The Theory of Moral Sentiments (3 page)

In fact, a broad ethical evaluation of the kind Smith outlined can take note of the virtues both of what actually happened and of the actions taken to produce such outcomes, going well beyond the simple-minded “consequentialist” framework made popular by theories of practical reason such as utilitarian ethics (which insists on attaching direct significance only to utilities that ultimately result). We can take note of the actions undertaken and of the ethical quality of the decision-making that led to those actions, since they are indeed part of what “really happened,” without confining our scrutiny only to what occurred at the “culmination.”
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Smith’s simultaneous interest in virtues and obligations and in what actually happens in the world are comprehensively integrated.

Smith makes an important distinction, in his conception of virtue, between praise and “praiseworthiness,” and focuses on the latter as the legitimate basis for action.
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It is of course the case that a praiseworthy action would also tend to generate actual praise, and this may well be pleasing to the person praised. What Smith argues for, however, is to concentrate not on what would bring praise—despite the happiness it may bring to the person involved—but on whether the action is praiseworthy.

In discussing “the different accounts which have been given of the nature of virtue,” Smith distinguishes among the ways of seeing virtue: first, in terms of “propriety”; second, as fulfilling one’s “private interest and happiness”; and third, as aiming “at the happiness of others.”
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These distinct views, he argues, can be integrated, and he discusses how reasoning can link them together, allowing a kind of balance that virtue and praiseworthiness would demand:

As our most solid judgments, therefore, with regard to right and wrong, are regulated by maxims and ideas derived from an induction of reason, virtue may very properly be said to consist in a conformity to reason, and so far this faculty may be considered as the source and principle of approbation and disapprobation.
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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE

I turn now from moral to political philosophy, though the two are closely related, particularly so in Smith’s analysis. I will concentrate first on the kind of theory of justice that we can find in the
Moral Sentiments
, and examine it in light of mainstream theories of justice as they have emerged in recent centuries.
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There are two basic, and divergent, lines of reasoning about justice among leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the Enlightenment. There is, first, the “contractarian” approach, led by the work of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and followed in different ways by such outstanding thinkers as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. In its rudimentary version, this approach concentrates on identifying “just” institutional arrangements for a society, which would yield a corresponding—hypothetical—contract. The demands of justice are, then, seen in terms of those institutional requirements, with the expectation that people would behave appropriately to make those institutions entirely effective.

The approach has two distinct features. First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice; it tries to identify social characteristics that cannot be transcended in terms of justice, and is aimed at identifying the nature of “the just”—rather than at finding some criteria that would allow us to decide whether an alternative is “less unjust” than another. Second, in searching for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on getting the institutions right, and it is only indirectly concerned with the societies that would ultimately emerge. The nature of the society that would emerge from any given set of institutions must, of course, depend on many non-institutional factors, such as actual behaviors of people and their social interactions. The traverse from institutions to social outcomes is handled by this approach with the assumption that people’s behavior would be exactly what would be needed for the proper functioning of the chosen institutions.

In contrast to the social contract approach, a number of other Enlightenment theorists took a variety of comparative approaches that were concerned primarily with removing identifiable injustices in the world—such as slavery, or bureaucracy-induced poverty, or cruel and counterproductive penal codes, or rampant exploitation of labor, or the subjugation of women. The focus is on what actually happens to the lives of people, and the judgments are comparative—for example, how the world would improve if slavery were abolished. The approach of comparative realizations, as we may call it, was pursued, in different ways, not only by Smith—who was its most powerful proponent—but also by the Marquis de Condorcet (the founder of the mathematical discipline of social choice theory who was greatly influenced by Smith), Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, among others, all of whom were admirers of Smith and were clearly influenced by him, to varying extents.

As it happens, it is the first tradition—that of transcendental institutionalism—on which today’s mainstream political philosophy largely draws in its exploration of the theory of justice. The most powerful and momentous exposition of this approach to justice can be found in the work of the leading political philosopher of our time, John Rawls.
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Indeed, Rawls’s “principles of justice” in
A Theory of Justice
are defined entirely for selecting perfectly just institutions. This entire tradition is very non-Smithian. Smith’s focus is on actual realizations (not just on institutions and arrangements), and on comparisons rather than on transcendence. The primary concentration in the Smithian approach is on questions such as “how would justice be advanced?” rather than on, as in Rawlsian theory, “what would be perfectly just institutions?”

IMPARTIALITY AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

An important contrast between the Smithian approach and the approach based on social contracts lies in the form in which impartiality, needed for fairness and justice, is invoked. Smith’s thought experiment on impartiality invokes the device of the “impartial spectator” who can come as readily from outside of a community as from within it. This differs substantially from the admissible points of view that a “social contract” approach concentrates on, to wit, the views of the people within a polity in which the contract is being made. In Rawls’s discussion of what he calls a “reflective equilibrium,” distant perspectives can be invoked, but in his structured theory of “justice as fairness,” the relevant points of view are confined entirely to those of the people in the society in which the so-called original position is being contemplated. In this sense, the impartiality that Rawls and the social contract approach explores is “closed”—i.e., it is confined to the members of the contracting parties (or their “representatives”). In contrast, Smith’s impartial spectator takes us toward an open impartiality.

