, and doing so produces in us a fainter version of what they feel - which Smith calls sympathy and which is a capacity rather than a virtue. Moral judgement is then a matter of comparison: I approve of your response if, imagining myself in your case, I find my own imagined feeling matching yours. This explains why we expect the bereaved to moderate their grief and the injured to moderate their anger, since the observer cannot reach the intensity the sufferer feels and the sufferer instinctively lowers it to meet him. From this Smith builds outward. Conscience is the same mechanism turned inward: to judge our own conduct we imagine how it would look to a spectator who is well informed and has no stake, and that impartial spectator is what we mean by the man within the breast. The later parts examine why we admire the rich and powerful, which he calls a corruption of the moral sentiments, and set out the virtues - prudence, justice, beneficence and self-command.
What it argues
That moral judgement is a matter of imaginative exchange of positions, and that the standard it produces is neither a rule nor a calculation but a fit. Approving of someone's response means finding that my own response, when I put myself in their case, matches theirs; disapproving means finding that it does not. Because the observer's imagined feeling is always weaker than the sufferer's real one, the whole system pulls toward moderation, and Smith treats this as the origin of self-command rather than a defect. Conscience is the internalised spectator, formed by having been observed and having observed others, so that morality is social in origin without being conventional in authority. Justice is singled out as the one virtue that may be enforced, because society can survive without beneficence but not without a check on injury.
What it answered
Hume, and the wider sentimentalist tradition running through Hutcheson, who had been Smith's teacher. Against Hutcheson's moral sense - a distinct faculty that perceives virtue - Smith substitutes a mechanism made of ordinary imagination and needs no special organ. Against Hume he denies that utility is what we are responding to. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a Scottish argument conducted among people who knew each other well, and its precision comes from that.
How it argues
By observation, in a prose that keeps returning to specific cases - how we react to a dying man who does not know he is dying, why the fortune of a friend can make us uneasy, what happens when a beggar and a nobleman pass in the street. There are no proofs and few definitions. Smith is describing a mechanism and testing the description against how people actually behave, and the argument accumulates from a great many small observations rather than from a principle. It is the most readable major work of moral philosophy in English.
The moment
Glasgow in the 1750s, where Smith held the chair of moral philosophy and lectured on natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence and political economy as one course. The book is the ethics section written up. He resigned the chair in 1764 to tutor a young duke on a European tour, met Voltaire and the physiocrats, and began the Wealth of Nations; the jurisprudence he had promised was never published and he had the manuscripts burned days before his death.
How it travelled
Into eclipse and out again. The book made Smith's reputation in 1759 and was read across Europe; then the Wealth of Nations arrived in 1776 and eventually swallowed him, so that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Smith was an economist who had happened to write something else first. German scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century made an argument out of the discrepancy, which acquired a German name and a long life. The recovery of the Theory of Moral Sentiments began in the later twentieth century, driven partly by economists who wanted to know what the other book had assumed about people.
The strongest objection
That the impartial spectator cannot deliver more than the standards of the society that formed him. Smith builds conscience out of imagining how a well-informed observer with no stake would see us - but the observer is assembled from the reactions of the people we have actually lived among, so a person raised where cruelty is normal will find an internal spectator who finds it normal too. Smith sees the difficulty and gestures at a further correction, appealing to what a spectator would think who knew everything and belonged nowhere; but that figure has no way of being constructed by the mechanism he has described, and the account is either sociology of morals or a moral standard, and cannot easily be both.
Why read it
Because it is the most enjoyable book in this section and contains more accurate observation of human behaviour per page than anything else here. It can be opened anywhere. The first part on propriety, the third on conscience, and the chapter on our disposition to admire the rich are the ones to read if you read nothing else.
- First printed
- 1759
- First in English
- 1759
- Digitised
- Yes
Six editions in Smith's lifetime. The sixth of 1790 adds Part VI on the character of virtue and the passage on the man of system who would arrange society as a hand arranges pieces on a chessboard.
Written in English. All editions are public domain.
Where it stands
Revived and busy. It is read in moral psychology for the account of sympathy and the impartial spectator, in behavioural economics as a corrective to models of self-interest, and in political theory for the argument that our admiration of wealth and status is a moral corruption rather than a neutral fact.
The passage
the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, part III. Public domain, and Smith's own words.
Contested
The relation between this book and the Wealth of Nations is the standing question, argued under a German name since the 1850s. The nineteenth-century view was that Smith changed his mind and replaced sympathy with self-interest; the modern consensus is that there is no incompatibility, that both books are parts of a system whose missing third part on jurisprudence Smith never finished, and that he said as much in the advertisement to the sixth edition. How much the sixth edition's additions change the doctrine, rather than extending it, is disputed. And whether the impartial spectator is a description of how conscience works or a normative standard is unresolved in the text.