Smith's Claims About Joy and Corruption of Moral Sentiments

By

 It was an interesting experience to re-read Adam Smith's account of moral sentiments with a clearer understanding of the other philosophies we discussed this semester. (I think Henry does a fantastic job of highlighting the differences between Hobbes's and Smith's accounts!) 

While I do find Smith's extended discussions about the various passions of man and the degrees to which these passions are (un)conducive to sympathy, I cannot help but ponder the seeming discrepancy between his claims about the passion joy and his conclusions made about the corruption of moral sentiments. Perhaps one of my colleagues can help me reconcile them.

In Section II, Ch. V, Smith describes joy as a passion of "middle place" (35) between the sets of social and unsocial passions he described earlier. He claims that "we are generally most disposed to sympathize with small joys" (35), arguing that one who experiences a "sudden revolution of fortune" (35) stirs envy amongst his peers. Hence, it becomes difficult to sympathize with the joy he experiences as a result of his fortune. Smith extends his argument with the claim that "he is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness" (36) and that the smaller joys that accompany this gradual process are much easier to sympathize with. 

Is this not inherently contradictory to his claim that man has a "disposition to admire...the rich and the great" (56)? It can be derived from his description of "the rich and great" (56) that such people find joy in their fortunes as they continue to "endeavor" (56) to attain such fortunes. While Smith recognizes that these people are "always most miserably disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy in it" (57) after attaining greatness, I argue that it would be unreasonable to assume that they were not joyous in the process, presumably when they did not succumb to "remembrance" (57) of their deeds. Returning to Smith's point that smaller joys are easier to sympathize with, I argue that perhaps one way in which Smith can reconcile these two parts of his theory is to clearly characterize "the rich and great" (56) as those who become rich and great via a gradual process. 

Overall, I believe that my unwillingness to accept Smith's argument about the corruption of moral sentiments is largely rooted in his failure to substantiate his claim that man's "disposition [is] to admire the rich and the great" (53). Is this claim valid when we clearly have the ability to not only sympathize with others but also discern situations in which our degrees of sympathy should be adjusted? 

Comments

  1. Henry LongFebruary 9, 2023 at 8:42 AM

    From Muthu:

    That's a good question. When Smith talked about man's tendency to admire "the rich and great" (56), I interpreted it as man's tendency to admire the success story, and successful people. Through this lens, this point actually strengthens his earlier point about the need for men to gradually ascend to greatness, since it seems that we readily look up to people who ascend to greatness through small victories and long labor.

    However, your question stands. Just as often as we hear people admiring success stories, we hear them deride the rich. This derision and envy seems to usually come from a feeling that the rich "didn't earn" their wealth, or didn't work for it.

    Perhaps both of Smith's observations ring true in human life. It'll be interesting to examine the conditions under which each attitude towards rich people prevails.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul HurleyFebruary 9, 2023 at 10:56 AM

    Really cool point upon which to focus. Notice that the first passage deals with the sudden good fortune of someone -- they win the lottery, and suddenly are not among you, but above you. The second passage deals primarily with established, class wealth. It is the aristocracy that gets a hall pass, on Smith's view. Are these passages in tension, then, or can we appeal to context to reconcile them into a coherent view?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Livia: Táíwò and Economic Success in the Global South

By
  Reconsidering Reparations by Professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò illuminates the large extent to which racism and colonialism played in creating the current global economic structure, in which the global north dominates the global south. Additionally, this book highlights how current policies implemented by global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have further strengthened and reaffirmed this positioning. Taking into account this global historical perspective, we can better understand how “consequences flow from some other parts of the world to other parts, often across national borders, and in ways that complicate geographically and politically narrow ways of thinking about reparations” (24). Thus, some sort of international obligation of social justice must be exist. Táíwò’s emphasis on the role that slavery and colonialism played in establishing the current economic order makes me think about the signal which this sends to the Global South in the development of their p...
Read more

Carlos: Response to Henry's Conclusion

By
I've spent way too long trying to argue against Henry's point because it just seems wrong to conclude with "there is no current social framework by which we might call their lasting effects socially unjust–at least under the political conception of justice". Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I had to agree with Henry's argument regardless of how strange it felt to do so. Still, I did have a few ideas as I was thinking of how to refute Henry's conclusion: -------------------------------------------- 1) With the hypothetical situation Henry provides, if we were to fully extend its logic to our current world, I think Prof. Hurley would have also created a division between the A and B group that would have maintained even into Tuesday. I think were that division were to have taken place, even after Prof. Hurley disbanded the government, the division would have remained and the hierarchy of power would continue into the rest of the week. It seems fa...
Read more

Smith, Locke, Harris, and Justice

By
 On page 79, Smith writes, "the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons," and thus it is a virtue that, unlike beneficence, warrants resentment if we fail to fulfill it. Upon reading this, I immediately thought, well how are you defining justice?  It became very clear in the following pages that Smith's conception of justice is nearly identical to Locke's Law of Nature. On page 80, he writes, "Among equals each individual is naturally, and antecedent to the institution of civil government , regarded as having a right both to defend himself from injuries, and to exact a certain degree of punishment for those which have been done to them." He continues to say that justice is only those transgressions which spectators would have the right to, and would be compelled to, punish whoever commits them. After this, he explains that no one has a right to advance their own happiness at the expense of someone else's...
Read more