The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

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The Enlightenment of Sympathy

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF SYMPATHY Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

MICHAEL L. FRAZER

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frazer, Michael L., 1978– The Enlightenment of sympathy : justice and the moral sentiments in the eighteenth century and today / Michael L. Frazer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-539066-7 1. Political science—Europe—History—18th century. 2. Enlightenment. 3. Sentimentalism—Political aspects—History—18th century. 4. Emotions (Philosophy) —History—18th century. 5. Ethics, Modern—18th century. 6. Reason—History—18th century. I. Title. JC171.F73 2010 320.01—dc22 2009041540

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began life as a dissertation, defended at Princeton in June of 2006. Acknowledgements are due first and foremost to my dissertation committee: Stephen Macedo, Jeffrey Stout, Charles Beitz, and Alan Patten. I have also benefited from the many suggestions of Princeton faculty outside the committee—including Jonathan Allen, R. Douglas Arnold, Patrick Deneen, Gilbert Harman, Tali Mendelberg, Sankar Muthu, Josiah Ober, Phillip Pettit, Jennifer Pitts, Tamsin Shaw, Karen Stenner, Paul Sigmund, Peter Singer, David Sussman, and Maurizio Viroli. I am especially indebted to George Kateb, my advisor until his retirement, and still a source of inspiration. I owe just as much to my friends and colleagues among Princeton’s graduate alumni. Eric Beerbohm, Corey Brettschneider, Pamela Bromley, David Erdos, Denise Dutton, Katie Gallagher, John Holzwarth, Nathaniel Klemp, John Lombardini, Susan McWilliams, Danielle Shani, Prerna Singh, Ethan Schoolman, Simon Stacey, Jack Turner, Ian Ward, Micah Watson, James Wilson, Alex Zakaras, and Mariah Zeisberg all deserve particular acknowledgment. Thanks also go to Monica Selinger and all the Politics Department support staff. During my fourth year at Princeton, my work was supported by a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship. Support in graduate school was also provided by the Institute for Humane Studies and the University Center for Human Values, the latter through both a Graduate Prize Fellowship and (thanks to the generosity of Amy Gutmann) through the Political Philosophy Graduate Student Research and Travel Fund. I am also indebted to the UCHV for bringing so many visiting fellows to campus who have helped with my work—including Kate Abramson, J. B. Schneewind, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Tracy Strong. Considerable credit goes to my undergraduate advisor at Yale University, Steven B. Smith, as well as the professors who first introduced me to Hume and Smith—William FitzPatrick and Norma Thompson, respectively. I also have to thank John Tomasi and the Political Theory Project at Brown University for their support during a 2006–7 post-doctoral fellowship. My v

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Acknowledgments

colleagues at Brown—including Jason Brennan, David Estlund, Charles Larmore, Adam Tebble, and, most of all, my fellow sentimentalist Sharon Krause—were wonderfully helpful. I have presented ideas from this book at a large number of conferences and seminars, and would like to thank all my fellow participants for their helpful suggestions—including, among many others, Paul Guyer, Ryan Hanley, Russell Hardin, Melvin Rogers, Eric Schliesser, Susan Shell, and Anna Stilz. I have also presented my work at more job talks than I would care to mention. Even when they declined to offer me a position, the faculties of all the institutions I visited made important suggestions for the improvement of my work. Since I have arrived at Harvard, the faculty, visitors, graduate students, and staff have all contributed a great deal to the final form this project has taken. I would particularly like to thank Aaron Garrett, Patti Lenard, Reidar Maliks, Harvey Mansfield, Eric Nelson, Nancy Rosenblum, Michael Rosen, Andrew Sabl, Michael Sandel, Dennis Thompson, Dana Villa, and, especially, Richard Tuck for their support and suggestions. In the final stages of the project, David McBride and the two anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press were extremely helpful, as was the volunteer research assistance provided by Cameron Johnstone. Dennis Rasmussen generously agreed to read the entire manuscript the week before it was sent to the publisher. Earlier versions of passages in the introduction and chapter 7 first appeared in my article “John Rawls: Between Two Enlightenments.” The final, definitive version of this article was published in Political Theory 35:6, December 2007, pp. 756–80 by SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. © SAGE Publications, Inc. Available at http://online.sagepub.com. Finally, I must give my greatest thanks to my family—my parents Allen and Martha, my brother Ben, and my wife Coral. I dedicate this work to Coral and our son Oren, who have taught me more about human sentiments than Hume or Smith ever could.

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Tale of Two Enlightenments, 3 1. Sentimentalism before Hume, 15 I. The New Science of Human Nature, 17 II. Religious and Metaphysical Foundations, 25 III. Theories of Justice, 34 2. Hume’s Free-Standing Sentimentalism, 40 I. Sympathy and the Moral Sentiments, 41 II. Moral Development, 46 III. Hume’s Normative Theory, 56 3. Hume’s Conservative Sentimentalism, 65 I. Hume’s Theory of Justice, 66 II. The Sentimentalist Case against Hume’s Theory, 76 4. Adam Smith’s Liberal Sentimentalism, 89 I. Sentimentalism and Individualism, 90 II. The Space between Actor and Spectator: Sympathy and Moral Judgment, 97 III. The Space between Actors: Justice and Natural Jurisprudence, 102 5. Kant’s Abandonment of Sentimentalism, 112 I. The Critical-Period Position on the Foundations of Morals, 114 II. The Critical-Period Normative Evaluation of Sympathy, 119 III. The Critical-Period Theory of Affects and Passions, 127 IV. A Contrasting Precritical Position, 132

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6. Herder’s Pluralist Sentimentalism, 139 I. Sentimentalism and the Problem of Diversity, 142 II. From Sympathy to Diversity, 147 III. From Diversity to Empathetic Understanding, 154 IV. From Empathetic Understanding to Justice, 160 7. Sentimentalism Today, 168 I. Sentimentalism and Social Science, 169 II. Sentimentalism and Normative Theory, 174 III. Sentimentalism and Political Practice, 178 Notes, 183 Bibliography, 213 Index, 229



