When Good Deeds Deserve Reward — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith recapitulates his account of merit and demerit by tying desert to doubled sympathy. We do not heartily share a beneficiary's gratitude unless the benefactor's motives display full propriety; beneficial effects alone, without approveable affection, scarcely call for proportionate reward. When beneficence and propriety unite, love for the agent heightens our beat with grateful hearts, and the benefactor becomes the clear object of reward whose conduct we must approve along with the sentiment that prompts recompense.

The parallel holds for injury. Resentment toward a wrongdoer stirs us only when we cannot enter into his motives; if his affections seem unimpeachable, however fatal the action's tendency, punishment appears unjust. Add hurtful conduct to improper affection, and the heart rejects the agent with abhorrence while wholly adopting the sufferer's resentment, making punishment seem to cry out for itself and fixing the offender as its proper object.

In both directions approving the motive carries approving the act. Smith has shown that sympathetic propriety, not bare utility of outcomes, structures desert: gratitude and resentment beat in us only when we first enter the agent's principles, and desert follows that entered harmony between spectator, agent, and person acted upon.