Adam Smith, long embalmed in the marbled halls of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical canon, is that rare thing—a thinker whose shadow, centuries long, still obscures our very capacity to question why we stand in it. "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759), for all its celebrated subtlety, promises to ground morality not in divine decree nor rational command, but in the beating, feeling heart—the natural operation of sympathy. No icy God, no metaphysical edicts: only the warm circulation of fellow-feeling, regulated, so Smith would have us believe, by that most trustworthy of inner chaperones, the “impartial spectator.”

The modern reader—anxious to escape both dogma and metaphysical fantasy—may at first find Smith’s naturalism intoxicating. Here, finally, is an ethics for the secular age: human, psychological, and, if you squint, almost scientific. Yet look closer and the façade cracks, revealing an edifice that is at once elegant and hollow, brilliant and breathtakingly naïve. For Smith’s sentimentalism, while artfully constructed, is a theory uniquely unsuited to provide either critical distance or ethical traction. Its enduring popularity says more about our institutional and ideological investments than about its intrinsic merit.

Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments claims that morality is born not of abstract reason nor divine edict, but of our capacity to imaginatively transpose ourselves into the situation of others. This is sympathy—not mere empathy, but a sophisticated psychological operation, by which we simulate another’s emotional state and, finding a “correspondence” between our sentiments and theirs, deliver judgment. This, Smith asserts, is how we judge propriety (is the agent’s feeling fitting?) and merit (does the action deserve gratitude or resentment?). Justice and virtue, so it seems, are products of this double-entry bookkeeping of feeling.

Smith’s masterstroke—his “impartial spectator”—is no ordinary bystander but an idealised inner judge, progressively abstracted from our own self-interest and local bias. Morality is achieved when we internalise this spectral audience, so that our actions are governed not by immediate feeling or habit, but by the imagined gaze of an impartial conscience. This “spectator within the breast” becomes, for Smith, both the regulator and the source of moral facts—a constructivist realism avant la lettre.

Yet even in its most sophisticated rendering, Smith’s machinery is less a compass than a weather vane: exquisitely sensitive to the prevailing winds of social sentiment, but lacking any principled anchor when those winds turn foul.

To understand Smith’s distinctiveness, one must wade through a genealogy of failed alternatives, each of which sharpens the outline of his sentimentalist proposal. Unlike Hume, who sees morality as mere projection—“gilding and staining” objects with subjective sentiment—Smith seeks to give sentiment a form of objectivity: moral facts are not just our feelings, but those feelings as they would be judged by a properly situated, ideal observer. This is no Humean projectivism, nor is it Hutcheson’s “moral sense,” which posits an innate, infallible faculty for virtue. For Smith, there is no faculty, no sixth sense; only the social and imaginative process by which we regulate, refine, and universalise our responses.

Contrast this with intuitionism (Moore, Ross): here, moral facts are grasped directly, self-evident to reason—a fantasy of rational immediacy that Smith rejects. Haidt’s social intuitionism, meanwhile, sees moral judgment as fast, automatic, and tribal, whereas Smith’s impartial spectator aspires to correction, to the possibility of rising above local custom through imaginative abstraction.

Virtue ethics? Smith borrows the language of character and propriety, but unlike Aristotle, he grounds neither in telos nor tradition, but in the “fit” of sentiment as seen by the internalised observer. Even his universalisation is sui generis: not the stern categorical imperative of Kant, but a cultivated, aspirational generality achieved through social imagination. No reference to Platonic forms or categorical reason—only the endless adjustment of fellow-feeling, made plausible by the possibility (never quite realised) of the genuinely impartial gaze.

In sum, Smith’s sentimentalism is a high-wire act: morality as social construction, regulated and universalised through abstraction, imaginative rather than habitual, yet always one step away from collapsing into the prejudices of the age.

It is in the tension between theory and text—between the promises of impartiality and the realities of Smith’s own pronouncements—that the edifice totters. The impartial spectator, for all its sophistication, is circular: its authority depends on a process of social abstraction that presupposes the very standards it claims to discover. In practice, it is not a universal lawgiver, but the internalised voice of the prevailing social order—bourgeois, commercial, decorous.

Here, Smith’s notorious conservatism becomes unavoidable. Emotional restraint is valorised: “pain never calls for lively sympathy,” and even mild expressions of discomfort are deemed “improper,” a “rudeness to the whole company.” Suffering is subordinated to decorum. Justice, for Smith, is not the redress of wrong but the avoidance of public shame. Remorse, in his telling, is not the agony of ethical self-discovery but the anticipation of social exclusion—a morality for the clubbable, not the oppressed.

It is precisely this feature that makes Smith much closer to Confucius than to Aristotle. For Smith, as for Confucius, moral order is emergent rather than essentialist—not grounded in a fixed metaphysical telos but arising from the dynamic interplay of social expectations and practices. Smith’s idea of “propriety” directly mirrors the Confucian emphasis on li (ritual, decorum). Neither system centers the rational, autonomous agent as the seat of virtue; instead, Smith’s impartial spectator is an explicitly imagined other—a social and dialogical construct, akin to the Confucian “mirror” of family, society, and ancestors.

