The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith published this seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, and it was the work he revised throughout his life, producing a substantially altered sixth edition in 1790. It is a treatise on the origin of moral judgement.

The foundation is sympathy, which Smith uses to mean the capacity to imagine oneself in another's situation and to feel a corresponding sentiment. We judge others by asking whether we could enter into their feelings given their circumstances, and we judge ourselves by imagining how a disinterested observer would view our conduct. Smith calls this observer the impartial spectator, and it develops through social experience rather than existing prior to it. Moral rules are generalisations formed from many such judgements, not deductions from principle.

He distinguishes propriety, meaning whether a sentiment fits its object, from merit, meaning whether an action deserves reward. He argues that we sympathise more readily with joy than with sorrow, and more readily with the rich than with the poor, and he treats this as a moral corruption rather than a neutral fact. That argument, which he strengthened in the final edition, holds that admiration for wealth and greatness undermines moral judgement even though it also sustains social order.

The relationship between this book and The Wealth of Nations was long treated as a contradiction, the so-called Adam Smith problem, on the grounds that one rests on sympathy and the other on self-interest. Modern scholarship rejects that reading and treats them as complementary: self-interest operates within a framework of judgement and justice that this book describes. The prose is eighteenth century and demanding, and the psychology is introspective rather than empirical, though experimental work on perspective-taking has been broadly consistent with it.

Scottish moral philosopher at the University of Glasgow who founded modern economics with The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The Wealth of Nations set out how division of labour, self-interest and competitive prices coordinate production without central direction, and it supplies the vocabulary economics still argues in: specialisation, capital accumulation, natural and market price. The Theory of Moral Sentiments supplies the other half, placing exchange inside a system of sympathy and judgement.

University of Glasgow