THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR IS WITHOUT:

Mr. Roberts offers newcomers a nice taste of the banquet Smith has to offer. Open "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" almost anywhere and you will gain insight into some aspect of the human condition: why poets but not mathematicians tend to form cabals (the former rely on public approval), for example, or what makes romantic comedies so much fun (other people's amours are ridiculous and yet produce interesting complications). Smith saw that we rate pain more potent than the equivalent amount of pleasure and that imagination is crucial to morality--so we can see how our actions will look to others and what the future will be like depending on what we do now. In not quite as many words, Smith observes that form follows function, that crowds can have wisdom, and that what social scientists now call "hedonic adaptation" (our tendency to adjust quickly to good and bad news alike) will soon wash away the pleasure that we gain from material good fortune. His advice to mourners of all kinds--"return, as soon as possible, to the daylight of the world"--remains sound.

All this comes as part of Smith's effort to derive a basis for virtue, the key feature of which is self-command. His premise is that our desire for the love and regard of others makes us behave in accord with their preferences and expectations, enabling us to rise above our baser selves. Society doesn't enslave us, as Rousseau and others have suggested; rather, according to Smith, it liberates us from the worst part of ourselves and allows us to thrive in concert. All of us, Smith says, judge our behavior against the standard of an impartial spectator within who develops as we mature, a kind of embodied conscience who can hold us to the straight and narrow even if our fellow humans are reprobates or monsters. Not that this spectator can't be fooled. Smith warns of the rationalizing to which our species is prone and, in doing so, places a modern-sounding emphasis on the problem of self-deception.

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