CHAPTER XIV: REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL CRITICISMS OF ADAM SMITH'S THEORY
The result of the preceding chapter, in which the relation of Adam Smith's theory to other ethical theories has been defined, is that it is a theory in which all that is true in the "selfish" system of Hobbes or Mandeville, in the "benevolent" system of Hutcheson, or in the "utilitarian" system of Hume, is adopted and made use of, to form a system quite distinct from any one of them. It seeks to bridge over their differences, by avoiding the one-sidedness of their several principles, and taking a wider view of the facts of human nature. It is therefore, properly speaking, an Eclectic theory, if by eclecticism be understood, not a mere commixture of different systems, but a discriminate selection of the elements of truth to be found in them severally.
The ethical writers who most influenced Adam Smith were undoubtedly Hume and Hutcheson, in the way of agreement and difference that has been already indicated. Dugald Stewart has also drawn attention to his obligations to Butler.
It would be interesting to know whether he ever read Hartley's Observations on Man, a work which, published in 1749that is, some ten years before his ownwould have materially assisted his argument. For Adam Smith's account of the growth of conscienceof a sense of duty, is in reality closely connected with the theory which explains its origin by the working of the laws of association. From our experience of the constant association between the acts of others and pleasurable or painful feelings of our own, according as we sympathize or not with them, comes the desire of ourselves causing in others similar pleasurable, and avoiding similar painful, emotionsor in other words, that desire of praise and aversion to blame which, refined and purified by reference to an imaginary and ideal spectator of our conduct, grows to be a conscientious and disinterested love of virtue and detestation of vice. The rules of moral conduct, formed as they are by generalization from particular judgments of the sympathetic instinct, or from a number of particular associations of pleasurable and painful feelings with particular acts, are themselves directly associated with that love of praise or praise- worthiness which originates in our longing for the same sympathy from other men with regard to ourselves that we know to be pleasurable in the converse relation. The word "association" is never once used by Adam Smith, but it is implied at every step of his theory, and forms really as fundamental a feature in his reasoning as it does in that of the philosopher who was the first to investigate its laws in their application to the facts of morality. This is, perhaps, internal evidence enough that Adam Smith never saw Hartley's work.
But the writer who, perhaps, as much as any other contributed to the formation of Adam Smith's ideas, seems to have been Pope, who in his Every on Man anticipated many of the leading thoughts in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The points of resemblance between the poet and the philosopher are frequent and obvious. There is in both the same constant appeal to nature, and to the wisdom displayed in her laws; the same reference to self-love as the basis of the social virtues and benevolence; the same identification of virtue with happiness; and the same depreciation of greatness and ambition as conducive to human felicity.
Adam Smith's simple theory of happiness, for instance, reads like a commentary on the text supplied by Pope in the lines,
"Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three wordsHealth, Peace, and Competence."
Said in prose, the same teaching is conveyed by the philosopher:"What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?"
Or, to take another instance. Adam Smith's account of the order in which individuals are recommended by nature to our care is precisely the same as that given by Pope. Says the former: "Every man is first and principally recommended to his own care," and, after himself, his friends, his country, or mankind become by degrees the object of his sympathies So said Pope before him
"God loves from whole to parts: but human soul
Must rise from individual to the whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds
Another still, and still another spreads;
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race."
To turn now from the theory itself to the criticisms upon it: it may perhaps be said, that if the importance of an ethical theory in the history of moral philosophy may be measured by the amount of criticism expended upon it, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments must take its place immediately after Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. The shorter observations on it by Lord Kames and Sir James Mackintosh bear witness to the great interest that attached to it, no less than the longer criticisms of Dr. Brown, Dugald Stewart, or Jouffroy, the French moral philosopher. The various objections raised by these writers, all of whom have approached it with that impartial acuteness so characteristic of philosophers in regard to theories not their own, will best serve to illustrate what have been considered the weak points in the general theory proposed by Adam Smith. But in following the main current of such criticism, it is only fair that we should try in some measure to hold the scales between the critics and their author, and to weigh the value of the arguments that have been actually advanced on the one side and that seem capable of being advanced on the other.
First of all, it is said that the resolution of all moral approbation into sympathy really makes morality dependent on the mental constitution of each individual, and so sets up a variable standard, at the mercy of personal influences and local custom. Adam Smith says expressly indeed, that there is no other measure of moral conduct than the sympathetic approbation of each individual. "Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty iu another ;" and as he judges of other men's power of sight or hearing by reference to his own, so he judges of their love, resentment, or other moral states, by reference to his own consciousness of those several affections.
Is not this to destroy the fixed character of morality, and to deprive itas Protagoras, the Greek sophist, deprived it long ago in his similar teaching that man was the measure of all thingsof its most ennobling qualities, its eternity and immutability? Is it not to reduce the rules of morality to the level merely of the rules of etiquette? Is it not to make our standard of conduct dependent merely on the ideas and passions of those we happen to live with? Does it not justify Brown's chief objection to the system of sympathy, that it fixes morality "on a basis not sufficiently firm"?