Introduction A Tale of Two Enlightenments

1. The Reflective Revolution Human beings have a unique capacity for introspection, the ability to reflect upon their own thoughts and deeds. Pausing for moral reflection involves taking a step back from our habits of action as individuals, examining them, and determining whether we ought to continue as before. Political reflection involves taking such a perspective on the laws and institutions by which we govern our actions together. Moral and political philosophers pursue refined forms of reflection as a vocation, but all of us engage in reflection from time to time. Indeed, upon reflection, we often determine that we should all really take more time for reflection. Moral reflection can lead us to revise how we are currently leading our lives. Political reflection can lead us to revise how we are governing ourselves as a society. Both involve comparing how things are currently done to standards of how they ought to be done. In the political sphere, the relevant normative standards are commonly called standards of justice. Any law, institution, or political practice is liable to rejection upon reflection if we conclude that it is unjust. Our standards of justice and morality are then themselves subject to revision upon reflection, and then further revision upon further reflection. Eventually, we may reach the conclusion that some of our standards are unlikely to be revised much further. We then treat these standards as—at least tentatively—authoritative. In the inelegant language of recent philosophy, they become our considered convictions in reflective equilibrium.1 When we engage in reflection, we determine our own moral and political standards. When we insist on reflective freedom—on the right and responsibility of all to reflect for themselves—we insist on the importance of autonomy, or self-legislation. The political metaphor of autonomy—so common that we often forget that it is a political metaphor—is a product of the eighteenth-century. The political revolutions of that time were grounded in a notion of literal, collective self-legislation through republican governance. The intellectual revolution of the same period, known as the Enlightenment, 3

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uses the enactment of legitimate laws by a self-governing people as a metaphor for the determination of principles of justice and morality through individual reflection.2 According to this account, any law (even a legitimately enacted one) may be opposed as unjust if it conflicts with our considered convictions in reflective equilibrium. Kant’s motto “Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!” (WE 8:35) was the revolutionary slogan of the Enlightenment. Revolutionaries, however, always have trouble maintaining a united front. Not all Enlightenment thinkers interpreted Kant’s call for reflective autonomy as Kant himself did. The study of eighteenth-century moral and political thought reveals that there were in fact many competing Enlightenments, each with its own account of reflective autonomy. Although it is important not to oversimplify the intellectual diversity of the period, this book focuses on the contrast between two primary streams of eighteenth century analysis of moral and political reflection. The first, which I am calling rationalist, corresponds to our common conception of the eighteenth century as the “age of reason.” The second, which I am calling sentimentalist, suggests an age not of reason alone, but also of reflectively refined feelings shared among individuals via the all-important faculty of sympathy.3 This is not to say that every moral and political thinker of the Enlightenment can be easily classified as exclusively “rationalist” or “sentimentalist.” Many of the greatest thinkers of the period—most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau—evade such simple categorization. But there was clearly an ongoing debate in the eighteenth century over the nature of reflective autonomy—a debate in which many took an identifiably rationalist position and many others an identifiably sentimentalist one.4 Most of the major philosophers of the sentimentalist Enlightenment—such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith—were British, while many of the major rationalists of the period were French or German. It is important, however, not to confuse the distinction between the rationalist and sentimentalist Enlightenments with the distinctions that have been drawn among the various “national” Enlightenments.5 There were many rationalists in Britain—among them Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston, and Richard Price. There were also many sentimentalists on the continent, most notably J. G. Herder and, at least for a time, his teacher the precritical Immanuel Kant. Sentimentalism and rationalism should not be seen as national worldviews, but as competing positions on a single, trans-national debate central to the intellectual life of the eighteenth century—a debate on the nature of reflective autonomy that continues to this day. For better or worse, the heirs of the rationalist rather than the sentimentalist Enlightenment now dominate both philosophy and social science. Enlightenment sentimentalism has long been underappreciated by comparison with Enlightenment rationalism—as the very notion of the eighteenth

Introduction

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century as “the age of reason” will attest. Even philosophers today who are well aware of the centrality of moral sentimentalism to eighteenth-century intellectual life tend to define the Enlightenment in purely rationalist terms. John Rawls, for example, defines “Enlightenment liberalism” as a “comprehensive liberal and often secular doctrine founded on reason,” one capable of supporting political morality through a direct appeal to the rational faculties alone.6 Normative theorists and social scientists who are now rediscovering the importance of emotion in our moral and political lives have thus often been led to believe that they are refuting the philosophy of the Enlightenment, rather than lending support to one popular eighteenth-century view of reflective autonomy over another.7 This book is a reclamation and defense of the sentimentalist account of reflection. After a brief account of Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson in chapter 1, the book will focus on three of sentimentalism’s strongest defenders— David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder—as well as its single greatest rationalist critic: the older, critical-period Immanuel Kant. Although it consists primarily of the interpretation of centuries-old texts, this is not a work of intellectual history per se. My aim is not to trace the development of sentimentalism in its eighteenth-century context. Instead, I seek to reclaim the sentimentalist account of reflection as a resource for enriching political science, political philosophy, and political practice today, a resource often overlooked due to the widespread influence of the opposed rationalist account.

2. Competing Reflective Regimes Insofar as it has been treated as part of the Enlightenment at all, sentimentalism has long been seen as a purely destructive doctrine. According to this view, once the moral impotence of reason has been decisively established, one is left with no foundation for justice and morality other than mere feeling. Not only is this interpretation of sentimentalism’s negative position misleading, but it also neglects the most useful insights the sentimentalist Enlightenment has for today, all of which stem from its positive project: specifically, from its explication and defense of a particular conception of reflective autonomy. Although the rationalist and sentimentalist Enlightenments are united in their characteristically enlightened endorsement of such autonomy, they have different notions of what it means to legislate moral and political standards for oneself. They are divided on the nature of the self who is doing the legislating and the nature of the self who is obeying the standards so legislated. To use a Platonic locution, they disagree about the proper psychic regime. Rationalists separate the legislative faculties of the mind—identified as “reason”—from the faculties that obey. Sentimentalists, on the other hand, see the standards created in ethical reflection as products of the mind as a whole, and do not distinguish sovereign and subject aspects of the mind.

