As if this picture was not already complicated enough, Smith adds a number of further qualifications which merit our attention. The first is that not all sentiments are sympathetically approved of in the same manner. In particular, approval of sentiments which arise in response to other people’s actions, such as gratitude or resentment, are dependent upon approval or disapproval of the motives or causes of those actions themselves49. Smith
describes this by saying that our approbation of an action has two components, an assessment of its propriety and an assessment of its merit. An action’s propriety is a measure of the reasonableness of its motive or causes given the situation the agent was in. Consequently, an apparently
47 For instance, Campbell only recognises the first and fourth sense (1971, 96), while
Griswold identifies a ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ usage, the latter coinciding with my first, whereas the former is equivalent to compassion or pity – on this construal “sympathy is an emotion” (1999, 79), but this is not Smith’s usual sense. The editors of the Glasgow edition neglect the distinctions entirely. Knud Haakonssen (1981, 51) is a notable exception.
48 Hume, Letter 36 dated 28 July 1759, printed in TMS, 46.
49 Strictly speaking, it is not the action itself, but the “sentiment or affection of the
heart, from which [the] action proceeds” (TMS II.i.1.1, 67) which is subject to these two forms of approbation, since it is technically only sentiments we can sympathise with and so approve of.
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morally bad action can turn out to be appropriate (or more appropriate) in this sense if proceeding from motives fitting for the circumstances, whereas an apparently morally good action can turn out to be less appropriate if proceeding from a less estimable motive. For instance, angrily sneering at someone may be (more) appropriate if that person has just insulted one, whereas the performance of helpful gestures may be less appropriate if done only from a sense of duty, rather than out of generosity or kindness (TMS, III.6.3, 172). The merit or demerit of an action is a measure of the quality of its consequences for the people it effects. If an action is harmful, its consequence for others will typically be reactions of anger or resentment. If the action is beneficial, its consequences for others will typically be reactions of gratitude. The measure of both propriety and merit of actions is the extent to which we are able to ‘go along with them’, i.e. the extent to which our own sentiments harmonise with either the motive or the reaction when we imaginatively occupy the situation of the agent or the person acted upon. However, Smith includes the important condition that in the latter case, i.e. the case of sympathy with the reactions caused by someone’s action, our approval is indirect, i.e. conditional on our reaction to the agent’s motive50.
That is, I can only sympathise with (i.e. approve of) resentment if I disapprove of the motive of the action which brought that resentment about, and I can only sympathise with (i.e. approve of) gratitude, if I approve of the motive which brought it about.
The second qualification is that approval of some sentiment does not in fact require an actual harmony of sentiments, but merely a belief that such a harmony would occur under certain circumstances. Smith’s presentation somewhat obscures this fact, since he characterises the pleasurable sentiment of approbation as arising from the observation of a harmony of sentiments, which seems to require the de facto convergence of actual sentiments. But this cannot be quite right. For firstly, Smith also holds that we can feel “illusive sympathy”, i.e. that we can be in sympathetic harmony with “an emotion which the person principally concerned is incapable of feeling”
50 Not to be confused with Smith’s notion of “conditional sympathy”, which I discuss
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(TMS II.1.3.1, 71). Thus, we can become sympathetically affected with feelings of embarrassment for someone who does not realise she is making a fool of herself (TMS I.i.1.10, 12) or with feelings of dread for the dead (TMS, I.i.1.13), but more importantly for our purposes, we can feel resentment or gratitude for a villain or benefactor even when the person directly affected by their actions cannot or does not. This is clearly an important addition to the picture, for without it, many key instances of sympathetic resentment would be impossible. It would be impossible to resent the actions of a killer, for instance, or a person who successfully gaslighted the victim of their abuse. Secondly, in addition to approving by illusive sympathy of a non- existent sentiment, we can also have non-actual or “conditional sympathy” (TMS, I.i.3.5, 18) for an existing sentiment. I may recognise that some sentiment is proper and meritorious, and thus deserving of my sympathetic approval, but for independent and morally irrelevant reasons be unable to produce that sentiment of approbation myself at the time. For instance, I may be too diverted by my own suffering to go along with your appropriate happiness, or even too busy to fully imaginatively enter your situation and approve of your grief, but nevertheless judge that it is appropriate.
The consideration of this qualification therefore leads us onto the next, for we are now led to wonder what it is that enables us to ‘fill in the blanks’ when we have approval without an actual coexistence of harmonious sentiments. How do I judge what the murder victim would have felt if she had still been around, or what I would have felt, if I had not been so caught up with my own concerns? Smith holds that in these situations we fall back on “general rules derived from our preceding experience” (TMS I.i.3.5, 18), i.e. “upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve or disapprove of” (TMS III.4.7, 159), but also experiences of the judgements others make of us.51 These
judgements are highly useful for compensating for natural irregularities in our circumstances of judgements, too important in fact “to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and
51 See e.g. (TMS III.3.20, 145) for Smith’s description of how we “enter the great school
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uncertainty of philosophical researches” (TMS, III.5.4, 164) and nature therefore provides us with a propensity to grow to think of the general rules of morality as “laws of the Deity” (TMS III.5.2, 163). In this manner, the patterns of evaluation which were ultimately founded on our tendency to imaginatively enter into the situations of others eventually become ratified and gain independent authority. Smith conceives of the presence of this authority in our moral reasoning in a remarkable manner, namely as embodied in an internalised judge or ‘inmate of the breast’ (TMS, VI.concl.1, 262). This figure is the constant spectator of both our conduct towards and our evaluations of others, and will loudly “call us to account” (Ibid.) for our wrong-doing, or our inattention and indifference to others. Since being sympathised with is attended with a pleasure and its absence with pain, and since the verdicts of this inner judge has been given the highest authority as the internal “vice-regents” of the Deity (TMS, III.5.6, 165), this has an extensive influence not just on our evaluations, but on our willingness to perform moral actions as well52.