Adam Smith's answer to this might have been, that the consideration of the basis of morality lay beyond the scope of his inquiry, and that, if he explained the principle of moral approbation by the laws of sympathy he appealed to, the facts commanded acceptance, whatever the consequences might be. He would have reasserted confidently, that no case of approbation occurred without a tacit reference to the sympathy of the approver; and that the feeling of approbation or the contrary always varied exactly with the degree of sympathy or antipathy felt for the agent. Therefore, if as a matter of fact every case of such approbation implied a reference to the feelings of the individual person approving, then those feelings were the source of moral judgment, however variable or relative morality might thus be made to appear.
He would also have denied that the consequence of his theory did really in any way weaken the basis of morality, or deprive it of its obligatory power over our conduct. The assertion of such a consequence has been perhaps the most persistent objection raised against his system. Sir James Mackintosh, for instance, makes the criticism, that "the sympathies have nothing more of an imperative character than any other emotions. They attract or repel, like other feelings, according to their intensity. If, then, the sympathies continue in mature minds to constitute the whole of conscience, it becomes utterly impossible to explain the character of command and supremacy, which is attested by the unanimous voice of mankind to belong to that faculty, and to form its essential distinction."
But as, of all Adam Smith's critics, Jouffroy has been the one who has urged this argument with the greatest force, it will be best to follow his reasoning, before considering the force of the objection.
According to him, no more moral authority can attach to the instinct of sympathy than can attach to any other instinct of our nature. The desire of sympathy, being simply an instinct, can have no claim to prevail over the impulses of our other instincts, whenever they happen to come into conflict, than such as is founded on its possible greater strength. For instance, the instinct of self-love often comes into conflict with, and often prevails over, the instinct of sympathy, the motive of self-interest well-understood being thus superior to our sympathetic impulses both in fact and by right. If then there is a superiority in the instinct of sympathy above all our other instincts, it must come from a judgment of reason, decisive of its title; but since such decision of reason implies a reference to some rule other and higher than instinct, our motive in preferring the inspirations of instinctive sympathy to all other impulses must be derived from this higher motive, or, in other words, from reason and not from instinct. Hence, since the sympathetic instinct bears no signs of an authority superior to that of other instincts, there is no real authority in the motive which, according to Adam Smith, impels us to right conduct. Instead of proving that the instinct of sympathy is the true moral motive, Adam Smith describes truly and beautifully the characteristics of this moral motive, and then gratuitously attributes them to the instinct of sympathy. But he fails to apply to rules of conduct founded upon such an instinct, that which is the special characteristic of the moral motive, namely, that it alone is obligatoryalone presents us, as an end to be pursued, an end which ought to be pursued, as distinct from other ends suggested by other motives, which may be pursued or not as we please. "Among all possible motives, the moral motive alone appears to us as one that ought to govern our conduct."
Jouffroy applies the same reasoning to Adam Smith's explanation of our moral ideas, those, for example, of Right and Duty. For if the motive of sympathy bears with it no authority, it is evident that it cannot explain ideas both of which imply and involve a motive of obligation. If duty is obedience to rules of conduct that have been produced by sympathy, and these rules are only generalizations of particular judgments of instinctive sympathy, it is plain that the authority of these rules can be no greater than that of the judgments which originally gave rise to them. If it is equally a duty to obey the instinct as to obey the rules it gives rise to, it is superfluous to explain duty as a sense of the authority of these rules, seeing that it is already involved in the process of their formation. And if again it can never be a duty to obey the instinct, because neither its direction nor the desire of sympathy which impels us to follow it can ever be obligatory, it can none the more be a duty to obey the rules which are founded upon the instinct. The authority of the moral rules or principles of conduct stands or falls with the authority of the instinct; for if the latter can enforce obligation to a certain degree, it can enforce it in all degrees; and if it cannot enforce it to this degree, then it cannot in any. It is therefore Jouffroy's conclusion, that "there is not, in the system of Smith, any such thing as a moral law; and it is incompetent to explain our ideas of duty, of right, and of all other such ideas as imply the fact of obligation."
The question then is, How far is such criticism well-founded? How far is it relevant to the subject-matter of Adam Smith's treatise?
Adam Smith might have replied to Jouffroy's objections by asking whether, putting aside the question of the soundness of his theory of the origin of moral approbation, any theory that accounted for the approbation did not ipso facto account for the obligation. He might have said that, if he showed why one course of conduct was regarded as good and another as bad, he implicitly showed why one course was felt to be right and the other to be wrongwhy it was felt, that one course ought to be followed and the other course ought to be avoided. For the feeling of authority and obligation is involved in the fact of approbation. As it has been well put by Brown, "The very conceptions of the rectitude, the obligation, the approvableness (of certain actions) are involved in the feeling of the approbation itself. It is impossible for us to have the feeling, and not to have these..... To know that we should feel ourselves unworthy of self-esteem, and objects rather of self-abhorrence, if we did not act in a certain manner, is to feel the moral obligation to act in a certain manner, as it is to feel the moral rectitude of the action itself. We are so constituted that it is impossible for us, in certain circumstances, not to have this feeling; and having the feeling, we must have the notions of virtue, obligation, merit."