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Admittedly, this reading of sentimentalism as a kind of democratic egalitarianism of the soul is in sharp contrast to the standard interpretation of sentimentalist moral psychology. Hume in particular is conventionally read as advocating a psychic regime as fully hierarchical as that of his rationalist opponents. Under this reading, he disagrees with them only with regard to which faculties are to be sovereign and which are to be subject. While rationalists from Plato onward maintained that reason is rightly the master and passion rightly the slave, Hume famously counters that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” (T 2.3.3.4). But it will be argued in chapter 2 that this memorable bit of rhetoric distorts Hume’s true view. Although philosophers may rightly distinguish the operations of reason from those of passion, Hume consistently maintains that in reality the two are “uncompounded and inseparable” (T 3.2.2.14). It is true that Hume believes reason alone is powerless to motivate action; it is in this sense that reason is and ought to be passion’s slave. Yet the sentiments that Hume describes as motivating moral action are not merely passions, but products of the mind as a whole, reason and imagination included. It is from passion alone that these sentiments get their motivational impetus, but moral sentiments are much more than mere impetus. The contrast between rationalism and sentimentalism is therefore best understood as the contrast between a hierarchical view of the moral soul on the one hand, and an egalitarian view on the other—an egalitarian view in which normatively authoritative standards are the product of an entire mind in harmony with itself. Despite their hierarchical view of the proper psychic regime, Enlightenment-era rationalists considered their theory to be one of reflective autonomy. This was possible because they identified themselves with the sovereign, legislative faculty and not with the subject faculties that obey its legislation. Although the other features of the mind and personality are plagued by contingency, reason deals only with necessary truths. Although my emotion, imagination, and memory are all part of causal nexuses both natural and social, my reason is free. If I am to think of myself as free from natural and social contingency, Enlightenment rationalists maintained that I must think of my true self as purely rational. If my actions and my standards of action are to be truly my own, they maintained that it is this real self that must be sovereign, legislating standards in reflection and dictating behavior in practice. And since the true self is identified with a single faculty we are all held to share, the true self of all individuals is fundamentally the same. Sentimentalism, by contrast, adopts a different attitude toward contingency, and identifies the true self with the whole self, contingent social and psychological elements included. Unlike some of the more extreme rationalists of ancient times, Kant and his Enlightenment-era allies rarely denied that social and psychological contingencies are responsible for much of our behavior. Rather than seek to

Introduction

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extirpate the power of contingency from human life, they instead sought to bring all contingent forces under rational control, so that these forces guide us to the very same standards and practices that reason necessarily and authoritatively demands. Even if my norms or behavior are the product of nonrational social and psychological factors, if these contingent forces have been made to comply with the dictates of my better, noncontingent self, then this behavior is rationally justified. The Enlightenment-era rationalist position is generally Platonic, not Stoic; the passions are not to be banished from the psychic regime, but are to obey their superiors, and keep to their proper place. The duties of their station involve keeping quiet during the purely rational process of proper moral and political reflection, and then obeying the rationally authoritative principles that emerge.

3. The Normative and the Descriptive The competing reflective regimes offered by rationalism and sentimentalism can be understood to combine two distinct elements. To use Hume’s most famous distinction, they both offer a theory of what “is” and a theory of what “ought to be”—a descriptive moral psychology that explains what goes on when we engage in moral and political reflection and a normative theory that explains why the standards we reach through such reflection must be treated as authoritative. While sentimentalism describes reflection as a matter of feeling and imagination as well as cognition, rationalism describes reflection as a matter of rational cognition alone. While sentimentalism understands normativity as stemming from the peace and satisfaction of a mind able to bear its own holistic survey, rationalism sees normativity as authoritative legislation by the faculty of reason—here identified with our true, autonomous self. The disagreements between rationalists and sentimentalists within the respective fields of descriptive psychology and normative theory imply a further disagreement about the relationship between these two fields. The sentimentalist Enlightenment can therefore provide normative theorists and empirical psychologists today with a program for their fruitful collaboration that differs markedly from the model of interdisciplinarity suggested by the dominant tradition of Enlightenment rationalism. Although Hume is widely thought to have insisted on the strict separation of empirical description from normative evaluation, the empirical study of moral and political phenomena is actually central to his normative philosophical project, as it is for all Enlightenment sentimentalists.8 Of course, before the emergence of full academic specialization in the twentieth century, all moral and political philosophers—rationalists and sentimentalists alike—were also social scientists. The distinction between philosophy and science was unknown in the

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Enlightenment; in the eighteenth century, these terms were used more or less interchangeably. Yet the relationship between empirical and normative theory takes a different form among Enlightenment-era sentimentalists than it does among their rationalist contemporaries. The rationalists begin with normative theory—discovering valid moral principles on the basis of reason alone—and only then turn to empirical investigation to determine how imperfect, real-world creatures such as ourselves may be better brought in line with reason’s authoritative demands. Sentimentalists, however, begin where rationalists end—with the empirical investigation of what actually leads real-world human beings to follow the norms that they do. Sentimentalists describe these norms as the outcome of our moral sentiments, products of the mind as a whole. The faculty of sympathy is central to their descriptive etiology of these moral sentiments. Sympathy is the bridge between the social and the psychological, the faculty by which inner mental states are shared among individuals. So the empirical social-psychology of reflection offered by sentimentalism can be understood largely in terms of the reflective expansion and correction of our sympathetic bonds to our fellow human beings. In contrast to the picture of legislative reason offered by rationalism, sentimentalism here offers a richer account of the process by which we search for reflective equilibrium. Specifically, sentimentalism offers an empirically grounded sociology and psychology of moral and political reflection that focuses on the key social-psychological faculty of sympathy. Yet the sentimentalist account of reflection is not merely descriptive. Of course, no account of the development of our moral psychology could ever, by itself, justify our moral commitments. To believe otherwise is to confuse an empirical explanation of the origins of a value commitment with a demonstration of its genuine normative authority, to mistake statements of what is for statements of what ought to be in precisely the way that Hume so famously warned against. Yet once we accept a sufficiently sentimentalist description of our moral psychology—one that sees our moral commitments as reflective outgrowths of basic human emotions of which we all heartily approve—a distinctively sentimentalist method for normatively justifying these commitments immediately presents itself. John Rawls imagines a contemporary reader faulting Hume’s ethics for being nothing more than descriptive moral psychology. Yet to maintain such a position, Rawls argues, is to seriously misunderstand Hume. Focusing on the conclusion of the Treatise, Rawls instead interprets Hume as maintaining “that his science of human nature . . . shows that our moral sense is reflectively stable: that is, that when we understand the basis of our moral sense—how it is connected with sympathy and the propensities of human nature, and the rest—we confirm it.” 9

