Adam Smith's Sympathy (Part II)

 Sympathy, as Smith defines it, is a cognitive capacity rather than an emotional one. It is not to be identified with sympathetic feeling. Smith points out how difficult it is to feel concern for people who are remote from us. If we did not have conscience to give us some sense of proportion, then, says Smith, we would care more about a trifling injury to ourselves than about the entire destruction of China in an earthquake: 

If [a man] was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. 

He dismisses those ‘whining and melancholy moralists’ who claim that we ought to make ourselves unhappy by imagining the unhappiness of people unknown to us. There is no virtue in merely caring (or professing to care) about unknown persons. Passive emotion is feeble and ineffectual, but active virtue is motivated by a far stronger force – that of conscience, originating in a desire for others’ approval and hence for self-approval. 

We have, moreover, a ‘general fellow-feeling . . . with every man merely because he is our fellow-creature’. Our strong emotions, however, are directed towards individuals, beginning with our friends and relatives. General fellow-feeling underlies our attachment to the principle of justice, without which, Smith insists, society would collapse into anarchy. The importance of justice for the good of society is confirmed by reflection. Humane people may well feel sorry for a condemned criminal, especially as, having been captured, he can do no more harm, and may wish him to be spared the death penalty. On further reflection, however, ‘[t]hey counterbalance the impulse of this weak and partial humanity by the dictates of a humanity that is more generous and comprehensive’, and acquiesce in the criminal’s execution. What underlies our love of justice, however, is not an abstract regard for the good of society, but an ingrained feeling, which makes us detest the idea of a murderer escaping punishment. 

Misguided emotions need to be corrected by ‘reason, principle, conscience... the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct’, which has itself a foundation in the deep emotions implanted in us by nature. Smith thinks well of the emotional self-control advocated by the Stoics. He even praises the astonishing ‘magnanimity and self-command’ of native North Americans, who endure torture with ‘heroic and unconquerable firmness’. But the Stoic virtues are one-sided. Stoics are wrong to recommend insensibility. Affectionate feeling is itself a source of pleasure: ‘The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux [sic] and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.’ They teach ‘that moderated sensibility to the misfortunes of others, which does not disqualify us for the performance of any duty’.

Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (pp. 271-272). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Adam Smith's Sympathy

Adam Smith, who attended Hutcheson’s lectures at Glasgow, and subsequently held the chair of moral philosophy there from 1752 to 1764, dissented from his teacher’s ‘amiable system’. He thought Hutcheson expected too much of people’s benevolence. We may remember the famous sentence from The Wealth of Nations: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ When Smith set out his own system of moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he placed the emphasis not on benevolence but on sympathy, and described its working in a complex way. Smith uses ‘sympathy’ to mean not benevolence or compassion, but ‘our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’. Sympathy depends on imagination. It is the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, to imagine what we would feel in their situation. We feel pleasure when our feelings correspond to another’s – that is, when the feelings he expresses are what we would experience in his situation. But we feel displeasure if his feelings appear to be either more or less than we would feel: if someone complains of a misfortune that would not upset us, or if someone pusillanimously accepts an injury which we would resent. 

Smith insists that there is nothing selfish about sympathy. It would be selfish if, condoling with a bereaved father, I were to think about what I would feel if I were to lose a child. Sympathy goes much further: ‘I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters.’ Hence, I can feel sympathy with people whose misfortunes I could never possibly experience myself: Smith gives the example of a man sympathizing with the pains of a woman in labour.

Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (pp. 268-269). (Function). Kindle Edition.