Moreover, Adam Smith expressly pointed out that the difference between moral approbation and approbation of all other kinds lay in the impossibility of our being as indifferent about conduct as about other things, because conduct, either directly or by our imagination, affected ourselves; so that the additional strength thus conferred on the feeling of moral approbation was quite sufficient to account for that feeling of the imperative and obligatory force which inculcates obedience to moral rules. If there is no authority in an instinct per se, it may nevertheless be so constituted and may so operate that the strictest sense of duty may ultimately grow from it and upon it. The obligation is none the less real because it can be accounted for; nor are the claims of duty any the less substantial because they are capable of being traced to so humble a beginning as an instinctive desire for the sympathy of our fellows.
It may therefore be said, on behalf of Adam Smith, that it is not to weaken the basis of morality, nor the authority of conscience, to trace either of them to their sources in sentiments of sympathy, originally influenced by pleasure and pain. The obligatory nature of moral rules remains a fact, which no theory of their origin can alter or modify; just as benevolent affections remain facts of our moral being, irrespective of their possible superstructure on instincts of self-interest. If con- science is explicable as a kind of generalization or summary of moral sympathies, formed by the observation of the distribution of praise or blame in a number of particular instances and by personal experience of many years, its influence need be none the less great nor its control any the less authoritative than if it were proved to demonstration to be a primary principle of our moral consciousness.
It is also necessary to remember that Adam Smith carefully restricted the feeling of obligation to the one single virtue of justice, and throughout his treatise avoided generally the use of words which, like "right" and "wrong," seem to suggest the idea of obligation. By the use of the words "proper" and "improper," or "meritorious," as applied to sentiments and conduct, he seems to have wished to convey the idea that he did regard morality as relative to time, place, and circumstance, as to a certain extent due to custom and convention, and not as absolute, eternal, or immutable. Properly speaking, justice, or the abstinence from injury to others, was, he held, the only virtue which, as men had a right to exact it from us, it was our duty to practise towards them. The consciousness that force might be employed to make us act according to the rules of justice, but not according to the rules of any other virtues, such as friendship, charity, or generosity, was the source of the stricter obligation felt by us in reference to the virtue of justice. "We feel ourselves," he said, "to be in a peculiar manner tied, bound, and obliged to the observation of justice," whilst the practice of the other virtues "seems to be left in some measure to our own choice." "In the practice of the other virtues, our conduct should rather be directed by a certain kind of propriety, by a certain taste for a particular tenor of conduct, than by any regard to a precise rule or maxim;" but it is otherwise with regard to justice, all the rules of which are precise, definite, and certain, and alone admit of no exception.
As to the authority of our moral faculties, of our perception, howsoever derived, of different qualities in conduct, it is, in Adam Smith's system, an ultimate fact, as indisputable as the authority of other faculties over their respective objects; for example, as the authority of the eye about beauty of colour, or as that of the ear about harmony of sounds. "Our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety," approve or disapprove of actions instantaneously, and this approval or judgment is their peculiar function. They judge of the other faculties and principles of our nature; how far, for example, love or resentment ought either to be indulged or restrained, and when the various senses ought to be gratified. Hence they cannot be said to be on a level with our other natural faculties and appetites, and endowed with no more right to restrain the latter than the latter are to restrain them. There can be no more appeal from them about their objects than there is from the eye, or the ear, or the taste with regard to the objects of their several jurisdictions. According as anything is agreeable or not to them, is it fit, right, and proper, or unfit, wrong, and improper. "The sentiments which they approve of are graceful and becoming; the contrary, ungraceful and unbecoming. The very words, right, wrong, fit, proper, graceful, or becoming, mean only what pleases or displeases those faculties."
Hence the question of the authority of our moral faculties is as futile as the question of the authority of the special senses over their several objects. For "they carry along with them the most evident badges of this authority, which denote that they were set up within us to be the supreme arbiter of all our actions, to superintend all our senses, passions, and appetites, and to judge how far either of them was either to be indulged or restrained." That is to say, it is impossible for our moral faculties to approve of one course of conduct and to disapprove of another, and at the same time to feel that there is no authority in the sentiment which passes judgment either way.
Perhaps the part of Adam Smith's theory which has given least satisfaction is his account of the ethical standard, or measure of moral actions. This, it will be remembered, is none other than the sympathetic emotion of the impartial spectatorwhich seems again to resolve itself into the voice of public opinion. It will be of interest to follow some of the criticism that has been devoted to this point, most of which turns on the meaning of the word impartial.
If impartiality means, argues Jouffroy, as alone it can mean impartiality of judgment, the impartiality of a spectator must be the impartiality of his reason, which rises superior to the suggestions of his instincts or passions; but if so, a moral judgment no longer arises from a mere instinct of sympathy, but from an operation of reason. If instinct is adopted as our rule of moral conduct, there must be some higher rule by which we make choice of some impulses against the influence of others; and the impartiality requisite in sympathy is itself a recognition of the insufficiency of instinctive feelings to supply moral rules.
