Oh no, not another philosophical diatribe

[bwv 1080]

Actually I am just posting a great summary of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  (been listening to a great podcast series on www.econtalk.org) Smith's genius was analyzing things as they are rather than trying to construct a system of how things ought to be.  After being ignored for 200+ years, Smith's thinking is being taken up by a new generation of social scientists guided by evolutionary biology and a similar empirical focus on how people actually behave:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/adam-smith-moral-philosopher/

Acquiring Moral Standards

Smith's goal in TMS is to discover by means of empirical investigation the process that explains two phenomena: on the one hand, the adoption by individuals of moral standards by which they judge others; and, on the other, their adoption of moral standards by which they judge themselves. One striking feature about both phenomena is that during their lifetimes people seem to go from having virtually no such standards as children to having standards that are commonly shared with others as adults. What explains this transition?

Smith argues that all human beings innately have something he called a desire for "mutual sympathy" of sentiments. What Smith means is that each of us gets pleasure on seeing his own sentiments echoed in others. It gives us pleasure when, for example, our friends find the same things funny that we do, to the same degree, or we find the same things distasteful as our friends do, to the same degree. Smith thinks it is simply a fact about human nature that we find this mutual accord, or concordance of sentiments—what Smith terms "sympathy"—pleasurable. (And note, incidentally, Smith's special use of the term "sympathy": it means harmony or concord with any emotion whatsoever; it does not mean only pity or compassion.) In fact, he thinks this pleasure is one of the finest that human beings experience.

Since everyone finds this pleasurable, everyone seeks it out; and this mutual seeking-out of sympathy of sentiments becomes, for Smith, the engine of social cohesion and the centripetal force, as it were, of human communities. It encourages people not only to enter into groups, alliances, and communities with others (so that they have opportunities to achieve the much-sought-after mutual sympathy of sentiments), but also to form associations of like-minded people (because this increases the chances of actually achieving such a sympathy).

The mechanism, Smith thinks, is this: I desire mutual sympathy of sentiments with you, which leads me to moderate my sentiments to the level that I think, based on my past experience, you are likely to "enter into." You, on the other hand, because you desire the same thing, also moderate your sentiments to the level you think, based on your past experience, I am likely to enter into. Over time this process trains our sentiments to gravitate toward mutually acceptable levels. Smith's picture thus has a clear anti-Freudian thrust: it denies the hydraulic picture of human emotions according to which emotions build up "pressure" that must be "released." Instead, and more plausibly, it conceives of emotions as things that can be controlled and trained by exercising what Smith calls "self-command." The activity of reciprocal adjustment is then repeated numberless times in every person's lifetime, as it is between and among the people in one's community, resulting in the creation of an unintended and largely unconscious system of standards. These standards then become the rules by which we determine in any given case what kind of behavior is, as Smith calls it, "proper" in a situation and what "improper"—meaning what others can reasonably be expected to enter into.

Think of a person laughing too long at a joke: at some point you start to form the judgment that his laughter is simply too much; you judge it, that is, to be "improper." But how do you know at what point the laughing becomes too much? According to Smith, you know by judging this case against the standards you have unintentionally, and probably unconsciously, developed in conjunction with the members of your community over time. In different situations, the amount of laughter that is acceptable may differ; but in each case our experience with our fellows in similar situations sets the parameters for our judgment of propriety.

The same holds true with attire: there is such a thing as dressing inappropriately—in either direction, as it were: wearing black tie to a beach party, or wearing a bathing suit to a wedding—and your judgment of when a person's attire becomes inappropriate is a function of the mechanism Smith describes. To take a final example, there is even, Smith thinks, such a thing as too little anger. If a man's wife is being publicly humiliated by another man, then we think he ought to show anger, or what Smith calls "spirit." If he does not—if he cowers, without rising to her defense—then we judge him to have acted improperly. The propriety or impropriety of a person's behavior, then, is constituted by its accordance or discordance with what is recommended by this system of standards.

