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Adam Smith
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Smith defines moral propriety through concord between a person's original passion and the spectator's sympathetic response. When resentment, grief, admiration, or laughter in another matches what we would feel on bringing the case home to ourselves, we approve it as just and suitable; disproportionate feeling appears improper. Approving opinions and approving passions are the same operation: we adopt what coincides with our own sentiments and reject what does not. His standard is blunt: every faculty in one person measures the like faculty in another.
Experience also supplies conditional sympathy when present mood blocks full feeling. We may approve a jest we do not laugh at because we know we would on most occasions, or a stranger's grief at a father's death while occupied elsewhere, because we know that with time and attention we would share it. General rules drawn from past cases correct our immediate emotions when they would otherwise misfire.
Smith then separates how we judge a passion from its cause and from its effects. Excessive love, grief, or resentment is blamed both for harmful outcomes and for weak occasion: the favorite is not worth it, the misfortune not so dreadful, the provocation not so extraordinary. Propriety in the first sense is measured only by the correspondent affection in ourselves, and we have no other route to judging what fits.
We often call people dramatic when we have not imagined their situation vividly enough to feel what they feel. Smith defines approval as sympathy that keeps time with another's passion, whether in grief or laughter.
Before you label a reaction excessive this week, ask what cause you might be underestimating because it has never happened to you.
Smith continues exploring this theme of emotional judgment, diving deeper into how we measure the appropriateness of feelings and the complex ways sympathy shapes our moral decisions Smith distinguishes two arenas of judgment. For impersonal objects such as beauty, mathematics, poetry, or another person's conduct viewed at a distance, agreement is easy and yields taste or good judgment; uncommon acuteness that leads our own.
What this chapter proves — the pattern beneath the scene
In this chapter, the lesson is Developing Moral Imagination.
The card below names the pattern this chapter proves — carry it with you into the original text.
Developing Moral Imagination
We approve emotions that match what we imagine we would feel in the same case. Too much grief or too little anger strikes us as improper because our simulated self in their shoes says so.
Key Insight
Moral judgment begins with an imaginative comparison. When someone's response seems off, you are measuring it against your projected self in their position.
Chapter 03
Of the manner in which we judge of the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men, by their concord or dissonance with our own. 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; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he finds that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the causes which excite them. To…
Public-domain chapter text, formatted for reading.
Think of someone whose emotional reactions often seem 'wrong' to you - maybe they get too upset about small things, or don't seem bothered by things that would anger you. Write a brief story explaining their reaction from their perspective, considering what experiences might have shaped their emotional scale differently than yours.
Write about a time when someone dismissed your emotional reaction as inappropriate. How did that feel? What did they miss about your experience that made the situation feel different to you than it would to them?
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