It may be said, in reply to this, that by impartiality Adam Smith meant neither an impartiality of reason nor of instinct, but simply the indifference or coolness of a mind that feels not the full strength of the original passion, which it shares, and which it shares in a due and just degree precisely because it feels it not directly but by reflection. If the resentment of A. can only fairly be estimated by the power of B. to sympathize with it, the latter is only impartial in so far as his feeling of resentment is reflected and not original. His feeling of approbation or disapprobation of A's resentment need be none the less a feeling, none the less instinctive and emotional, because he is exempt from the vividness of the passion as it affects his friend. It is simply that exemption, Adam Smith would say, which enables him to judge; and whether his judgment is for that reason to be considered final and right or not, it is, as a matter of fact, the only way in which a moral judgment is possible at all.
The next objection of Jouffroy, that the sympathy of an impartial spectator affords only variable rules of morality, Adam Smith would have met by the answer, that the rules of morality are to a certain extent variable, and dependent on custom. Jouffroy supposes himself placed as an entire stranger in the presence of a quantity of persons of different ages, sexes, and professions, and then asks, how should he judge of the propriety of any emotion on his part by reference to the very different sympathies which such an emotion would arouse. Lively sensibilities would partake of his emotions vividly, cold ones but feebly. The sympathies of the men would be different from those of the women, those of the young from those of the old, those of the merchant from those of the soldier, and so forth. To this it might fairly be replied, that as a matter of fact there are very few emotions with which different people do not sympathize in very different degrees, and of which accordingly they do not entertain very different feelings of moral approbation or the reverse. Each man's sympathy is in fact his only measure of the propriety of other men's sentiments, and for that reason it is that there is scarcely any single moral action of which any two men adopt the same moral sentiment. That morality is relative and not absolute, Adam Smith nowhere denies. Nevertheless, he would say, there is sufficient uniformity in the laws of sympathy, directed and controlled as they are by custom, to make the rule of general sympathy or of the abstract spectator a sufficiently permanent standard of conduct.
It is moreover a fact, which no one has explained better than Adam Smith, in his account of the growth in every individual of the virtue of self-command, that though our moral estimate of our own conduct begins by reference to the sympathy of particular individuals, our parents, schoolfellows, or others, we yet end by judging ourselves, not by reference to any one in particular so much as from an abstract idea of general approbation or the contrary, derived from our experience of particular judgments in the course of our life. This is all that is meant by "the abstract spectator," reference to whom is simply the same as reference to the supposed verdict of public opinion. If we have done anything wrong, told a lie, for example, the self-condemnation we pass on ourselves is the condemnation of public opinion, with which we identify ourselves by long force of habit; and had we never heard a lie condemned, nor known it punished, we should feel no self-condemnation whatever in telling one. We condemn it, not by reference, as Jouffroy puts it, to the feelings of John or Peter, but by reference to the feelings of the general world, which we know to be made up of people like John and Peter. There is nothing inconsistent therefore in the notion of an abstract spectator, "who has neither the prejudices of the one nor the weaknesses of the other, and who sees correctly and soundly precisely because he is abstract." The identification of this abstract spectator with conscience, is so far from being, as Jouffroy says it is, a departure from, and an abandonment of the rule of sympathy, that it is its logical and most satisfactory development. There is no reason to repeat the process by which the perception of particular approving sympathies passes into identification with the highest rules of morality and the most sacred dictates of religion. By reference to his own experience, every reader may easily test for himself the truth or falsity of Adam Smith's argument upon this subject.
It is said with truth, that to make the judgment of an impartial or abstract spectator the standard of morality is to make no security against fallibility of judgment; and that such a judgment is only efficacious where there is tolerable unanimity, but that it fails in the face of possible differences of opinion. But this objection is equally true of any ethical standard ever yet propounded in the world, whether self- interest, the greatest possible happiness, the will of the sovereign, the fitness of things, or any other principle is suggested as the ultimate test of rectitude of conduct. This part of the theory may claim, therefore, not only to be as good as any other theory, but to be in strict keeping with the vast amount of variable moral sentiment which actually exists in the world.
In further disproof of Adam Smith's theory, Jouffroy appeals to consciousness. We are not conscious, he says, in judging of the acts of others, that we measure them by reference to our ability to sympathize with them. So far are we from doing this, that we consider it our first duty to stifle our emotions of sympathy or antipathy, in order to arrive at an impartial judgment. As regards our own emotions, also, there is no such recourse to the sympathies of others; and even when there is, we often prefer our own judgment after all to that which we know to be the judgment of others. Consciousness therefore attests the falsity of the theory that we seek in our own sensibility the judgments we pass upon others, or that we seek in the opinions of others the principle of estimation for our own sentiments and conduct.
