The Ancient Recipe for Balance — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith opens his survey of systems that make virtue consist in propriety with Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. Plato treats the soul as a little commonwealth: reason governs; irascible passions defend dignity; concupiscible appetites seek bodily ease. Prudence is clear discernment of ends; fortitude follows when the spirited part obeys reason in danger; temperance is harmony among the three; justice is each faculty confined to its office. Plato's extended sense of justice comprehends abstention from harm, distributive beneficence, and exact propriety of esteem toward every object, including poems and pictures. His account coincides with Smith's analysis of conduct suited to circumstance.

Aristotle places virtue in the habit of mediocrity according to right reason: courage lies between cowardice and rashness, frugality between avarice and profusion. A single generous action does not make a generous man; a single crime shakes confidence in one usually regular. Against Plato's intellectualism Aristotle insists that inveterate habit, not conviction alone, constitutes moral life: passion may defeat doubtful opinion, but not plain judgment, only repeated action reshapes character.

Zeno ranks objects of choice by nature's scale; perfect rectitude is living according to nature. The wise man prefers health, friendship, and public prosperity yet submits to sickness, loss, and death when the order of the whole requires it; Epictetus's foot illustrates the part that must sometimes be mired for the body's sake. Stoics demand apathy where Peripatetics allow measured passion, yet submission of private interest to the whole derives its propriety from sympathetic comparison with mankind. Clarke, Wollaston, and Shaftesbury offer modern variants on the same theme. All describe virtue truly so far as propriety goes, but propriety is never the sole ingredient: beneficence deserves recompense beyond approbation, injury provokes resentment beyond disapprobation, and beneficent motives that fall short of due strength appear imperfect rather than merely imprudent. Smith's impartial spectator unites what these systems separate by showing how spectators measure both fit of passion to object and desert of reward or punishment. Where propriety theories stop at internal order, Smith's account explains why spectators feel a warmer esteem for beneficence and a sharper hatred for malice than propriety alone would predict.