The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Overview

Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759, is the ethical foundation on which his entire intellectual project rests. It is the book that made Smith's reputation in his own lifetime — he was known to his contemporaries primarily as a moral philosopher, not as an economist — and it was the work he revised most carefully, producing six editions over the course of thirty years, with the final edition appearing in 1790, the year of his death.

The central question of the book is deceptively simple: how do we make moral judgments? Smith rejects the two dominant answers of his era. He rejects the rationalism of Samuel Clarke and others, who held that moral distinctions are perceived by reason in the same way that mathematical truths are. And he rejects the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson — Smith's own teacher — who argued that we have a dedicated faculty, analogous to the senses, that directly perceives moral qualities. Instead, Smith offers a theory grounded in sympathy: we judge the propriety of actions and characters by imaginatively putting ourselves in the position of those involved and feeling whether the sentiments they express are appropriate to the situation.

This is a moral psychology of remarkable subtlety. Smith does not claim that sympathy makes us good — he is clear that sympathy is a neutral mechanism that can be deployed for good or ill. Nor does he claim that our actual sentiments are reliable guides to moral truth — our sentiments are often distorted by self-interest, bias, and proximity. What makes moral judgment possible is the corrective mechanism of the impartial spectator — an idealized perspective that we construct by imagining how a fully informed, disinterested observer would regard our actions. Moral judgment, for Smith, is the product of a constant negotiation between our immediate sentiments and this imagined perspective, and the cultivated capacity to adopt this perspective is what moral education is all about.

Author

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and political economist who is often called the father of modern economics. He was born in Kirkcaldy, a small town on the Firth of Forth, and educated at the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford. At Glasgow he studied under Francis Hutcheson, whose moral sense theory would shape — and be challenged by — Smith's own thought. After a period lecturing at Edinburgh, Smith returned to Glasgow as Professor of Logic and then Professor of Moral Philosophy, a position he held from 1752 to 1764.

Smith's intellectual career has a structure that is often overlooked by those who know him only as the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776). The Theory of Moral Sentiments came first, both chronologically and conceptually. It articulates the moral and psychological framework within which Smith's economic thought operates. The Wealth of Nations is, in many respects, an application of the principles of Moral Sentiments to the domain of economic life — an attempt to show how the same psychological mechanisms that govern moral judgment also shape economic behavior.

This point matters because the popular image of Smith — the champion of self-interest, the apostle of the invisible hand, the theorist of the market as a self-regulating mechanism — strips his thought of its ethical context. Smith did not believe that self-interest is the whole story about human motivation. He believed that human beings are fundamentally social creatures, shaped by sympathy, governed by the desire for mutual recognition, and capable of moral judgment only through the discipline of the impartial spectator. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the text that restores this fuller picture, and without it, Smith's economics is liable to be misunderstood as a celebration of selfishness that he never intended.

Historical Background

The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written during the Scottish Enlightenment, one of the most fertile periods in the history of philosophical thought. The intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Scotland was distinctive — less dominated by continental rationalism than France, less empiricist in its strict form than England, and more attuned to the social dimensions of human life. Thinkers like David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Kames developed a philosophical style that combined empirical observation with conceptual analysis, and that took seriously the insights of history, psychology, and the emerging social sciences.

Smith was a central figure in this intellectual community. He was a close friend of Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) had attempted to ground morality in sentiment rather than reason. Hume's influence on the Theory of Moral Sentiments is unmistakable — Smith takes over the basic project of explaining morality through sentiment — but Smith's execution is entirely his own. Where Hume is a systematic philosopher who constructs abstract arguments, Smith is a phenomenologist of moral life, describing the actual workings of moral psychology with a detail and psychological acuity that Hume never attempted.