The truth of the fact stated in this objection may evidently be conceded, and yet the validity of the main theory be left untouched. The latter is a theory mainly of the origin of moral feelings, and of their growth; and emotions of sympathy which originally give rise to moral feelings may well disappear and be absent when long habit has once fixed them in the mind. It is quite conceivable, for instance, that if we originally derived our moral notions of our own conduct from constant observation of the conduct of others, we might yet come to judge ourselves by a standard apparently unconnected with any reference to other people, and yet really made up of a number of forgotten judgments passed by us upon them. Children are always taught to judge them- selves by appeals to the sentiments of their parents or other relations about their conduct; and though the standard of morality, thus external at first, may in time come to be internal, and even to be more potent than when it was external, it none the more follows that recourse to such sympathy never took place because it ceases to take place or to be noticed when the moral sentiments are fully formed. In learning to read and write, an exactly analogous process may be traced. The letters which so painfully affected our consciousness at first, when we had to make constant reference to the alphabet, cease at last to affect it at all; yet the process of spelling really goes on in the mind in every word we read or write, however unconscious we may be of its operation. Habit and experience, says Adam Smith, teach us so easily and so readily to view our own interests and those of others from the standpoint of a third person, that "we are scarce sensible" of such a process at all.
Then again, the question has been raised, Is it true that sympathy with an agent or with the object of his action is a necessary antecedent to all moral approbation or the contrary?
It is objected, for instance, by Brown, that sympathy is not a perpetual accompaniment of our observation of all the actions that take place in life, and that many cases occur in which we feel approval or disapproval, in which consequently moral estimates are made, and yet without any preceding sympathy or antipathy. "In the number of petty affairs which are hourly before our eyes, what sympathy is felt," he asks, "either with those who are actively or with those who are passively concerned, when the agent himself performs his little offices with emotions as slight as those which the objects of his actions reciprocally feel? Yet in these cases we are as capable of judging, and approve or disapprovenot with the same liveliness of emotion indeed, but with as accurate estimation of merit or demeritas when we consider the most heroic sacrifices which the virtuous can make, or the most atrocious crimes of which the sordid and the cruel can be guilty." There must be the same sympathy in the case of the humblest action we denominate right as in that of the most glorious action; yet such actions often excite no sympathy whatever. Unless therefore the common transactions of life are to be excluded altogether from morality, from the field of right and wrong, it is impossible to ascribe such moral qualities to them, if sympathy is the source of our approval of them.
To this objection, founded on the non-universality of sympathy, and on its not being coextensive with feelings of moral approbation, Adam Smith might have replied, that there was no action, howsoever humble, denominated right, in which there was not or had not been to start with a reference to sentiments of sympathy. It is impossible to conceive any case in the most trivial department of life in which approbation on the ground of goodness may not be explained by reference to such feelings. Brown himself lays indeed less stress on this argument than on another which has, it must be confessed, much greater force.
That is, that the theory of sympathy assumes as already existing those moral feelings which it professes to explain. If, he says, no moral sentiments preceded a feeling of sym- pathy, the latter could no more produce them than a mirror, without pre-existence and pre-supposition of light, could reflect the beautiful colours of a landscape.
If we had no principle of moral approbation previous to sympathy, the most perfect sympathy or accordance of passions would prove nothing more than a mere agreement of feeling; nor should we be aware of anything more than in any case of coincidence of feeling with regard to mere objects of taste, such as a picture or an air of music. It is not because we sympathize with the sentiments of an agent that we account them moral, but it is because his moral sentiments agree with our own that we sympathize with them. The morality is there before the sympathy. If we regard sentiments which differ from our own, not merely as unlike our own, but as morally improper and wrong, we must first have conceived our own to be morally proper and right, by which we measure those of others. Without this previous belief in the moral propriety of our own sentiments, we could never judge of the propriety or impropriety of others, nor regard them as morally unsuitable to the circumstances out of which they arose. Hence the sympathy from which we are said to derive our notions of propriety or the contrary assumes independently of sympathy the very feelings it is said to occasion.
A similar criticism Brown also applies to that sympathy with the gratitude of persons who have received benefits or injuries which is said to be the source of feelings of merit and demerit. If it is true that our sense of the merit of an agent is due to our sympathy with the gratitude of those he has benefited if the sympathy only transfuses into our own breasts the gratitude or resentment of persons so affected, it is evident that our reflected gratitude or resentment can only give rise to the same sense of merit or demerit that has been already involved in the primary and direct gratitude or resentment. "If our reflex gratitude and resentment involve notions of merit and demerit, the original gratitude and resentment which we feel by reflexion must in like manner have involved them. . But if the actual gratitude or resentment of those who have profited or suffered imply no feelings of merit or demerit, we may be certain, at least, that in whatever source we are to strive to discover those feelings, it is not in the mere reflexion of a fainter gratitude or resentment that we can hope to find them. . The feelings with which we sympathize are themselves moral feelings or sentiments; or if they are not moral feelings, the reflexion of them from a thousand breasts cannot alter their nature."
