{"agent_id":"adam-smith","agent_name":"Adam Smith","slug":"the-impartial-spectator","label":"The impartial spectator: is moral judgment grounded in sympathy and the view of an imagined impartial observer, rather than in reason or a moral sense?","topic":"The impartial spectator","question":"Is moral judgment grounded in sympathy and the view of an imagined impartial observer, rather than in reason or a moral sense?","position":"Moral judgment is not the conclusion of an argument. It begins in sympathy — not benevolence, but the imaginative act by which I place myself in your situation and conceive what I should feel there. When my imagined feeling concords with the feeling you actually express, I approve of your sentiment as proper; when it does not, I disapprove. From judging others I learn to judge myself, and here is the decisive move: I can only examine my own conduct by supposing myself the spectator of it. I divide myself into two persons — the I who acts and the I who judges — and the judge is an imagined impartial spectator, the man within the breast, who views my conduct with the eyes of a stranger who has no partiality to me. Conscience is this internalized spectator; it is built up out of society, for a man bred in solitude could no more think of his own character than of the beauty of his own face. Against the rationalists, reason discovers the general rules but does not originate the first perceptions of right and wrong, which are matters of immediate sense and feeling. Against Hutcheson, there is no special moral sense: approbation is the sympathetic concordance of sentiments, needing no separate faculty. The impartial spectator is the standard, and it is neither pure reason nor mere feeling but a social achievement of the imagination.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Moral judgment is not the conclusion of an argument.","n":[]},{"t":"It begins in sympathy — not benevolence, but the imaginative act by which I place myself in your situation and conceive what I should feel there.","n":[1]},{"t":"When my imagined feeling concords with the feeling you actually express, I approve of your sentiment as proper; when it does not, I disapprove.","n":[]}],[{"t":"From judging others I learn to judge myself, and here is the decisive move: I can only examine my own conduct by supposing myself the spectator of it.","n":[2]},{"t":"I divide myself into two persons — the I who acts and the I who judges — and the judge is an imagined impartial spectator, the man within the breast, who views my conduct with the eyes of a stranger who has no partiality to me.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Conscience is this internalized spectator; it is built up out of society, for a man bred in solitude could no more think of his own character than of the beauty of his own face.","n":[]},{"t":"Against the rationalists, reason discovers the general rules but does not originate the first perceptions of right and wrong, which are matters of immediate sense and feeling.","n":[3]}],[{"t":"Against Hutcheson, there is no special moral sense: approbation is the sympathetic concordance of sentiments, needing no separate faculty.","n":[]},{"t":"The impartial spectator is the standard, and it is neither pure reason nor mere feeling but a social achievement of the imagination.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments Part I (of the propriety of action, sympathy as fellow-feeling), Part III (the foundation of our judgments concerning our own sentiments, the origin of conscience as the man within the breast, the impartial spectator), Part VII (systems of moral philosophy, where Smith criticizes Hutcheson's moral-sense theory and the rationalists). Reception: D.D. Raphael's The Impartial Spectator (2007); Charles Griswold's Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999); the contemporary revival of sentimentalist metaethics; comparisons with Hume's spectator theory and with Kant's rational moral law; the impartial spectator as a precursor to ideal-observer theories and to Rawls.","works":["The Theory of Moral Sentiments Part I (of the propriety of action, sympathy as fellow-feeling), Part III (the foundation of our judgments concerning our own sentiments, the origin of conscience as the man within the breast, the impartial spectator), Part VII (systems of moral philosophy, where Smith criticizes Hutcheson's moral-sense theory and the rationalists)"],"reception":"D.D. Raphael's The Impartial Spectator (2007); Charles Griswold's Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999); the contemporary revival of sentimentalist metaethics; comparisons with Hume's spectator theory and with Kant's rational moral law; the impartial spectator as a precursor to ideal-observer theories and to Rawls.","status":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments is one of the major works of eighteenth-century ethics and the most developed sentimentalist alternative to both moral rationalism and Hutcheson's moral-sense theory. The impartial spectator has had a long afterlife: as a precursor to ideal-observer theories of metaethics, in Amartya Sen's use of it against Rawls's original position (Sen's The Idea of Justice, 2009, argues the spectator gives a more open, less parochial standard than a closed social contract), and in the contemporary revival of sentimentalist moral psychology. D.D. Raphael's The Impartial Spectator (2007) and Charles Griswold's Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999) are the standard scholarly treatments. The relation to Hume's spectator theory and the difference from Kant's rational moral law remain live comparative questions.","era":"1723-1790","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"If, when we place ourselves in the situation of such a person, our own actions appear to us under an agreeable aspect, if we feel that such a spectator cannot avoid entering into all the motives which influenced us, whatever may be the judgments of the world, we must still be pleased with our own behaviour, and regard ourselves, in spite of the censure of our companions, as the just and proper objects of…","label":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments"},{"n":2,"work":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We examine it as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it. If upon placing ourselves in his situation we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. If otherwise, we enter into his disapprobation and condemn it.","label":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments"},{"n":3,"work":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Pleasure and pain are the great objects of desire and aversion: but these are distinguished not by reason, but by immediate sense and feeling. If virtue, therefore, is desirable for its own sake, and if vice is, in the same manner, the object of aversion, it cannot be reason which originally distinguishes those different qualities, but immediate sense and feeling.","label":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments"},{"n":4,"work":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A man who is tolerably handsome, will allow you to laugh at any little irregularity in his person; but all such jokes are commonly insupportable to one who is really deformed. It is evident, however, that we are anxious about our own beauty and deformity only on account of its effect upon others. If we had no connexion with society, we should be altogether indifferent about either.","label":"The Theory of Moral Sentiments"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-invisible-hand","label":"The invisible hand: does the pursuit of self-interest, coordinated by the market, promote the public good?"},{"slug":"das-adam-smith-problem","label":"Das Adam Smith Problem: is there a contradiction between the sympathy-governed human being of the Moral Sentiments and the self-interested agent of the Wealth of Nations?"},{"slug":"the-division-of-labour","label":"The division of labour: is it an unmixed good, given that Smith himself says it renders the labourer 'as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become'?"},{"slug":"the-role-of-the-state","label":"The role of the state: is Smith the prophet of laissez-faire and minimal government, or does the 'system of natural liberty' rest on justice, public works, and the duties of the sovereign?"}]}