The book was also written in the context of a specific philosophical debate about the foundations of morality. The rationalists, represented by Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston, argued that moral distinctions are perceptions of reason — that we can see, through rational reflection, that certain actions are fitting and others are not, in the same way that we can see mathematical truths. The sentimentalists, represented by Hutcheson and the Earl of Shaftesbury, argued that moral distinctions are perceived by a moral sense — an innate faculty that directly apprehends moral qualities. Smith's position is distinct from both. He agrees with the sentimentalists that morality is grounded in feeling rather than reason, but he rejects the idea of a dedicated moral sense. Instead, he traces moral judgment to the general psychological mechanism of sympathy, which is not a moral faculty but a universal feature of human psychology.

Key Ideas

Sympathy as the Foundation of Morality

The opening sentence of the Theory of Moral Sentiments announces its central thesis: "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." Smith names this principle sympathy, and he means by it something broader than the ordinary English word suggests. Sympathy, for Smith, is not pity or compassion — it is the capacity to feel what others feel, to be moved by their situation, to enter imaginatively into their experience.

Smith's account of sympathy is a work of remarkable psychological detail. When we see someone in pain, we do not literally feel their pain — our bodies are not injured. What happens is that we form a conception of their situation, and this conception produces in us a corresponding emotion. The sight of a person in agony makes us wince not because we feel the agony ourselves but because our imagination places us in their position and generates an echo of their feeling. This echo is what Smith calls sympathy — and it extends far beyond pain. We sympathize with joy, with grief, with anger, with amusement, with every human emotion.

Sympathy is the mechanism that makes moral judgment possible. When we observe an action, we naturally compare the sentiments of the person acting with the sentiments we imagine we would feel in their situation. If the sentiments match — if the person's grief seems proportionate to their loss, or their anger seems proportionate to the injury they have suffered — we judge the sentiment to be proper and approve of it. If the sentiments do not match — if the person's grief seems excessive or their anger disproportionate — we judge the sentiment to be improper and disapprove. Moral judgment, in other words, is a form of psychological attunement. We approve when we can sympathize with the actor's feelings, and we disapprove when we cannot.

This is a strikingly democratic theory of morality. There is no appeal to divine command, to natural law, or to moral sense. The authority of moral judgment comes from the psychological process of sympathy itself — from the fact that we are constituted to feel what others feel, and that this feeling provides the basis for our assessment of propriety. For those exploring empathy and compassion in the wisdom tradition, Smith's theory offers a philosophical account of how these capacities function as the foundation of moral life.

The Impartial Spectator

The impartial spectator is Smith's most original and most important contribution to moral philosophy. The concept arises from a fundamental problem in the sympathy-based theory. If moral judgment is based on sympathy, and if sympathy is the capacity to feel what others feel, then moral judgment would seem to be hostage to our own feelings — and our feelings are notoriously unreliable. We are biased in our own favor, too ready to sympathize with our own grievances and too slow to sympathize with those of others. How can sympathy, which is so easily distorted by self-interest, serve as the basis for objective moral judgment?

Smith's answer is the impartial spectator. When we judge our own actions, we cannot rely on our immediate sentiments — they are too partial. Instead, we imagine how our conduct would appear to a well-informed, disinterested observer — someone who is not a party to our interests, who has no stake in the outcome, and who sees the situation from a neutral perspective. We then judge our actions by asking whether this imagined spectator would sympathize with the sentiments that motivated them. If the impartial spectator would approve, we judge our actions to be proper. If the impartial spectator would disapprove, we feel the sting of self-condemnation.

The impartial spectator is not a real person. It is a construction of the imagination — an idealized perspective that we build up through experience, through the feedback we receive from others, and through the discipline of moral education. Over time, through the repeated practice of judging our own actions from the perspective of others, we internalize this perspective until it becomes a permanent feature of our moral psychology. The mature moral agent does not need to consciously construct the impartial spectator each time they act. The perspective has become habitual, a kind of inner voice that speaks with the authority of reason but is grounded in the social experience of sympathy.

This is one of the most psychologically sophisticated accounts of moral agency in the history of philosophy. Smith recognizes that moral judgment is not simply a matter of applying rules or consulting principles. It is a process of imaginative construction, in which we build a perspective that is both our own and not our own — a perspective that we inhabit but that speaks with the authority of the community. The impartial spectator is the mechanism by which social life internalizes itself in the individual, and by which the individual transcends the narrow perspective of self-interest.

