Adam Smith on Sympathy

Quote

"Though our brother is on 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."

— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part I, Section I, Chapter 1 (1759)

Historical Context

Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, while he was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The book was his first major work and the one he continued to revise throughout his life, producing six editions, the last in 1790, the year of his death. The passage quoted here appears in the opening chapter, where Smith lays the foundation for his entire moral theory. It comes before any discussion of virtue, justice, or the impartial spectator — it is the first move in the argument, the bedrock claim from which everything else follows.

Smith wrote in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual ferment that produced not only his own work but the philosophy of Hume, the social theory of Adam Ferguson, and the historical writing of William Robertson. A central concern of this circle was the nature of moral judgment: on what basis do we judge actions to be right or wrong? The dominant positions of the period were rationalism, which grounded morality in reason, and the moral sense theory of Smith's teacher Francis Hutcheson, which posited an innate faculty that approved of benevolence and disapproved of malice. Smith's theory of sympathy was an original contribution to this debate, neither purely rationalist nor purely sentimentalist but a sophisticated account of how moral judgment emerges from the interplay of feeling and imagination.

The image of the brother on the rack is deliberately extreme. Smith chose it not for its realism but for its clarity: it is the most vivid possible illustration of the gap between one person's experience and another's. The rack is a symbol of concentrated, unbearable suffering, and the point is that even in the presence of such suffering, the observer's own senses remain untouched. This was a direct challenge to the moral sense philosophy of Hutcheson, who suggested that we have an innate capacity to perceive moral qualities in actions the way the eye perceives colors.

Philosophical Interpretation

The passage makes a precise epistemological claim about the limits of sensation. Our senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell — give us access only to our own experience. I can see your face contorted in pain, but I do not feel your pain. I can hear your cries, but the sound reaches my ears, not your nerves. The senses, as Smith puts it, "never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person." This is a factual claim about the architecture of human perception, and it sets up the central question of the Theory of Moral Sentiments: if we cannot directly experience what others feel, how is moral life possible?

Smith's answer is imagination. Imagination is the faculty that allows us to form "any conception of what are his sensations." It does not give us the other person's feelings directly but constructs a representation of them by placing ourselves in their situation. When I see my brother on the rack, I imagine what I would feel in his place, and this imagined feeling — not his actual pain, but my sympathetic response to it — is the raw material of moral judgment. Imagination is therefore not a supplement to moral life but its foundation. Without it, we would be locked in the prison of our own sensations, incapable of the compassion that makes social existence meaningful.

This account has several important consequences. First, it means that sympathy is always mediated and therefore always fallible. We can misjudge what another person feels, projecting our own responses onto them rather than grasping theirs. This fallibility is one reason Smith places such emphasis on the impartial spectator — the internalized figure that helps us correct our partial and self-interested judgments. Second, it means that sympathy is an active achievement, not a passive reception. Feeling for others requires effort: the effort of attention, of imagination, of setting aside one's own concerns long enough to enter into another's. Moral development, on Smith's account, is largely the cultivation of this imaginative capacity.

Third, the passage implies that moral knowledge is fundamentally different from scientific knowledge. In science, we learn about the world by observing it from the outside. In morality, we learn about others by imagining ourselves into their situation from the inside. This does not mean that morality is subjective or arbitrary — Smith believed that moral judgments could be more or less accurate — but it does mean that morality has a different epistemological structure from the natural sciences.

The passage also speaks to a tension that runs through the entire Theory of Moral Sentiments. If sympathy depends on imagination, and imagination is strongest when the situation is vivid and close to us, then we will sympathize more with those who are near to us than with those who are distant. The impartial spectator is the mechanism that counteracts this bias: by imagining how a fair observer would judge, we can extend our sympathy beyond the circle of the familiar.

Related Concepts

Smith's theory of sympathy connects to several traditions in the history of philosophy. The most immediate connection is to the broader sentimentalist tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly Hume, who argued that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Smith agreed with Hume that moral judgment is grounded in feeling rather than reason, but he disagreed about the mechanism: where Hume emphasized pleasure and displeasure, Smith emphasized the more complex process of sympathetic imagination.

The passage also resonates with contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Smith's claim that we know other minds through imagination rather than direct perception anticipates what is now called "simulation theory" — the view that we understand others by simulating their mental states in our own minds. This theory has been developed by philosophers such as Alvin Goldman and Robert Gordon and is supported by the discovery of mirror neurons.

The concept of empathy is a direct descendant of Smith's sympathy, though the two terms are not identical. "Empathy" was coined in the early twentieth century as a translation of the German Einfuhlung, and it carries connotations of emotional resonance that Smith's "sympathy" does not fully capture. For Smith, sympathy is not primarily an emotional state but a cognitive process — the imagination's construction of another's experience.

Learning Path

To deepen your understanding of Smith's theory of sympathy, consider the following path:

1. Start with the thinker: Read the full Adam Smith page to understand his biography, his relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment, and the connection between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.
2. Explore the virtue ethics tradition: Smith's moral philosophy is deeply influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics, and it belongs to the tradition of virtue ethics.
3. Connect to compassion and empathy: Smith's sympathy is the philosophical ancestor of modern concepts of compassion and empathy.
4. Compare with Hume: Hume and Smith were close friends and intellectual partners, but their moral philosophies differ in important ways.
5. Read the primary source: The Theory of Moral Sentiments is available in the authoritative Glasgow Edition and is one of the most readable works of eighteenth-century philosophy.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Adam Smith." Covers the theory of moral sentiments, the impartial spectator, and the relationship between Smith's moral philosophy and his economics.
2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). The authoritative Glasgow Edition of the complete text.
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Adam Smith." An accessible overview of his moral philosophy and political economy.