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Adam Smith
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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 even the generous feel a shade more affection for success. Lucullus's glory seemed incomplete when Pompey gathered his victories; an architect mortifies when plans go unbuilt.
Failed crimes are punished more lightly than completed ones, though demerit is the same; treason is the exception, because the sovereign resents injuries to himself. The would-be criminal who is accidentally prevented feels deliverance, not virtue, yet knows his heart was as guilty as if he had executed the crime.
Second, fortune magnifies desert beyond motive. The messenger of good news is embraced; Tigranes of Armenia struck off the bearer of bad tidings. Gross negligence, such as casting a stone into a public way, deserves chastisement even without harm; when death follows, Scottish law and natural indignation treat carelessness like malice. Lesser negligence still obliges compensation, as under the Aquilian law when a frightened horse tramples a slave.
Recognize when people are being judged by their results rather than their efforts or intentions. 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.
Having exposed how unfairly fortune shapes our moral judgments, Smith will explore why nature designed us this way. What purpose could this seemingly unjust system serve in human society That the world judges by the event, not the design, has always discouraged virtue; yet Smith argues Nature implanted this irregularity for human happiness. If resentment ran as high against bad wishes as bad deeds.
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
Fortune diminishes merit when laudable intentions fail and demerit when blamable ones do. The friend who procures an office outranks the friend who only solicits it. Failed crimes are judged lighter than landed ones, though the design was the same.
Key Insight
We know the design was equal. We still feel more affection, and more blame, for the result that arrived.
Chapter 23
Of the extent of this influence of fortune. The effect of this influence of fortune is, first, to diminish our sense of the merit or demerit of those actions which arose from the most laudable or blamable intentions, when they fail of producing their proposed effects: and, secondly, to increase our sense of the merit or demerit of actions, beyond what is due to the motives or affections from which they proceed, when they accidentally give occasion either to extraordinary pleasure or pain. 1. First, I say, though the intentions of any person should be ever so proper and beneficent,…
Public-domain chapter text, formatted for reading.
Think of someone you've judged recently—either positively or negatively. Write down what actually happened (the outcome) and what you think they were trying to do (their intention). Now imagine the same intention with the opposite outcome. Would you judge them differently? This exercise reveals how much results versus intentions drive your moral judgments.
Write about a time when you were judged unfairly based on an outcome you couldn't control. How did it feel, and how might understanding outcome bias help you handle similar situations in the future?
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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.
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