When Self-Interest Masquerades as Virtue — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith reviews systems that derive moral approbation from self-love. Hobbes and his followers hold that society is necessary for security; whatever supports it is remotely advantageous to each member, so virtue pleases as the polish that keeps the social machine running smoothly. This political view, Smith grants, lends probability to the theory yet cannot be the ground of the approbation we already feel when applauding Cato or condemning Catiline in remote ages.

Those authors, he suggests, were groping toward indirect sympathy with the gratitude or resentment of persons affected by conduct, imagining what we might gain or suffer were we to live with such characters. Sympathy is not selfish: when I condole with your loss, I do not ask what I would feel in my own profession, but what I would feel were I really you, changing persons as well as circumstances. A man may sympathize with a woman in childbirth though the passion cannot be his.

The whole account of human nature that deduces sentiments from self-love, Smith concludes, seems to arise from confused misapprehension of sympathy. Self-love may often be a virtuous motive of action; the question is whether the desire to be honourable and the proper object of esteem can properly be called vanity. That distinction, developed against Mandeville in the preceding chapter, completes the rebuttal begun here.