Introduction

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The sentimentalists know that we not only approve and disapprove of our individual actions and our shared political practices, but also of our own sentiments of approval and disapproval. Sometimes, our moral sentiments are premised on unfounded beliefs, and can therefore be rejected as irrational. Yet even when there is no rational error in our moral judgment, we sometimes still disapprove of our own moral sentiments—not as irrational, but as immoral. The fact that we can have higher-order moral sentiments—that we can approve or disapprove of our own approval and disapproval—allows for a process of reflection in which the mind as a whole repeatedly turns on itself, winnowing out those sentiments that cannot bear reflective survey. As the mind turns in on itself through the process of reflection, the moral sentiments must bear the test of close scrutiny, and may be revised or rejected if they are found wanting. This test is sometimes directly reflexive. Our set of moral sentiments, if internally contradictory, may lead us to disapprove morally of some or all of these very sentiments themselves. However, it can also be reflective in a broader way. For example, our moral sentiments may be rejected if they are grounded on premises found to be false upon rational inquiry, or if they make it impossible to achieve happiness.10 As the mind as a whole repeatedly turns in on itself, reflection leads us through a gradual progress of moral sentiments, as more and more of our contingently given convictions are revised on both directly reflexive and broadly reflective grounds. Only those moral sentiments that have endured when we reach reflective equilibrium can be treated as authoritative. Only they can play a role in a truly happy human life. Hume, Smith, and their fellow sentimentalists thus stand in direct opposition to Hobbes, Mandeville, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the other reductive debunkers of morality who often dominate discussions of descriptive moral psychology. These debunkers have led many modern thinkers, Rawls included, to worry that we will come to “doubt the soundness of our moral attitudes when we reflect on their psychological origins.”11 If Hume’s description of our moral psychology is correct, however, a complete understanding of the origins of our proper moral commitments can only lead us to affirm these commitments. Although such a defense of human morality cannot convince a committed rationalist, who is determined to find a morality binding on any rational being as such, the sentimentalist can simply reply, citing Rawls, that “beings with a different psychology either have never existed, or must soon have disappeared in the course of evolution.”12 It is thus crucially important for the success of a sentimentalist normative theory that its empirical description of human psychology prove accurate— that human beings actually have the mental faculties that they describe. “As this is a question of fact,” Hume reasons, “and not of abstract science [i.e., a priori philosophy], we can only expect success by following the experimental method, and deducing general maxims from a comparison of particular

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instances” (EPM 1.10). On the title page of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume therefore introduces his work as “an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (T Title Page). Hume, Smith, and Herder, of course, were not experimental psychologists in the contemporary, social-scientific sense. Rather than using the term “experiment” to describe the controlled tests of today’s laboratory science, Hume instead associates “careful and exact experiments” with the simple “observation of those particular effects which result from . . . different circumstances and situations” (T Introduction:8). Since experimentation is equated with careful observation, in the case of “moral subjects” experimentation involves scrutinizing the social world around us and the psychological forces within us. The Enlightenment sentimentalists’ introspective technique in describing our moral psychology is therefore less akin to that of today’s social-scientific psychologists than to that of twentieth-century psychoanalysts or phenomenologists. Their “experimental method” might not appear as such to those today with certain set notions of what qualifies as experimental, but it is meant to describe actual human experience accurately, experience that these authors hope that readers will recognize as their own. They offer an account of reflection based on empirical observation, which could be either supported or falsified by the more methodologically rigorous empirical research being carried out in moral and political psychology today. The support that current research in moral psychology lends to sentimentalism will be discussed in the final chapter of this book.

4. In Defense of Reflective Sentimentalism: Overview of the Book Despite its empirical and theoretical richness, reflective sentimentalism is vulnerable to a number of important criticisms. As this book moves through a chronologically organized examination of each of the Enlightenment-era philosophers under discussion, it is also structured so as to respond to each of these criticisms in turn. The explanation of how sentimentalism can rise to the challenges posed by each of these criticisms should make the attractiveness of its approach to moral and political reflection clear. Chapter 1 will consist of an overview of the work of the three British philosophers from the first half of the eighteenth century whose work most influenced Hume and the later sentimentalists: Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Joseph Butler, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Although all three made important contributions to the argument that justice and morality cannot be products of reason alone, this chapter will consider these authors primarily insofar as they presented the problems that Hume, Smith, and Herder were left to work out in their own writings. The first of

Introduction

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these challenges was the need for a free-standing sentimentalist ethics—one that does not rely on religion or metaphysics to establish the normative authority of our moral sentiments. The second challenge was to explain how our moral sentiments can lead to a sense of justice capable of being instantiated in law-governed political institutions. The next chapter concerns Hume’s answer to the first of the two challenges described in chapter 1: the challenge of constructing a free-standing sentimentalist theory that can provide authoritative normative standards. Perhaps the most common criticism of the sentimentalist understanding of moral and political reflection is that it cannot actually provide binding norms, at least not without relying on external religious or metaphysical sources of moral authority. Without a single governing faculty that is identified with the higher self—without a single sovereign in the soul bringing the rest of the soul in line—many worry that the individual is reduced to a kind of psychic chaos, doing whatever he or she feels like doing at the moment without the guidance of stable, reflectively endorsed standards. Yet to identify sentimentalism with such wantonness is to confuse psychic democracy with psychic anarchy. Just as a nation as a whole can govern itself through democratic deliberation and the rule of democratically enacted law, so too can a mind as a whole govern itself through reflectively refined and endorsed moral sentiments. Much of the blame for this confusion lies with the Enlightenment sentimentalists themselves, most notably David Hume. In order to refute rationalism, Hume often used rhetoric that might be taken to suggest that, like his rationalist opponents, he too saw one faculty as sovereign and others as subject. In contrast to the opposing view in which reason was sovereign, Hume’s rhetoric suggested a theory of reflection in which passion was the exclusive sovereign. Chapter 2, however, rejects this misleading reading of Hume’s position. Our moral sentiments, Hume makes clear, are not immediate passions; they also include cognitive and imaginative elements and are subject to revision upon reflection. Hume’s reflective sentimentalism should not be confused with sheer wantonness or “doing as one feels.” To the contrary, Hume’s moral philosophy is capable of providing a full normative justification for our commitment to genuine virtues, while also giving us grounds to reject the sham virtues advocated by others. Indeed, some of the virtues that Hume himself recommends may deserve to be rejected according to the criteria of his own sentimentalist ethics. I argue in chapter 3 that Hume’s own theory of justice must be discarded for precisely such reasons. This refutation of Hume’s theory of justice is meant to address a second objection to reflective sentimentalism. Many argue that, even if sentimentalist reflection can provide standards by which to govern our actions and our politics, these are the wrong kind of standards. Specifically, since it begins from the social-psychological forces that are responsible for our accepting the norms and standards that we do, a concern arises that sentimentalism can

