Human Nature

Smith's account of human interaction as a condition of justice is interesting and optimistic, and makes me think of other arguments we've seen in this course. Rawls' 'veil of ignorance,' although seen by Franny as a precursor to selfishness, seemed to outline a similar idea: that people would treat others with justice because they might see themselves vulnerable to similar injustices without such mutual consideration. This is while Hobbes might argue that man would only begin to consider the interests of others once he's left the state of nature for his own. 

Smith, though, in outlining what might constitute a "fellow-feeling" in individuals towards others around them, focuses on how sympathy and compassion are experienced (12). He seems to immediately discount empathy, where a bystander might understand and assume the emotions of another, claiming instead that "our senses will never inform us of what [another individual] suffers," but instead merely "correspond to... the sentiments of the sufferer" (10). He argues for sympathy, which does not arise from "the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it," and therefore is less about others on the part of the bystander, and more about "the consideration of what [the bystander themselves] would feel if [they were] reduced to the same unhappy situation" (12). Smith sees reasonable people in this way, and believes that these forces, whereas bystanders constantly sympathize with the emotional states of those around them, be they in happiness or sorrow, drive society. This point is concluded by Smith in describing a familiar situation with an unfamiliar perspective: the sorrow felt at the death of another. While the circumstances of death can bring us no pain personally, they, perhaps objectively unreasonably, make us "miserable while we are alive" (13). That bystanders can so completely imagine the feelings of others in themselves, Smith argues, sets the stage for reasonable human interaction, and creates "the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind" (13). In this way, strong sympathetic emotions like "the dread of death," while they afflict the individual, restrain our capacity to harm others or do injustice onto them and in this way "guard and protect society" (13). 

This is why it might be, as Smith describes, a "real and gross inhumanity" to disregard the afflictions of our fellow individuals: by doing so one is ignoring sympathy as a precondition for a just society, leaving people unable or unwilling to consider and therefore respect the interests of others as their own (15). This idea seems to be defended by Smith, as he argues that when the passions of one are in "perfect concord" with the "sympathetic emotions of the spectator," they appear to be "just and proper" while a lack of concord would evoke the opposite (16). By sympathizing, we acknowledge the emotions and desires of others as valid, and "allow [their] justness" as we would expect others to observe in us (16). When we feel "much for others and little for ourselves" and restrain our selfish natures (that Hobbes may have spoken of here) this "constitutes the perfection of human nature:" a harmony of "sentiments and passions" for others that resonate with our own (25).