5
of virtue, conscience, and duty was set up not only to explain each, but also to focus
attention upon the problems facing individual moral creatures in every day life. All six
editions basically adopt a similar outline. Smith begins by explaining how we make
moral judgments about ourselves and then turns to consider how we develop standards
for evaluating the objectivity of our judgments. This is followed by a discussion of the
emergence of a conscience in an individual and the rise of general rules as a solution to
the occasional failure of our moral sentiments to function appropriately. Part III
concludes with a discussion of when duty is enough and when other factors must be taken
in to account as a guide to action. Where the significant expansions and revisions in
moral theory take place are in the first three chapters and his explanation of how humans
learn to judge themselves and come to have a conscience.
Judging Ourselves
How do we come to make moral judgments about our own conduct? This is the
question that opens Part III of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s answer appears
to be relatively straightforward. The principles by which we judge our conduct “seem” to
be the same as those by which we judge the conduct of others. Part I and II had
explained how we go about judging the conduct of others through a version of the
spectator-agent model of moral judgment. In its barest form, Smith’s argument boils
down to the fact that we judge others when we use our imaginations to put ourselves into
their situation and bring their case home to us.
3
We either do or do not sympathize with
the sentiments and motives guiding the action of the person that we are observing. When
3
Smith uses the term sympathy in a number of different ways, often quite loosely. In one of his broadest
definitions, Smith suggests that the term may be used “without much impropriety, be made use of to denote
our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.” (TMS: 10) For the purposes in this paper, sympathy will
refer to our imaginative capacity to enter into the sentiments of others. For a further discussion of Smith’s
notion of sympathy, see Griswold (1999), Raphael (1985), Otteson (2002), Campbell and Skinner (1982).
Convention