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never successfully criticize existing institutions or practices, that it may be too complacent or conservative. Again, much of the blame for this confusion rests with Hume himself, who was sometimes unduly complacent toward existing standards and practices—although he was also sometimes an adamant advocate of moral, political, and economic reform. Nowhere is Hume’s undue conservatism more evident than in his theory of justice, which describes justice as the virtue of obeying existing social conventions that promote the public interest. Yet I argue that, far from there being a direct connection between Hume’s moral sentimentalism and his political conservatism, the two aspects of his philosophy are in fact incompatible. When sentimentalists are excessively complacent, I argue, it is simply because they have failed to subject their convictions to the test of sufficient sentimentalist reflection. As our moral sentiments progress, we reflectively expand our sense of sympathy, increasing the degree to which we share specific feelings with an ever-wider array of our fellows. As our circle of sympathy expands, we will in turn demand reforms that show increasing concern for all. Hume’s sentimentalist reflections were advanced in this liberal and individualist direction by his close friend Adam Smith. The most important of Smith’s improvements to Hume’s sentimentalism for purposes of political theory, and the subject of chapter 4, is a deemphasis of the importance of sympathy with the public interest in our commitment to justice. Smith argues that a proper commitment to justice stems primarily from sympathy with particular individuals—specifically, sympathy with the resentment felt by individual victims of injustice. If there is any single thinker whose influence has led contemporary political theorists to be wary of sentimentalism, it is Immanuel Kant. Yet Kant actually embraced reflective sentimentalism at one point in his philosophical career, only to reject it later during his so-called critical period. Chapter 5 seeks to explain this turn in Kant’s moral philosophy, and to argue that Kant’s reasons for rejecting reflective sentimentalism need not lead us to do the same. Rather than accepting the conventional view of the critical-period Kant as an opponent of any form of emotionally motivated behavior in favor of a coldly rationalist sense of duty, I argue that the later Kant is willing to endorse many emotions that enable finite creatures to better conform to duty’s categorical demands. He nonetheless categorizes sympathy in particular as having very limited ethical value, and argues that no form of fellow-feeling must ever be allowed to threaten the rational self-control that he identifies with autonomy. Yet once we see reflective sentimentalism as dependant on a harmony of all the faculties in a reflectively stable psyche, rather than advocating the utter slavery of reason to passion, such an approach to moral and political reflection need not be seen as a threat to autonomy. Our choice is not between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of feeling, but rather between two competing theories of what reflective autonomy involves.

Introduction

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Aside from its potential threat to autonomy, another concern is that sentimentalist reflection cannot provide moral and political standards that can be shared by all. While rationalist reflection can derive a single set of authoritative standards from a single universal faculty of reason, sentimentalism must assume an implausible degree of uniformity among the contingent psychological features of human beings to do the same; Hume and Smith made precisely this implausible assumption in order to do so. Another sentimentalist alternative, however, is to accept rather than reject the pluralism of human standards, while still insisting that plural sets of standards can join in a single overlapping consensus supporting basic principles of justice and reciprocity. Some factors for which sentimentalism allows entry into moral and political reflection are admittedly exclusive to particular individuals or groups. Others, however, are permanent features of human nature. While still contingent in the sense that rational creatures could always have evolved or been created without them, these features are shared by virtually all members of the human species. Among the most important features of our common human nature is an ability to sympathize with our fellows, and to share the feelings of even those whose values and worldviews are very different from our own. Such pluralist sympathy, in turn, can help form the basis of an overlapping consensus demanding fairness and reciprocity even among those who have otherwise conflicting moral sentiments. Exactly such a pluralist sentimentalism, I argue in chapter 6, can be found in the work of J. G. Herder, a student of the precritical, sentimentalist Kant and a vociferous opponent of the criticalperiod, rationalist Kant. Once, with Herder, sentimentalism takes this pluralist turn, it reveals itself to be especially helpful in the diverse democracies of today. Although citizens in such societies may have opposing moral convictions, they must come to some agreement on basic principles of justice. While some might hope to build a consensus behind these principles on the basis of reason alone, this is not the only faculty that all of us share. Given that our task is to build a just society for human beings, and not for rational beings as such, there is no reason why we cannot also appeal to the many nonrational features of the human psyche that we possess in common—our emotion, our imagination, and our ability to share in the inner life of others through sympathy. The final chapter of this book will outline the many and varied improvements to normative political theory, empirical political science, and practical political life that sentimentalism can offer us today. Contemporary scholars are increasingly coming to reject the rationalist paradigm that has long dominated a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Just as psychologists and neuroscientists have been examining the central role of emotion in all mental processes, and philosophers have been refuting neo-Kantian claims that reason alone can support justice and morality, political scientists have begun acknowledging

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the legitimacy of sentiment throughout all spheres of civic activity. Chapter 7 argues that greater attention to Enlightenment sentimentalism could serve to enrich not only such contemporary scholarship on ethics, politics, and psychology, but also the actual practices of our civic life. By offering competing descriptive and normative theories of moral and political reflection, rationalism and sentimentalism can lead to different theories of how collective political activity should be managed. If reflection is a matter of rational cognition alone, then appealing to others’ emotions or imagination only serves to undermine their autonomous political reflection. Although rhetoric, narrative and other emotionally loaded tools of political persuasion may be used to help others better abide by the principles that reason demands of us all, they could just as easily be used to lead us away from these principles. Sentimentalism, by contrast, sees such forces as emotion and imagination as part of the process of moral and political reflection itself. Our use of rhetoric and narrative here enhances rather than diminishes the reflective autonomy of others. In an age of widespread political apathy, a reconsideration of the work of Hume, Smith, and Herder suggests an impassioned rather than a dispassionate politics, politics in which a diverse citizenry strives to spur itself continually onward in the reflective revision of its moral sentiments. To forego the rich reflective resources of sympathy and the moral sentiments in either political theory or political practice would, I conclude, be a terrible waste.