Moral Judgment and Approbation

For Smith, moral judgment is inseparable from the experience of approbation — the feeling of approval or disapproval that arises when we observe an action or character. When we approve of someone's conduct, we are not merely registering a fact about their behavior. We are responding to the perceived propriety of their sentiments — the degree to which their feelings are appropriate to their situation. And this response is itself a form of sympathy: we approve because we can enter into their feelings, because our imagination finds a resonance between their situation and our response.

Smith distinguishes between two forms of approbation. The first is the immediate, unreflective sympathy we feel when we observe someone's conduct. We see a person bear misfortune with dignity, and we feel a surge of admiration — this is immediate approbation, grounded in direct sympathy with the propriety of their sentiments. The second is a more reflective form of judgment, in which we consider not only the immediate sentiments but also the broader context — the motives, the consequences, the character of the agent. This reflective approbation is informed by the impartial spectator and represents a more mature form of moral judgment.

The connection between sympathy and approbation also explains why we seek the approval of others. We are not merely motivated by a desire for praise — though Smith acknowledges that this is a powerful human motive. We are motivated by a desire to be worthy of praise — to be the kind of person whose conduct would meet with the approbation of an impartial spectator. This distinction is crucial. The person who seeks only praise is governed by the opinions of others, which may be mistaken or corrupt. The person who seeks to be worthy of praise is governed by the impartial spectator, which represents the standard of moral judgment that the community would endorse if it were fully informed and free from bias.

The Virtues

Smith identifies several virtues that emerge from the sympathetic process and the discipline of the impartial spectator. Prudence is the virtue of self-regard — the capacity to manage one's own affairs with wisdom and foresight, to pursue one's interests without recklessness or excess. Smith's account of prudence is marked by a certain ambivalence. He admires prudence and regards it as essential to a well-ordered life, but he also recognizes that prudence alone is not sufficient for moral excellence. The prudent person who never rises above self-interest is not fully virtuous, however successful they may be.

Justice and beneficence are the social virtues — the virtues that govern our relations with others. Justice, for Smith, is the virtue of not harming others — the negative virtue of abstaining from injury. It is the minimal standard of moral conduct, the baseline below which no one may fall without forfeiting their claim to social life. Beneficence, by contrast, is the positive virtue of doing good — of actively promoting the welfare of others. Beneficence is not obligatory in the way that justice is. We cannot be compelled to be beneficent, and the failure to be beneficent does not make us morally culpable in the way that the failure to be just does. But beneficence is what makes life flourish — it is the virtue that transforms mere coexistence into genuine community.

The highest virtue, for Smith, is self-command — the capacity to regulate one's own passions, to maintain composure in the face of provocation, and to act from principle rather than impulse. Self-command is the virtue that makes all the other virtues possible, because it is the mechanism by which the impartial spectator gains control over our immediate sentiments. Without self-command, sympathy would be overwhelmed by passion, and moral judgment would collapse into the expression of whatever feeling happens to be strongest. With self-command, the perspective of the impartial spectator can discipline our passions, redirect our impulses, and guide us toward conduct that is genuinely proper.

Justice and Beneficence

The distinction between justice and beneficence is one of the most important features of Smith's moral theory, and it has significant political implications. Justice, Smith argues, is the one virtue that can be enforced by law. Because justice consists in not harming others, its violation involves a clear injury that can be identified, punished, and prevented through legal means. Beneficence, because it consists in positive action, cannot be enforced without violating the freedom of the individual. We can compel people not to harm us, but we cannot compel them to help us — and a society that tried to enforce beneficence through law would become tyrannical.

