Prestige · $2.99/month
Chapter audio, theme analysis, and downloads
Adam Smith
0:00 / 0:00
Smith asks why fortune distorts moral judgment by tracing gratitude and resentment to their roots. Pain and pleasure excite these passions even toward inanimate things: we curse the stone that hurts us, burn the instrument that killed a friend, and cherish the plank that saved a sailor from shipwreck. Dryads and Lares, he suggests, arose from this affection for houses and trees. Reflection soon corrects revenge against what cannot feel.
Yet complete satisfaction requires an object that causes pleasure or pain, can feel, and acted from a design we approve or condemn. Animals approach this standard more nearly than objects, but still fall short. Gratitude wants the benefactor to know he is rewarded for past conduct; resentment wants the offender to know he is punished for contempt shown to us. When an enemy injured us justly, resentment cannot stand.
Failed beneficence and failed malice therefore receive diminished passion because an exciting cause is absent; lucky harm or benefit casts a "shadow" of demerit or merit on agents whose hearts were not properly tuned. Hence fortune governs our sense of desert.
Recognize when you're blaming the wrong target for your frustration or disappointment. Smith grounds the point in a concrete scene from moral spectatorship.
This week, pause before you call an emotion excessive and ask what situation you have not yet pictured.
Smith will examine just how far this influence of fortune extends in shaping our moral judgments, revealing the surprising ways that luck and circumstances affect how we view right and wrong Fortune works in two directions. First, it diminishes merit when laudable intentions fail and demerit when blamable ones do: the friend who procures an office outranks the friend who merely solicits it, and.
What this chapter proves — the pattern beneath the scene
In this chapter, the lesson is Holding Intentions Against Outcomes.
The card below names the pattern this chapter proves — carry it with you into the original text.
Holding Intentions Against Outcomes
Pain and pleasure excite gratitude and resentment even toward things that cannot intend. We curse the stone that hurts us and cherish the plank that saved a sailor. Reflection soon corrects the passion. Smith starts here to show how far fortune bends desert before a person is in the case.
Key Insight
The first warp is not hypocrisy. It is a passion that fires at whatever caused the pleasure or the pain.
Chapter 22
Of the causes of this influence of fortune. The causes of pain and pleasure, whatever they are, or however they operate, seem to be the objects, which, in all animals, immediately excite those two passions of gratitude and resentment. They are excited by inanimated, as well as by animated objects. We are angry, for a moment, even at the stone that hurts us. A child beats it, a dog barks at it, a choleric man is apt to curse it. The least reflection, indeed, corrects this sentiment, and we soon become sensible, that what has no feeling is a very…
Public-domain chapter text, formatted for reading.
For the next week, notice when you feel frustrated, angry, or grateful. Write down what triggered the feeling and what or who you initially wanted to blame or thank. Then ask yourself: Can this target actually understand my emotion and change their behavior? If not, what's the real source of your feeling?
Write about a recent time when you were angry at someone or something. Looking back, were you mad at the right target? What was really bothering you, and how could you have addressed the actual source more effectively?
Purchase the complete book to access all chapters and support classic literature
Available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book formats
Other theme-by-theme analyses from this book.
Divide yourself into two persons in chapter 26, and let the one who did not act pass sentence.
Stand at the rack in chapter 1, then at the slack rope, and watch imagination do what the senses refuse.
Hear that every man is first recommended to his own care, then watch the miser and the cheat use the same sentence.
Watch the poor man go unheeded in a crowd, then the toil whose only end is a neighbor's admiration.
Set the pillar beside the ornament: merchants may live without love, and cannot live once they start injuring one another.
Deep diving the literary elements.
Guides, life skills, and the full library.More ways to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments: guides, life skills, and the wider library.
Unlock study guides and downloads, early access, and exclusive content — and support free access for everyone.
