The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In an interview on Compassionate Conservatism

Your last choice was a bit of a surprise for me. I expected to see Adam Smith chosen by one of our panellists, but The Wealth of Nations, not his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and possibly the least read thing he ever wrote. It was written 17 years before The Wealth of Nations – but Adam Smith considered it his own greatest book. 

For me it was a close call. I felt my list probably accentuated the economic side of conservatism more than it should, but I love The Theory of Moral Sentiments and I read it every couple of years, because I know I don’t fully understand it and if I read it again I will get some new insight on it. For me the essential part of it is his description of human nature, that there really is inherent in every human being, a striving to win the favour of others by doing right things. I think it’s a complement to Wealth of Nations – I don’t think you can have a society as he describes in The Wealth of Nations, without also having understood the nature of human striving. Look, a young man who dropped out from Harvard, didn’t go to Albuquerque New Mexico in order to build a personal computer operating system in order to make ten gazillion dollars. He did it because he wanted to win the favour of others by doing something that he enjoyed, that he found stimulating and saw value and worth in, and the fact was he then made a gazillion dollars. 

Are we talking about Bill Gates?

Exactly. This is also why the impulse towards charity and service and love your neighbour as you’d like to be loved yourself is so important, because those moral strivings to win favour of those with whom we live, in the communities in which we exist, is a vital part of what it is to live in a free society. 

A lot of people are surprised by The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because Adam Smith’s reputation is as the high priest of individualism and self-interest. What he says in this book is that the real foundation of society is sympathy – the ability to imagine what others feel and to see ourselves as they see us. Are these insights as important as the insights about individualism/self-interest/entrepreneurship that we hear so much about? 

Absolutely. In fact, they have to go hand in hand. He is caricatured as the high priest of soulless, money-grubbing, uninterested, individualistic enterprise. Instead he says that that is truly soulless without the sympathy that we naturally feel towards those with whom we live. These two works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, are distilled quite well in Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. I picked my five in terms of what they did in forming my political and philosophical beliefs but, as an adult, one of the most powerful books that I’ve read is Michael Novak’s – in part because I was sensitised by having read these two previous volumes by Adam Smith. 

Today’s conservative movement has taken on board The Wealth of Nations. Do you think it’s adequately taken on board and come to grips with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the other side of Smith? 

As a political expression, no. But as a living expression, yes. Arthur Brooks, for example, made that interesting observation in one of his books, that conservatives of all income levels give more generously to philanthropic activity and implicitly give more of their personal time to charitable activity than do liberals of the same income level. Poor conservatives give more than poor liberals; rich conservatives give more than rich liberals. I think that says something about the accuracy of Smith’s observation. I think there is a natural tendency for conservatives to have a deeper sympathy for their neighbour, and to feel an obligation to take some of the fruits with which they’ve been blessed and provide them in support, and this is where it all fits together, through the associations that Tocqueville described. 

Yuval Levin, one of our other panellists, gave a lecture recently. He said American conservatives are very good at walking the walk of sympathy, but they need to get better at talking the talk of moral sympathy. Do you agree with that? 

I do. Look, compassionate conservatism was an attempt, in a political vein, to use the natural strength of conservatism and draw attention to this very attractive feature of conservatism. Being a conservative is fundamentally a compassionate philosophy. What is better to say to someone than, we want to construct a society in which you have every opportunity to achieve the best that you can possibly be in life and to be exactly what it is you want to be in life…

American conservatives tend to appear more self-serving and more self-interested than they need to? 

Exactly. 

In an interview on Human Traits Essential to Capitalism

You’ve started off with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (which, incidentally, was also one of Karl Rove’s top five, when he did an interview with us earlier this year).

It’s interesting that we have similar tastes – in that respect anyway.

Tell me why you chose it.

This is a remarkable book, because although in some cases it’s outdated, he has an interest in exposing human traits that are relevant to thinking about our daily lives, and he has, to me, a surprisingly insightful ability to do that. He doesn’t have any of the research methods of the modern social sciences; it’s all casual observation, and reading, I suppose, of other people and literature. But there are observations and conclusions in there that I never had before. They’re focused on a purpose, which is understanding how our society works and how people get a sense of mission, of purpose, that somehow makes things work as well as they do.

Can you give a particular example of a trait where you thought, ‘Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before, but he’s so right’?

Well, if you put it that way, it’s going to be disappointing – because your readers will say, "Yes I had thought of that before!" It’s a personal thing. But the thing he starts the book off with is sympathy. He uses the word sympathy – and he’s really focused on selfishness versus social consciousness. He sees that sometimes people are completely selfish, and that’s the problem for any economic theory – how to make a society work when people are completely, unremittingly selfish.

But he also notes something else: He doesn’t use the word empathy, because empathy hadn’t been defined yet. But it’s a very important observation about human behaviour, which is that we are wired to feel each other’s emotions and to have a theory of other people’s minds (not that he would have used the words wired or theory of mind either). The English word empathy was coined around 1900, in a translation of the German word Einfühlung from a German book by psychologist Theodor Lipps. What it means is that it’s not that I feel bad because I observe that you are suffering, it means I actually feel your feelings. So people may often be selfish, but they also have empathy.

Smith also talks about a selfish passion, which is a desire for praise. He argues that people instinctively desire praise, but that, as they mature, this feeling develops into a desire for praiseworthiness. This is a little bit different, and I haven’t seen it written about anywhere else. He points out that, suppose you were praised for something that you knew you didn’t do: It was a mistake, people thought you did something, so they’re praising you, but in fact you didn’t do it. It wouldn’t be such a good feeling – even if you could keep the lie going, and continue to receive the praise. He uses that to show that what people really want is to be deservedly praised. And that turn of mind, which develops as people mature, is what makes us into people with integrity.

I think this underlies how the economy works. We start out with selfish feelings, which are intermixed with feelings of empathy for others, and then we develop this mature desire to be praiseworthy. I think it is central to our civilisation that people do that. Adam Smith uses the example of mathematicians. Mathematicians seem to be, in his observation, totally unconcerned with popular praise. That’s because they know they’re doing good work in their mathematics, but also that the public will never appreciate them for what they do. They live in relative poverty, and they don’t seem to care about praise, except from their fellow mathematicians. And yet they’re doing all of this work which benefits humanity. This is something that happens in our society, and it makes the system work. He doesn’t go on, in this book, to explain how this develops into something that works. But this does mark the beginning of the thought process leading to his later book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.

Doesn’t The Wealth of Nations focus more on the negative aspects of human nature – the self-interest as opposed to the sympathy?

I didn’t see a contradiction between the two books. The Wealth of Nations is realistic about human behaviour and argues that a reasonably free enterprise system works well because it combines the different, sometimes conflicting passions of man, into something that is well-directed.

Isn’t Theory of Moral Sentiments also the book where Adam Smith first uses the term ‘invisible hand’?

I once did a search for the "invisible hand", and it was actually used before Adam Smith, but not in an economic context. I think Adam Smith was just using an expression of his time. I wouldn’t attach a whole lot of importance to it. My recent book with George Akerlof is Animal Spirits, and we say Keynes used that term. But he used it in a totally offhand manner. Everyone was using it; any literary person knew that expression.