To facilitate our ability to predict what our own behavior should be (that is, what would enjoy mutual sympathy with others), Smith thinks we learn to adopt the standpoint of an "impartial spectator" from which to judge our own behavior. He believes that in time we come to take the impartial spectator's judgments as the standard of morality—first for ourselves and then also for others. We have all experienced the unpleasantness of being judged unfairly, that is, on the basis of biased or incomplete information (people who do not know our situation thinking poorly of us). This leads us to desire that others refrain from judging until they know the whole story; but because we all want this, our desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments subtly encourages us to adopt an outside perspective, as it were, in judging our own conduct. That is, because we want others to be able to "enter into" our sentiments, we strive to moderate them to be what we think others will sympathize with; but we can only know what that is if we ask ourselves what the impartial observer would think. The voice of the impartial spectator becomes our second-nature guide of conduct. Indeed, Smith thinks it is what we call our "conscience." The phrase "let your conscience be your guide" really means to let the imagined impartial spectator be your guide. And because we come to rely on this impartial spectator to give us accurate moral guideposts by which to judge our own behavior, our confidence in his judgments leads us also to employ him to judge others. In this way the impartial spectator becomes the standard of morality.

Let me summarize Smith's explanation of the process of developing moral standards. Babies have only desires; they have no tincture of remorse, shame, or guilt at desiring something improper. As they grow into children, however, they have the first experience of discipline, which teaches them that others judge them and expect them to behave in particular ways. And they make the shocking, arresting discovery that they are not the most important person in everyone's life—only in their own. Their desire for mutual sympathy then encourages them to discover what others expect of them and to strive to achieve it. The more experience they have, the better they become at anticipating others' expectations and hence of behaving in ways that lead to mutual sympathy. The children then develop habits of behavior that reflect what they have learned; what were once rules handed down from on high become internalized principles by which the children routinely order their lives.

As adults, larger and larger experience leads to more and more complicated, internalized principles. These principles now cover a large range of actions and motivations, and they have been revised, corrected, and fine-tuned as necessary. The principles inform Smith's procedure of making moral judgments: they are the standard against which people judge themselves and others. They are what, in practice, render the moral judgment. A moral judgment, then, is the result of a deduction by which one determines whether a given act or motivation accords with these principles.

[DavidRoss]

Actually I am just posting a great summary of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  (been listening to a great podcast series on www.econtalk.org) Smith's genius was analyzing things as they are rather than trying to construct a system of how things ought to be.  After being ignored for 200+ years, Smith's thinking is being taken up by a new generation of social scientists guided by evolutionary biology and a similar empirical focus on how people actually behave:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/adam-smith-moral-philosopher/

Yeah, but we're busy turning back the clock to faith in wishful thinking instead of facing hard facts, lapping up the snake oil of an elite priesthood who promise salvation if only we sell our children and grandchildren into slavery. 

[Brian]

Actually I am just posting a great summary of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  (been listening to a great podcast series on www.econtalk.org) Smith's genius was analyzing things as they are rather than trying to construct a system of how things ought to be.  After being ignored for 200+ years, Smith's thinking is being taken up by a new generation of social scientists guided by evolutionary biology and a similar empirical focus on how people actually behave:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/adam-smith-moral-philosopher/

A book I love. Wrote a paper on it last semester and obnoxiously butted into conversations at parties saying "Adam Smith wasn't just a capitalist, you know!" I'm on the phone right now but will read that article soon. 

[bwv 1080]

Yeah, but we're busy turning back the clock to faith in wishful thinking instead of facing hard facts, lapping up the snake oil of an elite priesthood who promise salvation if only we sell our children and grandchildren into slavery. 

if the new atheists would read Smith and Hayek they might actually see that Smith's ethics describe well how historical religions are evolving, emergent systems that are repositories of a great deal of wisdom.  After all, the religions that survived from antiquity to the 20th century were those that provided a competitive advantage to the cultures who adopted them