The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Francis Hutcheson, Smith's teacher and an earlier holder of the Glasgow chair of moral philosophy, taught that virtue is benevolence. Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees had scandalised the previous generation, traced it to vanity. Smith thought Hutcheson was hunting for a special faculty that detects right and wrong, and Mandeville was explaining virtue away, when what actually happens is plainer and odder: we learn morality by being looked at. We judge our own conduct by imagining how it strikes someone who is watching and wants nothing from us — an impartial spectator, nobody in particular, assembled out of everyone who has ever judged us. Conscience is that habit turned inward. Sympathy here is not kindness but the ordinary work of putting yourself in another position, and on it Smith builds an entire moral theory, with no appeal to divine command or, against David Hume, to usefulness. It appeared in April 1759, printed for its publisher, the London bookseller Andrew Millar, in the Strand, and it made his name: students came from abroad to Glasgow to hear him. At the end of 1763 Charles Townshend, the politician whose American duties would later carry his name, offered Smith three hundred pounds a year and expenses to tutor his stepson abroad, and a pension of the same amount for life once the tutorship ended; early in 1764 Smith resigned the chair. He kept rewriting. Six editions appeared between 1759 and 1790, from the third onward with a dissertation on the origin of languages appended, and the last, finished in the year he died, added a substantial new part on the character of virtue that no earlier reader had seen. In the nineteenth century German scholars set the book against The Wealth of Nations and called the two incompatible — das Adam Smith Problem, the sympathetic Smith against the calculating one. Most now reject it; Smith had been revising both books in the same decade.