When Society Shapes Your Moral Compass — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

If custom and fashion govern judgments of beauty, Smith asks whether they govern moral sentiment as well. Their influence is similar but weaker: no habit reconciles us to Nero or Claudius, for approbation rests on the strongest passions and cannot be wholly perverted. Where custom coincides with natural right and wrong it refines delicacy; where it surrounds vice, enormity is dulled. Those bred among justice and humanity are more shocked by inconsistency; those reared amid falsehood and violence lose sense of dreadful guilt and treat corruption as the way of the world.

Fashion too gives reputation to disorder. Under Charles II licentiousness marked the liberal gentleman; severity seemed puritanical cant. Superficial minds connect the vices of the great with splendour and supposed virtues of spirit; parsimony and rigid rule appear mean because they accompany inferior station in imagination. Custom assigns expected characters to profession and age: the clergyman should be grave, the soldier gay, though danger might suggest melancholy and the camp encourages dissipation as escape from fear of death. Long peace diminishes the distance between civil and military manners; officers without imminent danger lose the thoughtless gaiety their trade expects, and city guards appear ridiculous for resembling sober citizens.

Nations fix their golden mean of politeness and frugality by what is usual at home; civilized life cultivates humanity and permits franker expression of passion, while savage hardship cultivates self-command, dissimulation, and fury restrained beneath a calm countenance. The greatest perversion concerns particular usages, not general conduct. Greek infanticide, once begun in extremity and continued by custom, was defended even by philosophers speaking of public utility; uninterrupted habit can authorize what shocks plain humanity, though no society could subsist if ordinary behaviour matched such practices. Smith then opens Part VI. Two questions structure moral philosophy: wherein virtue consists, and by what faculty the mind prefers one conduct to another. Accounts of virtue reduce to propriety, prudence, or benevolence; each partial system captures a genuine aspect of nature, and Smith will test them against the sympathy developed throughout the work. The inquiry that follows is less a refutation of rivals than a demonstration of how far each principle of human nature reaches before it must be supplemented by another.