Commerce and Strangers in Adam Smith by Shinji Nohara

Author:Shinji Nohara
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

Because of the inability to truly know others, people can only imagine another’s situation. What they feel is the imagined sentiments of the sufferer, and they can have only a lower pitch of sentiment than the latter. Thus, selfishness, as one’s inability to know another’s inner sentiments, is based on the physical incapability of the senses to perceive another’s inner sentiments. Because of this incapability, what people feel depends entirely on whether they are sufferers or spectators. Depends on one’s standpoint, they feel differently. Thus, moral sentiments are irregular. Smith wrote, “when we are about to act, the eagerness of passion will seldom allow us to consider what we are doing” (TMS, III. 4. 3). When we act, we are motivated by “the eagerness of passion,” and so “every thing appears magnified and misrepresented by self-love” (TMS, III. 4. 3).

However, the irregular sentiments can be corrected by people’s communication. Because they want to share their own sentiments with others, when “the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects” (TMS, I. i. 3. 1). In this case, “when we judge in this manner of any affection, as proportioned or disproportioned to the cause which excites it, it is scarce possible that we should make use of any other rule or canon but the correspondent affection in ourselves” (TMS, I. i. 3. 9). When the spectators and the sufferers have corresponding sentiments, those sentiments are regarded as appropriate.

An appreciation of the propriety of sentiments is the origin of moral virtues. When the spectators try to sympathize with the sufferers, the former can have “the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity.” On the other hand, when the sufferers try to stifle their own sentiments to correspond with those of the spectators, the former can have “the virtues of self-denial, of self-government” (TMS, I. i. 5. 1). Because of the difference or irregularity in sentiments between the spectators and the sufferers, both try to adjust their own sentiments so that they can be considered appropriate.

Even though people can share a sense of the propriety of moral sentiments, they might feel a different sense of propriety between intimates and between strangers. Indeed, Smith argued, “we expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend…. We expect still less sympathy from an assembly of strangers.” Because we understand the difference in our sympathy towards our intimates and towards strangers, “we assume, therefore, still more tranquility before them, and always endeavour to bring down our passion to that pitch, which the particular company we are in may be expected to go along with” (TMS, I. i. 4. 9). Thus, we express a different pitch of sympathy for each type of person (On this point, see Forman-Barzilai 2010).

In spite of this difference, people do feel the sentiments of others. If they do not, then sympathy

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