Smith's account of moral sentimentalism in The Theory of Moral Sentiments rests largely in his understanding of sympathy, a human emotion that arises when we imagine how we would feel in the same situation as someone else is experiencing. The correct type of sympathy, or morally superior type according to Smith, is the feeling an “impartial spectator” would have towards the individual in the given situation. This is important to Smith’s moral account because having sympathy for another is essentially to approve of the individual's reaction to a situation.
Thus the "impartial spectator" plays a large role in Smith's account, as this individual is supposed to respond as one would if following “moral norms.” The problem is that this displayal of such norms becomes Smith’s account for what is moral; however, as we know, existing as a societal institution does not equate being inherently moral (or just, or righteous, etc). Indeed it is obvious that Smith’s spectator reflects time-specific societal norms, but it is concerning how Smith takes these norms (sympathizing with the rich, looking down upon the poor) to be inherent to human conception of understanding one another. How well we sympathize with another person is entirely dependent on our own personal experiences; Smith would not deny that we can most easily feel whatever another is feeling if we have had a similar experience in our lifetime, but he focuses not enough on how these variances should have an equal influence on the spectator’s decisions.
Overall, Smith also fails to focus on an innate (and extremely valuable) human feeling of compassion, perhaps the most important type of sympathy of all. Instead, Smith’s account glorifies the wealthy and powerful while assume that the poor lives shameful lives with limited senses of self-worth.
I definitely agree that Smith defines emotions as either good or bad based on the reactions they get from other people. He doesn't really talk about an inherent type of compassion, apart from the fact that we DO have compassion. However, I don't think he's offering this analysis as an attempt to legitimize the way or the reasons why we sympathize with people. Instead, he's offering an observation of how people respond to certain expressions of emotion in others. When you say that Smith glorifies the wealthy and powerful, I think he's actually not glorifying them at all, but just explaining (kind of facetiously, I think) why he thinks the powerful are able to retain power. Just like in his account of how government retains power, I think Smith is not actually saying that the reasons that people sympathize with others (or the government retains power) are legitimate, but just trying to explain them. Since Smith is focused on the "spectator" perspective, it kind of makes sense that he isn't as focused on talking about an inherently valuable empathy that people have; instead, he's talking about how people view other people's emotions and sympathies.
ReplyDeleteI think Smith tries to argue that the innate human feeling of compassion is not trustworthy. According to him, sympathy should be from a specter who is not impartial and who tries to relate with the other in a more impersonal basis. Smith discusses however where our sympathy most naturally comes from, the innate human feeling of compassion, in the following passage:
ReplyDeleteHe writes that "His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion…" (9).
However, Smith does not focus on this innate human feeling of compassion because it does not support his argument that compassion and sympathy should be given from a non-personal, impartial way. This intrigues me, as we think of compassion as one of the human emotions that one uses to best relate with another person.