Unless therefore we already possessed moral feelings of our own, the most exact sympathy of feelings could do no more than tell us of the similarity of our own feelings to those of some other person, which they might equally do whether they were vicious or virtuous; and in the same way, the most complete dissonance of feeling could supply us with no more than a consciousness of the dissimilarity of our emotions. As a coincidence of taste with regard to a work of art pre-sup poses in any two minds similarly affected by it an independent susceptibility of emotions, distinguishing what is beautiful from what is ugly, irrespectively of others being present to share them; so a coincidence of feeling with regard to any moral action pre-supposes an independent capacity in the two minds similarly affected by them of distinguishing what is right from what is wrong, a capacity which each would have singly, irrespectively of all reference to the feelings of the other. There is something more that we recognize in our moral sentiments than the mere coincidence of feeling recognized in an agreement of taste or opinion. We feel that a person has acted not merely as we should have done, and that his motives have been similar to those we should have felt, but that lie has acted rightly and properly.
It is perhaps best to state Brown's criticism in his own words: "All which is peculiar to the sympathy is, that instead of one mind only affected with certain feelings, there are two minds affected with certain feelings, and a recognition of the similarity of these feelings; a similarity which far from being confined to our moral emotions, may occur as readily and as frequently in every other feeling of which the mind is susceptible. What produces the moral notions there- fore must evidently be something more than a recognition of similarity of feeling which is thus common to feelings of every class. There must be an independent capacity of moral emotion, in consequence of which we judge those sentiments of conduct to be right which coincide with sentiments of conduct previously recognized as rightor the sentiments of others to be improper, because they are not in unison with those which we previously recognized as proper. Sympathy then may be the diffuser of moral sentiments, as of various other feelings; but if no moral sentiments exist previously to our sympathy, our sympathy itself cannot give rise to them.
The same inconsistency Brown detects in Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments relating to our own conduct, according to which it would be impossible for us to distinguish without reference to the feelings of a real or imaginary spectator any difference of propriety or impropriety, merit or demerit, in our own actions or character. If an impartial spectator can thus discover merit or demerit in us by making our case his own and assuming our feelings, those feelings which he thus makes his own must surely speak to us to the same purpose, and with even greater effect than they speak to him. In no case then can sympathy give any additional knowledge: it can only give a wider diffusion to feelings which already exist.
It is therefore, according to Brown, as erroneous in ethics to ascribe moral feelings to sympathy, or the mental reflection by which feelings are diffused, as it would be, in a theory of the source of light, to ascribe light itself to the reflection which involves its existence. "A mirror presents to us a fainter copy of external things; but it is a copy which it presents. We are in like manner to each other mirrors that reflect from breast to breast, joy, sorrow, indignation, and all the vivid emotions of which the individual mind is susceptible; but though, as mirrors, we mutually give and receive emotions, these emotions must have been felt before they could be communicated."
The objection contained in this analogy of the mirror is perhaps more fatal to the truth of Adam Smith's theory than any other. If a passion arises in every one analogous to, though weaker than, the original passion of the person primarily affected by it; if, for instance, by this force of fellow-feeling we enter into or approve of another person's resentment or gratitude; it seems clear that the original gratitude or resentment must itself involve, irrespective of all sympathy, those feelings of moral approbation, or the contrary, which it is asserted can only arise by sympathy. It is impossible to state this objection more clearly than in the words already quoted from Brown. But when the latter insists on the irregular nature of sympathy as the basis of moralityon its tendency to vary even in the same individual many times in the day, so that what was virtuous in the morning might seem vicious at noon, it is impossible to recognize the justice of the criticism. Adam Smith might fairly have replied, that the educational forces of life, which are comprised in ordinary circumstances and surroundings, and which condition all sympathy, were sufficiently uniform in character to ensure tolerable uniformity in the result, and to give to our notions of morality all that appearance of certainty and sameness which undoubtedly belongs to them.
Adam Smith seems himself to have anticipated one of the difficulties raised in Brown's criticism, namely, the relation of moral approbation to the approbation of another person's taste or opinions. Why should the feeling of approbation be of a different kind when we sympathize with a person's sentiments or actions than when we sympathize with his intellectual judgments? The feeling of sympathy being the same in either case, why should the feeling of resultant approbation be different?
No one could state more clearly than does Adam Smith the analogy there is between coincidence of moral sentiment and coincidence of intellectual opinion; nor is anything more definite in his theory than that approval of the moral sentiments of others, like approval of their opinions, means nothing more than their agreement with our own. The following are his words: "To approve of another man's opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it; neither can I possibly conceive that I should do the one without the other. To approve or disapprove, therefore, of the opinions is acknowledged by everybody to mean no more than to observe their agreement or disagreement with our own. But this is equally the case with regard to our approbation or disapprobation of the sentiments or passions of others."
Whence, then, comes the stronger feeling of approbation in the case of agreement of sentiments than in that of agreement of opinion? Why do we esteem a man whose moral sentiments seem to accord with our own, whilst we do not necessarily esteem him simply for the accordance of his opinions with our own? Why in the one case do we ascribe to him the quality of rightness or rectitude, and in the other only the qualities of good taste or good judgment? To quote Brown once more: "If mere accordance of emotion imply the feeling of moral excellence of any sort, we should certainly feel a moral regard for all whose taste coincides with ours; yet, however gratifying the sympathy in such a case may be, we do not feel, in consequence of this sympathy, any morality in the taste which is most exactly accordant with our own."