This distinction has direct implications for Smith's political and economic thought. It suggests that the proper role of government is to enforce justice — to protect individuals from harm, to maintain the rule of law, and to provide the conditions under which voluntary cooperation can flourish. It suggests that beneficence — charity, mutual aid, social solidarity — should be left to the voluntary action of individuals and communities, not imposed by the state. And it suggests that the market, as a system of voluntary exchange, is a sphere of justice rather than beneficence — a domain in which individuals pursue their own interests within the constraints of law, and in which the sympathetic imagination works to align self-interest with the common good.

The Relationship to Wealth of Nations

The relationship between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations has been the subject of intense scholarly debate — the so-called "Adam Smith Problem." Some scholars have argued that the two works are fundamentally incompatible: the Theory of Moral Sentiments presents human beings as governed by sympathy and the desire for mutual approval, while The Wealth of Nations presents them as governed by self-interest and the desire for material gain. The sympathetic, social creatures of the Moral Sentiments seem to have been replaced by the calculating, self-interested agents of the Wealth of Nations.

Most contemporary scholars reject this interpretation. The two works, they argue, are complementary rather than contradictory. The Theory of Moral Sentiments provides the moral and psychological framework within which the economic analysis of the Wealth of Nations operates. Self-interest is not Smith's only account of human motivation — it is one motive among many, and it is always embedded in the social context of sympathy, approbation, and the impartial spectator. The butcher and the baker of the Wealth of Nations do not pursue their self-interest in a moral vacuum. They pursue it within a social world governed by the norms of justice and the discipline of the impartial spectator, and the market itself functions as a system of mutual adjustment in which the self-interest of each is constrained by the self-interest of others.

What the Theory of Moral Sentiments adds to the picture that the Wealth of Nations cannot provide on its own is an account of the moral foundations of market society. It explains why self-interest does not degenerate into exploitation, why market participants conform to norms of fairness and honesty, and why the invisible hand — the mechanism by which individual self-interest is channeled toward the public good — operates within a moral framework that it cannot itself create. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in other words, is the ethical infrastructure of Smith's economics, and reading it alongside the Wealth of Nations is essential for understanding Smith's vision of commercial society.

Legacy

The Theory of Moral Sentiments was an immediate success. It went through six editions in Smith's lifetime, was translated into French and German, and was admired by figures as diverse as Edmund Burke, Voltaire, and Kant. Kant's moral philosophy, though it ultimately took a very different direction, was influenced by Smith's account of the impartial spectator, and the concept recurs throughout the history of moral thought.

In the nineteenth century, the Theory of Moral Sentiments was somewhat overshadowed by the Wealth of Nations. Smith came to be known primarily as an economist, and his moral philosophy was treated as a preliminary to his economic work rather than as a significant contribution in its own right. The "Adam Smith Problem" — the supposed tension between sympathy and self-interest — was formulated by German scholars in the late nineteenth century and shaped the reception of Smith's moral philosophy for decades.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Theory of Moral Sentiments has experienced a remarkable renaissance. Behavioral economists, experimental psychologists, and neuroscientists have found in Smith's account of sympathy and moral judgment a remarkably prescient analysis of the psychological mechanisms that underlie moral behavior. The discovery of mirror neurons — brain cells that fire both when we act and when we observe others acting — has been interpreted as a neurological correlate of Smith's sympathy. And contemporary moral philosophers, dissatisfied with both Kantian rationalism and utilitarian calculation, have returned to Smith's sentiment-based theory as a resource for developing more psychologically realistic accounts of moral judgment.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments also speaks to contemporary concerns about the moral foundations of economic life. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and amid ongoing debates about inequality, corporate responsibility, and the social contract, Smith's insistence that markets operate within a moral framework — that self-interest is not the whole story of human motivation, and that the discipline of the impartial spectator is essential for the health of commercial society — has proved newly relevant. For those seeking to understand themselves and their place in the moral economy of modern life, Smith's first book remains a source of wisdom that his more famous second work, for all its importance, cannot replace. The Theory of Moral Sentiments shows us that the market is not a machine that runs on self-interest alone — it is a human institution, sustained by the same capacities for sympathy, judgment, and self-command that make moral life possible.