When Reason Rules Our Hearts — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith examines the doctrine that reason is the original principle of approbation. Hobbes had made civil obedience the measure of right; opponents replied that the mind must possess antecedent notions of right and wrong, and that reason distinguishes moral fit from unfit as it distinguishes truth from falsehood. Cudworth showed that law itself presupposes the ideas it is said to create.

Smith grants that reason is the source of general moral maxims. We observe what pleases or displeases our moral faculties, inductively form rules, and regulate judgment by them when immediate feeling would be variable. In this sense virtue may be said to consist in conformity to reason. Yet it is absurd to suppose that first perceptions of right and wrong in particular cases arise from reason. Whatever is agreeable or disagreeable for its own sake must be so to immediate sense and feeling; reason can show means to ends, not render an object intrinsically pleasing.

If virtue necessarily pleases and vice displeases for its own sake, the original distinction belongs to sentiment, not to deduction. Dr. Hutcheson first separated with precision what in moral judgment belongs to reason and what to immediate feeling; Smith endorses that division. The determination of this second question, he adds, is of great speculative but little practical importance: how approbation arises does not alter what, in particular cases, we ought to approve.