C HAPTER

1

Sentimentalism before Hume

One problem in many recent treatments of Enlightenment sentimentalism is the tendency to discuss the work of Hume exclusively, often using “Humean” as a synonym for “sentimentalist.”1 Doing so leads scholars astray in two ways. First, by ignoring authors who improved on Hume’s work they fail to present sentimentalism in its most compelling form. Chapter 4 of this book will argue that when Hume’s sentimentalism went wrong in its theory of justice, Smith offered a liberal sentimentalist solution. And chapter 6 will argue that while both Hume and Smith failed to appreciate the full scope of human diversity, Herder succeeded in doing so in a distinctly sentimentalist way. To use an old cliché, Smith and Herder may have been standing on the shoulders of a philosophical giant, but this allowed their theories to rise beyond his own. It is also important to note that there were important reflective sentimentalists before Hume. Scholars have long exaggerated the originality of Hume’s ethics and political philosophy. Sheldon Wolin, for example, credits Hume for nothing less than “effecting a minor revolution in political thought” by being the first to understand ethics and politics “in psychological rather than juridical categories.”2 Yet Hume knew that his appeal to reflectively stable sentiments to both explain and justify our convictions was nothing fundamentally new, and that readers familiar with previous writers on the subject would never mistake it as such. Hume cites his sentimentalist precursors Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler alongside their interlocutors Locke and Mandeville as among the “late philosophers in England who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing” (T Intro. 7). Although he observes that “they differ in many points among themselves,” Hume praises these authors for “founding their accurate disquisitions of human nature entirely upon experience” (T Abstract 2). The purpose of this chapter is not to do full justice to the complex sentimentalist theories put forward by Shaftesbury, Butler, or Hutcheson, let alone to provide a history of the moral sentiments before Hume. My goal 15

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here is merely to consider Hume’s debts to his predecessors, setting the scene for the chapters to follow. The result is not the sort of debunking in which what were once thought to be the original insights of genius are revealed to be borrowed from previous authors. To the contrary, examining how Hume was influenced by Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson also helps us see the ways in which he was not influenced by them. After briefly discussing how many fundamental features of reflective sentimentalism were in place before Hume, this chapter will then argue that Hume departed from his sentimentalist predecessors in two all-important ways. First, Hume successfully freed his version of sentimentalism from theological and metaphysical foundations. For Christian sentimentalists such as Butler and Hutcheson, the normative authority of our moral sentiments ultimately derives from the fact that they were built into our nature by God for the achievement of his intended ends. As for Shaftesbury, it is true that his sentimentalism seems basically free of Christian foundations—and this irreligiousness earned Shaftesbury, like Hume, considerable infamy—but these are replaced by a classical metaphysics with a strong emphasis on natural teleology. As will be clear by the end of chapter 2, however, Hume had a different theory of normativity, one that relies neither on religion nor on metaphysics. Hume’s is a self-supporting account of moral and political reflection, one in which the normative authority of our considered convictions in reflective equilibrium does not depend on their correspondence to any superhuman reality, but only on the fact that human happiness requires mental stability. Second, Hume saw that political philosophy was a weak spot for earlier sentimentalists. In the centuries before sentimentalism, as Wolin observed, Western moral and political thought was basically juridical in inspiration. Both rationalist natural law and divine command theories treated all normative phenomena on the model of a code of just laws. It was thus a relatively simple matter to evaluate the justice of existing political institutions by seeing how their positive laws measured up to either divine or natural standards. By grounding justice in human psychology, sentimentalists made this political-philosophical task considerably more difficult. Further steps were necessary to derive moral standards suitable for evaluating lawgoverned political practices from the nonjuridical movements of the human heart and mind. Chapter 3 will argue that Hume was not entirely successful in this endeavor, and chapter 4 will go on to elaborate how Adam Smith developed a superior sentimentalist theory of justice. As is so often the case, however, Smith’s theory of justice was itself not entirely original, and took its inspiration from suggestions by Shaftesbury and Butler that our sense of justice stems from the resentment we feel when we are the victims of injustice.


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I. The New Science of Human Nature 1. Observing the Human Heart In his preface to Hutcheson’s posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy, William Leechman recalls that, like so many intellectuals of the eighteenth century, Hutcheson was inspired by the success of Newtonian natural science. Leechman notes that his Glasgow colleague “had observed that it was the happiness and glory of the present age that they had . . . set themselves to make observations and experiments on the constitution of the world itself” (SMP Preface, Vol. I, p. xiii). The Enlightenment sentimentalists were united in their insistence that the modern, a posteriori or “experimental” approach be applied to moral as well as natural subjects. Leechman recalls that Hutcheson: was convinced that . . . a true scheme of morals could not be the product of genius and invention, or of the greatest precision of thought in metaphysical reasoning, but must be drawn from proper observations upon the several powers and principles which we are conscious of in our bosoms. (SMP Preface, Vol. I, p. xiv)

Yet this method of introspective observation was not solely an application of the techniques of modern natural science. Shaftesbury, for one, insisted that his self-contemplation was inspired by ancient philosophy, representing the best way to fulfill the classical injunction to know oneself. Religious sentimentalists could also defend their empirical-psychological method by appeal to scriptural authority. According to Paul, while the Jews have received God’s law through revelation, the gentiles “are a law for themselves . . . since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Romans 2:14–15). The emphasis on the heart is important here. For the Enlightenment sentimentalists, our moral nature can be seen, through introspection, to be based on passionate desires for the good of others, desires often referred to by the umbrella terms “benevolence” or “beneficence.”3 Benevolence in this sense is not a cold commitment to altruistic principles, but a warm concern for others’ welfare. Today, we might broadly term the warmth involved as a result of “feelings” or “emotions.” The former of these terms was already widely used in eighteenth-century English, and the latter was just beginning to take on its modern meaning.4 The most common terms for affective phenomena in eighteenth-century English were “passions” and “affections.” Although the two terms were often used interchangeably or concurrently, one can distinguish between the two in that the former sometimes has a more negative connotation than the latter. In the Latin Christian tradition, affectus was associated with the serene love of God and the divinely commanded love of one’s