Adam Smith's answer is, that matters of intellectual agreement touch us much less nearly than circumstances of behaviour which affect ourselves or the person we judge of; that we look at such things as the size of a mountain or the expression of a picture from the same point of view, and therefore that we agree or disagree without that imaginary change of situation which is the foundation of moral sympathy. The stronger feeling of approbation in the one case than in the other arises from the personal element, which influences our judgment of another person's conduct, and which is absent in our judgment of his opinions about things. It will be best again to let Adam Smith speak for himself.
"Though," he says, "you despise that picture, or that poem, or even that system of philosophy which I admire, there is little danger of our quarrelling upon that account. Neither of us can reasonably be much interested about them. They ought all of them to be matters of great indifference to us both; so that, though our opinions may be opposite, our affections may still be very nearly the same. But it is quite otherwise with regard to those objects by which either you or I are particularly affected. Though your judgments in matters of speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition; and, if I have any degree of temper, I may still find some entertainment in your conversation, even upon those very subjects. But if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none which bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling."
Accordingly, we only regard the sentiments which we share as moral, or the contrary, when they affect another person or ourselves in a peculiar manner; when they bear no relation to either of us, no moral propriety is recognized in a mere agreement of feeling. It is obvious that this explanation, to which Brown pays no attention whatever, is satisfactory to a certain point. A plain, or a mountain, or a picture, are matters about which it is intelligible that agreement or difference should give rise to very different feelings from those produced by a case of dishonesty, excessive anger, or untruthfulness. Being objects so different in their nature, it is only natural that they should give rise to very different sentiments. Independently of all sympathy, admiration of a picture or a mountain is a very different thing from admiration of a generous action or a display of courage. The language of all men has observed the difference, and the admiration in the one case is with perfect reason called moral, to distinguish it from the admiration which arises in the other. But when Adam Smith classes "the conduct of a third person" among things which, like the beauty of a plain or the size of a mountain, need no imaginary change of situation on the part of observers to be approved of by them, he inadvertently deserts his own principle, which, if this were true, would fail to account for the approbation of actions done long ago, in times or places unrelated to the approver.
But, even if Adam Smith's explanation with regard to the difference of approbation felt where conduct is concerned from that felt in matters of taste or opinion be accepted as satisfactory, it is strange that he should not have seen the difficulty of accounting by his theory for the absence of anything like moral approbation in a number of cases where sympathy none the less strongly impels us to share and enter into the emotions of another person. For instance, if we see a man in imminent danger of his lifepursued by a bull or seeming to fall from a tight ropethough we may fully sympathize with his real or pretended fear, in neither case do we for that reason morally approve of it. In the same way, we may sympathize with or enter into any other emotion he manifests his love, his hope, or his joywithout any the more approving them or passing any judgment on them whatever. Sympathy has been well defined as "a species of involuntary imitation of the displays of feeling enacted in our presence, which is followed by the rise of the feelings themselves."
Thus we become affected with whatever the mental state may be that is manifested by the expressed feelings of another person; but unless his emotion already contains the element of moral approbation, or the contrary, as in a case of gratitude or resentment, the mere fact of sympathy will no more give rise to it than will sympathy with another person's fear give rise to any moral approval of it. It is evident, therefore, that sympathy does not necessarily involve approbation, and that it only involves moral approbation where the sentiments shared by sympathy belong to the class of emotions denominated moral.
What, then, is the real relation between sympathy and approbation? and to what extent is the fact, of sympathy an explanation of the fact of approbation?
It is difficult to read Adam Smith's account of the identification of sympathy and approbation, without feeling that throughout his argument there is an unconscious play upon words, and that an equivocal use of the word "sympathy" lends all its speciousness to the theory he expounds. The first meaning of the word sympathy is fellow-feeling, or the participation of another person's emotion, in which sense we may be said to sympathize with another person's hope or fear; the second meaning contains the idea of approval or praise, in which sense we may be said to sympathize with another person's gratitude or resentment. Adam Smith begins by using the word sympathy in its first and primary sense, as meaning participation in another person's feelings, and then proceeds to use it in its secondary and less proper sense, in which the idea of approbation is involved. But the sympathy in the one case is totally different from the sympathy in the other. In the one case a mere state of feeling is intended, in the other a judgment of reason. To share another person's feeling belongs only to our sensibility; to approve of it as proper, good, and right, implies the exercise of our intelligence. To employ the word "sympathy" in its latter use (as it is sometimes employed in popular parlance) is simply to employ it as a synonym for "approbation;" so that sympathy, instead of being really the source of approbation, is only another word for that approbation itself. To say that we approve of another person's sentiments when we sympathize with them is, therefore, nothing more than saying that we approve of them when we approve of them a purely tautological proposition.