The result is a theory uniquely adept at rationalising hierarchy and preserving the status quo. The “admiration of the rich and powerful” is, by Smith’s own admission, “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments”—and yet, this admiration is recast as a necessity for social order. Historical atrocities, such as infanticide in ancient Greece, are met not with moral outrage but with the bland equanimity of the spectator. Even patriotism, in Smith’s hands, is a vector for uncritical loyalty, unable to account for principled dissent or the imperative to resist unjust authority.

One sees here not only the limitations of sentimentalism, but its perverse genius as a handmaiden of political stability: what matters is not what is right, but what is acceptable to the club; not justice, but propriety; not transformation, but reassurance.

The sentimentalist tradition is not short of critics, and Smith, despite his centrality, fares poorly by their lights. Modern expressivists (Blackburn, Gibbard) point out that if moral judgments merely express attitudes, the machinery of moral science collapses: we can explain, but never justify. The Frege-Geach problem—how can expressions of sentiment function in logical argument?—renders Smith’s project not only unstable but semantically incoherent.

Kant’s thunderous objection is, if anything, even more fatal. Morality, he insists, cannot be grounded in the accidents of psychology. The impartial spectator, for all its abstraction, is never abstract enough: it cannot escape the grip of history, society, and interest. True moral law requires autonomy, not heteronomy; the universal, not the club.

Nietzsche, that arch-diagnostician of values, would have no trouble unmasking the impartial spectator as the avatar of bourgeois timidity—a morality of the herd, systematised as the natural order of things. MacIntyre would diagnose in Smith the fragmentary fate of all Enlightenment ethics: a loss of tradition, a hollowing out of “thick” concepts, a reduction of moral judgment to the shuffling of disembedded sentiments.

Feminist and postcolonial theorists extend the assault. Smith’s “impartiality” is revealed as the abstraction of masculine, European, and commercial values, masquerading as universality. Care ethics exposes the limits of spectatorial distance; postcolonial critique uncovers the imperialism of “universal sympathy.” Wittgenstein, meanwhile, would remind us that moral language is not reducible to any one function; it is as diverse as the forms of life it inhabits.

At the heart of these critiques is a deeper meta-philosophical challenge: Smith confuses the psychological explanation of moral judgment with its justification. He commits Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, mistaking “is” for “ought,” and enshrines as universal what is only local, contingent, and convenient. His system is not a foundation but a house of mirrors: endlessly reflecting the prejudices of the present as the truths of human nature.

Why, then, does Smith endure? The answer is as much sociological as philosophical. Economics departments need a “moral philosopher of capitalism”—a founding myth to sanctify the market’s invisible hand. Anglo-American philosophy, meanwhile, maintains a Smith “industry,” an academic ecosystem that rewards the endless exegesis of paradox and inconsistency.

More importantly, Smith offers the liberal order a precious gift: the story that our institutions are not contingent, not political, but natural outgrowths of universal sentiment. Sympathy becomes the alibi for hierarchy; the impartial spectator, the mask of justice worn by the market. The prestige of Smith is not a measure of his philosophical acuity, but of our hunger for comforting narratives: procedural impartiality in place of substantive justice, sophistication in place of transformation.

There is also the philosophical evasion: Smith allows us to avoid the metaphysical hard choices of realism, intuitionism, or tradition. His sentimentalism is the comfortable middle ground, the “third way” that promises moral traction without metaphysical vertigo. The result is a theory that is both infinitely adaptable and utterly toothless.

The weaknesses of Smith's sentimentalism are most visibly on display in economics, where his legacy is deployed to both defend and critique capitalism. Free-market fundamentalists elevate the invisible hand from Wealth of Nations to a quasi-providential arbiter, treating it as the ultimate spectator: a divine deus ex machina that ensures collective good emerges even when human sympathy fails. Reformist critics, by contrast, selectively invoke the Theory of Moral Sentiments to claim that markets can be rendered humane if guided by sympathy, portraying Smith as the ultimate social conscience of capitalism.

This dual appropriation exposes the logic of sentimental opinionism. Each camp reads Smith through the lens of its own convictions: free-marketers see the invisible hand confirm market self-regulation; reformists discover their welfarist commmitments reflected in moral sentiment. In both cases, particular cultural biases are elevated to claims of universal legitimacy, transforming contingent social preferences into purportedly objective moral authority.

The popular mobilisation of Smith is not misapplication but the inevitable consequence of his theory. Since the impartial spectator is culturally constituted, it cannot escape the assumptions of those who invoke it. As a result, Smith provides procedural sophistication without substantive critique: social sentiment, dressed as universal principle, legitimates existing arrangements while displacing serious moral inquiry. Far from providing objective standards, Smith offers an elaborate mechanism for confirming whatever a community already believes—a philosophically worthless but ideologically potent exercise in moral self-congratulation.

Smith’s sentimentalism is a masterwork of philosophical ingenuity—but also a monument to the dangers of abstraction without critique. It offers not the universal, but the perpetually local; not justice, but decorum; not the challenge of moral life, but the consolation of the club.

The true task of moral philosophy is not to polish the sentiments of polite society, but to expose and transcend the conventions that sustain injustice and mediocrity. Sentiment, for all its warmth, is no substitute for justice; sympathy, for all its psychological plausibility, is no legitimacy for power. It is time to leave Smith behind and return to the real work of ethics: the pursuit not of what is acceptable to the club, but what is worthy of humanity. Until then, the shadow of Smith will linger—a comfort to the powerful, a sedative for the rest.

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