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neighbor, whereas the passiones were associated with unruly, earthly desires. Hume is deliberately departing from standard Christian usage in his distinction between calm and violent passions; the more mainstream Hutcheson called the former tranquil affections. Finally, since it carried then, as it does now, the secondary definition of opinion or belief, the term “sentiment” was often used in the eighteenth century to describe affective phenomena that also have a strong cognitive component, as with impassioned moral convictions. Although Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson thought benevolent desires could stem from a variety of passions, affections, and sentiments, all acknowledged that one important source of our desire for the good of others is our ability to share these affective phenomena with them. Here, the available terminology is even more slippery. In English, “compassion” comes from the Latin for “suffering with” or “feeling with,” and “sympathy,” from the Greek for the same.5 The double meaning of both pathos and passion leads to an ambiguity concerning sympathy and compassion. In a narrow sense, they might be limited to the sharing of another’s suffering, but in a broader sense they might involve sharing any emotion, pleasant or painful. Eighteenth century authors generally use the term “sympathy” in the broader sense, reserving “compassion” and “pity” for shared suffering.6 In this way, British Enlightenment discussions of “sympathy” lack the narrow focus on misery sometimes found in continental discussions of pitié or Mitleid.7 “Humanity” and “fellow feeling” are also sometimes used by English-language writers in this period as rough synonyms for sympathy in this broad sense.8 Shaftesbury and Hutcheson use the Latin sensus communis to mean something similar, although the phrase is more often used by others to mean simply “common sense.”9 Each of these many terms for feeling and for shared feeling carries subtly different connotations, but in everyday speech the distinctions between them are often lost. “It is very difficult to talk of the operations of the mind with perfect propriety and exactness,” Hume observes, “because common language has seldom made any very nice distinctions among them” (T 1.3.8.15). Unlike many philosophers today, eighteenth-century British sentimentalists wrote in standard English rather than adopting a precise terminological system, so their discussions of sympathy, the affections, and the passions are often as inexact as the language itself.

2. Stoic and “Selfish” Interlocutors Regardless of their terminological difficulties, Enlightenment sentimentalists clearly put great emphasis on powers of the soul that were previously disparaged throughout much of the western philosophical tradition. Authors from Plato and the ancient Stoics to Spinoza and the early modern neo-Stoics had shown a consistent hostility toward feeling.10 Yet despite the fact that “stoic”


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and “sentimental” are now diametrically opposed in ordinary language, sentimentalism can be seen as a continuation and a revision of the modern Stoic revival rather than an outright rejection of it. First, sentimentalism represented a continuation of the Stoic conception of philosophy as a sort of therapy—the art of learning to think, act, and feel properly, and hence live well. Shaftesbury, in particular, was committed to the idea that philosophy must be devoted to this practical task, dismissing metaphysical and epistemological speculations of the kind practiced by his tutor Locke as useless distractions. Second, like most ancient ethicists, sentimentalists believed that human perfection takes the form of moral virtue. Virtue, in turn, takes the form of “the harmony of a mind,” with “knavery . . . mere dissonance and disproportion” (SAA 1.3, p. 129). This harmony is conceived, as it was by the Stoics, as a happy state because of its tranquility, because of the lack of internal conflict or emotional turmoil. In contrast to the Stoics, however, Shaftesbury and his followers did not see this harmonious tranquility as a result of apathy, or the lack of emotion, but instead as a matter of emotional balance, of a proper “economy of the passions” (IVM 2.1.3, p. 53). The quest for Stoic apathy, Butler complains, can only lead us away from virtue and benevolence. Those who seek it “appear to have had better success in eradicating the affections of tenderness and compassion than they had with the passions of envy, pride, and resentment” (15S 5, p. 71). To be sure, some Enlightenment sentimentalists believed that the ancient Stoics never wished to destroy the benevolent alongside the selfish passions. In a note to the edition of Marcus Aurelius that he translated with James Moor, Hutcheson claims that “the Stoics always maintained that by the very constitution of our nature all men are recommended to the affectionate good-will of all” (MEM 3.5, fn., p. 42). Hutcheson, however, did acknowledge that the Stoics falsely viewed the “rational soul” as “a being distinct from both the gross body and the animal soul, in which are sensations, lower appetites and passions . . . The rational soul, they say, is the man; the seat of true perfection and happiness . . . capable of performing its proper, natural, lovely beatific offices independent of these lower parts” (MEM 5.19, fn, p. 65). Any knowledge of the realities of human psychology, the sentimentalists agree, demonstrates that this is impossible. As Butler puts it: Reason alone, whatever anyone may wish, is not in reality a sufficient motive of virtue in such a creature as man; but this reason joined with those affections which God impressed upon his heart . . . Neither is affection itself at all a weakness, nor does it argue defect, any otherwise than as our senses and appetites do; they belong to our condition of nature, and are what we cannot do without. (15S 5, pp. 67–68)

Rather than the Stoics or neo-Stoics, it was Hobbes and, later, Mandeville who were the sentimentalists’ primary opponents. The first edition of Hutcheson’s first book, the 1725 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of

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Beauty and Virtue, was introduced on its title page as a work “in which the principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are explained and defended against the author of the Fable of the Bees.” Hobbes, Mandeville, and other defenders of what their opponents called the “licentious” or “selfish system” (see, e.g., EPM App. 2:3 and TMS VII.ii.4), like the sentimentalists themselves, saw ethics as rightly focused on examining the empirical realities of human psychology. What the selfish system observed in the human heart, however, was very different from what sentimentalism saw. Although they were more than willing to grant the passions a central place in human life, Hobbesians thought these passions lead us to desire only our own private good. The sentimentalists thought it their primary task to defend humanity’s benevolent sociability against those who saw in our passions only natural selfishness, and only secondarily to explain this sociability through appeal to the passions against those who sought its sources in reason. Since the debate between sentimentalism and the selfish system was over the empirical realities of human psychology, it could only be resolved by empirical means. “If any person can in earnest doubt whether there is such a thing as goodwill in one man toward another,” Butler argues, “let it be observed that whether man be thus or otherwise constituted . . . is a mere question of fact or natural history, not provable immediately by reason” (5S 1.6, fn., pp. 27–28). The problem with appeal to the observable facts of human benevolence, however, is that these facts can always be reinterpreted so as to conform to the hypotheses of the selfish system. Hobbesians, Shaftesbury complains, “would so explain all the social passions and natural affections as to denominate them of the selfish kind” (SC 3.3, p. 74). Much of the writing of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler is therefore devoted to refuting the many and varied attempts to explain away benevolent affections as nothing more than expressions of self-interest. To give just one example, Hobbes explains compassion for another’s misfortune as nothing more than fear that the same will occur to oneself.11 Butler acknowledges that such fear is a real phenomenon, but it is not what we mean when we speak of compassion. Our experiences of pity or compassion are phenomenologically very different from our experiences of fear, and can occur when there is no possible danger to ourselves whatsoever (see 15S 5, pp. 64–66, fn). Hutcheson and Shaftesbury provide a significant number of other arguments to the same effect.12 Rather than cataloging the many arguments and counterarguments of this sort put forward by Hobbesians and sentimentalists respectively, it seems best to conclude this section with a single, powerful argument for why human nature cannot be understood as purely selfish. Although variations on this argument appear throughout Hutcheson’s writings,13 its clearest statement can be found in Butler’s sermon “Upon the Love of Our Neighbor.” Selfishness cannot be the only principle in the human heart, Butler argues,


