MORALITY PRECEDES THE eND OF hISTORY:

Consider, first, what I call Smith's moral anthropology, the particular way in which he invited his readers to understand the moral dimensions of human nature. For Smith, this anthropology centered on a particular psychology enabled by the faculty of sympathy. Although the word sympathy usually indicates benevolence, pity, or some other altruistic feeling, Smith repurposed it to signify a design, something like humanity's operating system. In this usage, sympathy describes the instinctual cognitive and affective ability individuals have that enables them to understand the motivations and feelings of others by imaginatively identifying with them. In the absence of immediate experience of what others suffer, for example, he surmised that we put this capacity into action by "conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation...[and] by changing places in fancy with the sufferer."3 A virtuous person can hone this faculty, to be sure, but its presence doesn't depend on virtue. According to Smith, even "the greatest ruffian" feels at least traces of the sentiments and emotions that sympathy enables.4 Sympathy is a load-bearing concept in Smith's moral anthropology. First, it enables moral judgment. When judging others, he thought, we evaluate the propriety of their actions by imaginatively identifying with them, and deciding whether we would act and feel the same way if we were in their shoes.5 It follows that we apply this mode of examination when judging ourselves, in that we "place ourselves in the situation of another man, and view [our conduct and motives], as it were, with his eyes."6 In addition to imagining the gaze of an actual other, we also use sympathy to imagine the gaze of an "impartial spectator," whose reason serves as our conscience, and can counter our excesses of self-love, should we choose to heed its voice.7 The voice of this spectator is not perfect--by both lack of perspective and actual self-deception, we may delude ourselves regarding its impartiality.8 Even so, the voice remains audible in even the most hardened criminal, issuing judgments on conduct, motivation, and sentiments.

For Smith, the faculty of sympathy is also the font of both virtue and vice, given that humans naturally desire the approval of others.9 He noted that it is natural to desire to be worthy of this approval. We want "to be respectable" as well as "to be respected."10 The virtuous person builds on this hunger for approbation by moderating her conduct and sentiments so as to earn the respect of others and to satisfy her impartial spectator. The mere fact of this desire for approval does not guarantee moral rectitude, of course. Ever the moral realist, Smith admitted that the desire for respect is always tainted by self-love, and that it is easy to mistake the conditions for respect, and to both seek and bestow it inappropriately.

Susceptible to misuse as it may be, the presence of this impartial spectator, alongside the natural human desire for moral approval, is the loving design of the ultimate impartial spectator: God. It was the plan of the "Author of our nature," according to Smith, that moral norms exert themselves on the human psyche both cognitively and affectively, and that all humans be constituted so as to be aware of these norms.11 Given this, it is appropriate that humans discern moral rules with reference to each other, and to their own sentiments.12 This is a design with which humans can cooperate in varying degrees; it facilitates moral action, without commanding it.

In blending reason and sentiment in this way in his ethics, Smith joined his contemporaries in developing what can be called a "moral sense theory," or "ethical intuitionism." It is possible to see in Smith's own version of this the influence of both Stoicism and his Scottish Calvinist context, including his sense that Providence has planned human nature in a particular way, and that this design participates in a natural ordering of creation. Neither of these influences, however, led Smith to the conclusion that such an ordering always produces agreeable outcomes, either at the level of individual behavior or at that of the social whole. First, such an idealistic picture is inconsistent with Smith's acknowledgment that individuals regularly reject the judgment offered by the voice of the impartial spectator, and accordingly fail to act with propriety and virtue. Moreover, Smith disagreed vociferously with the provocative claim of his contemporary, Bernard Mandeville, who, in his half-verse, half-prose commentary on economic relations in eighteenth-century England, The Fable of the Bees, asserted that "private vices are public benefits."13 Indeed, Smith had a deep and, at times, pessimistic awareness of unresolved injustice.14

Set alongside the more sanguine alternatives of the time (such as those offered by Mandeville and by Smith's mentor, Francis Hutcheson, who proposed a theory of moral senses in which benevolence was the root of most actions), the moral psychology Smith sketched appears fairly modest, realistic, and even ambivalent: By his reading, humans are designed to be moral persons--that is, both aware of and capable of meeting moral norms--and this design has both cognitive and affective dimensions having to do with our ability to imaginatively identify with others.

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