When Your Body Betrays Your Image — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith opens with a rule of decorum: strong passions born of the body's state should not be displayed openly because others cannot share them. Violent hunger and voracious eating are indecent; sexual passion, though lawful, must never be expressed strongly in company. We feel some sympathy with hunger in siege narratives or with gendered social expectation, yet we loathe bodily appetites chiefly because we cannot enter them once satisfied; the charm vanishes for the person who felt it.

Bodily pain receives still less fellow-feeling. We may wince at a blow aimed at another, but loud complaint under torture invites contempt because sympathy cannot match the sensation. Passions arising from imagination, such as disappointed love or ruined ambition, move us more readily since our minds can mold themselves to another's thoughts. A lost leg is a graver real evil than a lost mistress, yet tragedy trades in romantic distress because imagined anguish outlasts physical pain in memory.

Pain stirs lively sympathy mainly when danger accompanies it; gout and toothache move us little, while threatening disease moves us greatly. Novelty intensifies revulsion at surgery, though habit dulls it. Greek tragedy's bodily agonies interest us only through solitude, death, or surrounding circumstance, not the ache itself. Constancy under torture therefore wins admiration: the sufferer keeps time with our natural indifference, and approbation heightened by wonder becomes applause.