To be sure, both Smith and Kant had much to say about the importance of impartiality. Even though Smith’s exposition of this idea is less remembered among contemporary moral and political philosophers, there are substantial points of similarity between the Kantian and Smithian approaches. In fact, Smith’s analysis of “the impartial spectator” has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness that so engaged the world of the European enlightenment. Smith’s ideas were influential not only among enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet; Kant, too, was familiar with
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, as we know from his correspondence with Markus Herz in 1771 (even though, alas, Herz referred to the proud Scotsman as “the Englishman Smith”),
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which preceded by a considerable number of years Kant’s own classic works
Groundwork
(1785) and
Critique of Practical Reason
(1788), and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.

But it is the differences between Smith on one side and Kant—and Rawls—on the other that are particularly important for the present discussion. To Smith, the internal discussion among the participants in the Rawlsian original position would appear to be inadequately scrutinized, since we have to look beyond the points of view of others in the same society, engaged in making the social contract. As Smith argued:

We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.
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Compared to Smith’s approach, the procedural device of closed impartiality in Rawlsian “justice as fairness” can be seen as being limited in its reach. Why is this a problem? There are, in fact, two principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of public reasoning about justice go beyond boundaries of a state or region: (1) the relevance of other people’s
interests
—far away from as well as close to a given society—for the sake of preventing unfairness to those who are not party to the social contract for that society; and (2) the pertinence of other people’s
perspectives
to broaden our own investigation of relevant principles, for the sake of avoiding underscrutinized parochialism of values and presumptions in the local community.

INTERDEPENDENT INTERESTS AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

By its very nature a social contract has to be confined to the members of a sovereign state—it is a contract among the citizens of that state. This makes it hard to extend the idea to the global world, as some have tried to do. Indeed, it is precisely because of the contractarian mode of reasoning that many philosophers have been tempted to argue that the idea of global justice is an absurdity at the present time, without a global sovereign state. Smith’s device of the impartial spectator gets around this limitation not by posing the problem in terms of a negotiated contract for members of a sovereign state but by invoking impartial arbitrators—from far and near—whose assessments have to be considered in order to get toward impartial reasoning. Dealing with the global mess makes the Smithian engagement altogether necessary. In some ways the world is grappling with the Smithian route, and while the gradual shift from national thinking to the G-8 and now to the G-20 is a move in the right direction, we have to go much further, for Smithian reasons.

In many examples in each of his books, Smith did, in fact, make good use of the reach of global reasoning. For example, the misdeeds of early British rule in India, including the disastrous famine of 1770, engaged him greatly in
The Wealth of Nations
. When he concluded that the East India Company not only “oppresses and domineers in the East Indies” but was also “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions,” he was drawing not on any oddly devised social contract (it would have been very hard to fit such a judgment into the contractarian framework) but on the kind of reach that the impartial spectator allows, without confining judgments of justice to the limits of a sovereign state.

Similar issues remain extremely alive today. How America tackles its economy influences not only Americans but also those in the rest of the world. AIDS and other epidemics have moved from country to country, and from continent to continent, and the medicines developed and produced in some parts of the world are important for the lives and freedoms of people far away. Also, what can be said about the environmental challenges we currently face has to be based on global reasoning about the sharing of obligations and burdens, rather than on a strictly contractarian line of analysis confined within the limits of a sovereign state.

THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR AND THE AVOIDANCE OF PAROCHIALISM

Another argument for an “open” approach, in Smithian lines, is that it works to avoid the trap of parochialism. If the discussion of the demands of justice is confined to a particular locality—a country or even a region larger than that—there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counterarguments that might not come up in local political debates, or be accommodated in the discourse confined to the local culture, but that are eminently worth considering, from an impartial perspective.

This is still an active issue in contemporary legal debates—for example, among the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the admissibility of invoking arguments and judgments in courts in other countries in seeking an appropriate understanding of the demands of justice in the United States.
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Smith’s insistence that “the eyes of the rest of mankind” must be invoked to understand whether “a punishment appears equitable” remains deeply relevant here.

Smith was particularly keen on avoiding the grip of parochialism in jurisprudence and moral and political reasoning. In a chapter in
Moral Sentiments
revealingly entitled “Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the Sentiments of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation,” he gives various examples of how discussions confined within a given society can be incarcerated within a seriously narrow understanding.

. . . the murder of new-born infants was a practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the polite and civilized Athenians. . . . Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorized the practice, that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this barbarous prerogative, but even the doctrine of philosophers, which ought to have been more just and accurate, was led away by the established custom, and upon this, as upon many other occasions, instead of censuring, supported the horrible abuse, by far-fetched considerations of public utility. Aristotle talks of it as of what the magistrate ought upon many occasions to encourage. The humane Plato is of the same opinion, and, with all that love of mankind which seems to animate all his writings, nowhere marks this practice with disapprobation.
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