It cannot therefore be said that Adam Smith's attempt to trace the feeling of moral approbation to emotions of sympathy is altogether successful, incontestable as is the truth of his appli- cation of it to many of the phenomena of life and conduct. Yet although sympathy is not the only factor in moral approbation, it is one that enters very widely into the growth of our moral perceptions. It plays, for instance, an important part in evolving in us that sense of right and wrong which is generally known as Conscience or the Moral Faculty. It is one of the elements, just as self-love is another, in that ever-forming chain of association which goes to distinguish one set of actions as good from another set of actions as bad. Our observation in others of the same outward symptoms which we know in our own case to attend joy or grief, pleasure or pain, leads us by the mere force of the remembrance of our own pleasures and pains, and independently of any control of our will, to enter into those of other people, and to promote as much as we can the one and prevent the other.
Sympathy accordingly is the source of all disinterested motives in action, of our readiness to give up pleasures and incur pains for the sake of others; and Adam Smith was so far right, that he established, by reference to this force of our sympathetic emotions, the reality of a disinterested element as the foundation of our benevolent affections. In the same way, self-love is the source of all the prudential side of morality; and to the general formation of our moral sentiments, all our other emotions, such as anger, fear, love, contribute together with sympathy, in lesser perhaps but considerable degree. None of them taken singly would suffice to account for moral approbation.
Although any action that hurts another person may so affect our natural sympathy as to give rise to the feeling of disapprobation involved in sympathetic resentment, and although an action that is injurious to ourselves may also be regarded with similar feelings of dislike, the constant pressure of authority, exercised as it is by domestic education, by government, by law, and by punishment, must first be brought to bear on such actions before the feeling of moral disapprobation can arise with regard to them. The association of the pain of punishment with certain actions, and the association of the absence of such pain (a negative pleasure) with certain others, enforces the natural dictates of our sympathetic or selfish emotions, and impresses on them the character of morality, of obligation, and of duty. The association is so close and constant, that in course of time the feeling of the approbation or disapprobation of certain actions becomes perfectly independent of the various means, necessary at first to enforce or to prevent them; just as in many other cases our likes and dislikes become free of the associations which first permanently fixed them.
In this way the feeling of moral approbation is seen to be the product of time and slow growth of circumstance, a phenomenon to which both reason and sentiment contribute in equal shares in accordance with the laws that condition their development. Moral approbation is no more given instantaneously by sympathy than it is given instantaneously by a moral sense. Sympathy is merely one of the conditions under which it is evolved, one of the feelings which assist in its formation. It is indeed the feeling on which, more than on any other, the moral agencies existing in the world build up and confirm the notions of right and wrong; but it does of itself nothing more than translate feelings from one mind to another, and unless there is a pre-existent moral element in the feeling so translated, the actual passage will not give rise to it. Sympathy enables one man's fear, resentment, or gratitude to become another man's fear, resentment, or gratitude; but the feeling of moral approbation which attends emotions so diffused, arises from reference to ideas otherwise derived than from a purely involuntary sympathyfrom reference, that is, to a standard set up by custom and opinion. A child told for the first time of a murder might so far enter by sympathy into the resentment of the victim as to feel indignation prompting him to vengeance; but his idea of the murder itself as a wrong and wicked acthis idea of it as a deed morally worse than the slaughter of a sheep by a butcher, would only arise as the result of the various forces of education, availing themselves of the original law of sympathy, by which an act disagreeable to ourselves seems disagreeable in its application to others. And what is true in this case, the extreme form of moral disapprobation, is no less true in all the minor cases, in which approbation or the contrary is felt.
The feeling of moral approbation is therefore much more complex than it is in Adam Smith's theory. Above all things it is one and indivisible, and it is impossible to distinguish our moral judgments of ourselves from our judgments of others. There is an obvious inconsistency in saying that we can only judge of other people's sentiments and actions by reference to our own power to sympathize with them, and yet that we can only judge of our own by reference to the same power in them. The moral standard cannot primarily exist in ourselves, and yet, at the same time, be only derivable from without. If by the hypothesis moral feelings relating to ourselves only exist by prior reference to the feelings of others, how can we at the same time form any moral judgment of the feelings of others by reference to any feelings of our own?
But although the two sides of moral feeling are thus really indistinguishable, the feeling of self-approbation or the contrary may indeed be so much stronger than our feeling of approval or disapproval of others as to justify the application to it of such terms as Conscience, Shame, Remorse. The difference of feeling, however, is only one of degree, and in either case, whether our own conduct or that of others is under review, the moral feeling that arises is due to the force of education and opinion acting upon the various emotions of our nature. For instance, a Mohammedan woman seen without a veil would have the same feeling of remorse or of moral disapprobation with regard to herself that she would have with regard to any other woman whom she might see in the same condition, though of course in a less strong degree. In either case her feeling would be a result of all the complex surroundings of her life, which is meant by education in its broadest sense. Sympathy itself would be insufficient to explain the feeling, though it might help to explain how it was developed. All that sympathy could do would be to extend the dread of punishment associated by the woman herself with a breach of the law, to all women who might offend in a similar way; the original feeling of time immorality of exposure being accountable for in no other way than by its association with punishment, ordained by civil or religious law, or by social custom, and enforced by the discipline of early home life. It is obvious that the same explanation applies to all cases in which moral disapprobation is felt, and conversely to all cases in which the sentiment of moral approbation arises.
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Author: James Anson Farrer