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because selfishness itself only makes sense as a wish to fulfill our various desires, each of which has an independent psychological reality of its own. “If self-love wholly engrosses us, and leaves no room for any other principle,” Butler explains, “there can be absolutely no such thing at all as happiness, or enjoyment of any kind whatever since happiness consists in the gratification of particular passions, which supposes the giving of them” (5S 4.9, p. 48). To be sure, it is always possible to treat everything we desire as a mere means to the single goal of personal happiness; Butler’s argument, some appearances to the contrary, does not rule this out as a conceptual possibility.14 Yet Butler observes that it is a matter of psychological fact that doing so will only make us miserable, since it will rob us of the joy that can only come from pursuing at least some of the primary objects of our desire for their own sake. As has often been observed, the happiness that comes from sources such as love or friendship is impossible if one understands one’s friends and loved ones as a means to one’s own happiness. Such an attitude is incompatible with the attitudes toward others that love and friendship require. The happiness of love and friendship can only be experienced if we treat our intimates as possessing an independent, intrinsic value of their own. Butler’s point is that what is so widely recognized as true of love and friendship is also true of many of the other primary objects of our desire, which can only make us happy if we do not treat them as mere means to our own satisfaction. As such, “it is certainly true that even from self-love we should endeavor to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves” (5S 4.9, p. 49). The good of others is one of the many things that we are capable of desiring for its own sake, as is implied by the very concept of benevolence. As Shaftesbury observes, “We never call that man benevolent who is in fact useful to others, but at the same time only intends his own interest, without any desire of, or delight in, the good of others” (IBV 2.2.3, p. 103). Butler’s insight is that, far from making benevolent desires unique in some way, this is something they have in common with all the other primary desires that allow for human happiness. “That benevolence is distinct from, that is, not the same thing with self-love, is no reason for its being looked upon with any peculiar suspicion,” Butler argues, “because every principle whatever, by means of which self-love is gratified, is distinct from it” (5S 4.11, pp. 49–50). As a result, “benevolence and the pursuit of public good has at least as great respect to self-love and the pursuit of private good as any other particular passions and their respective pursuits” (5S 4.16, p. 53). Indeed, upon introspection, most of us see that the benevolent desire for the good of others is one of the strongest, most basic passions implanted in our hearts. The only route to happiness is therefore to treat benevolence as leading us to pursue its object for its own sake.

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3. Reason and Reflection Even after striving so mightily to establish the reality of benevolent desires, the sentimentalists were still concerned that such desires might grow too strong, and imbalance the economy of the passions. “It must be owned,” Butler writes, “that every affection . . . may rise too high, and beyond its just proportion” (15S 6, p. 79). Sometimes, our benevolent desires themselves may give us reason to keep these very desires under control. For example, as Shaftesbury observes, pity or compassion is sometimes “so overcoming as to destroy its own end” (IVM 2.1.3, p. 51), since “excessive pity renders us incapable of giving succor” (IVM 1.2.2, p. 16). At other times, however, our reason for limiting our benevolent desires may come from other elements in our mental economy. The faculty of reason cannot be excluded here. The Enlightenment sentimentalists never sought to prevent reason from playing a significant role in determining our actions, only to deny that it could do so alone. When interpreting the Biblical claim that the moral law is written in our hearts, Butler insists that this refers to “the whole system, as I may speak, of affections (including rationality) which constitute the heart, as this word is used in Scripture and on moral subjects” (5S 5.11, p. 60). In order to achieve its desired ends, benevolence must make use of reason in order to figure out the means to these ends. Hume was not the first to consider reason the “slave of the passions” in this way. Butler, too, saw that reason can be “considered merely as subservient to benevolence, as assisting to produce the greatest good” (5S 5.27, pp. 64–65). If this makes reason a slave of benevolent passions, however, it is in the same way that ancient tutors were often the slaves of their charges. Lest benevolence defeat its own purposes, Butler writes, “reason must come in as its guide and director in order to attain its own end” (5S 5.27, p. 65). When, as it so often does, reason fails in this capacity, terrible harm to others can be the result. According to Hutcheson, this is why we so often call moral actions rational, and immoral actions irrational. We naturally assume all others to share our benevolent desires, and ascribe immoral actions to a failure to reason appropriately about the proper means to their benevolent ends, rather than to a rejection of the ends themselves (see ENC 2.1, p. 148). Hutcheson complains that this habit of mind then often leads into the use of the word “reasonable” in a “confused manner” to “denote whatever is approved by our moral sense” (ENC 2.1, p. 154). This is not to claim, however, that rationality and moral virtue are not strongly correlated. “[I]t is probable no person would ever do anything publicly hurtful but upon some false opinion,” Hutcheson writes. “The flowing from true opinions is indeed a tolerable character or property of virtue, and flowing from false opinion a tolerable character of vice, though neither be strictly universal” (ENC 2.3, p. 169).


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Even though reason has an important role to play in keeping our passions in balance, what the Enlightenment sentimentalists called “reflection” has an even more central role. Although reason and reflection are often used in conjunction or as loose synonyms, the latter is better understood as a matter of self-observation than of reasoning per se. As it was used in the eighteenth century, the concept of reflection stems primarily from Locke, who famously believed all knowledge to be the result of experience. Experience, however, may take the form of either observation of the external world through the powers of “sensation” or observation of the operations of our own minds through the powers of “reflection.”15 Shaftesbury may have largely rejected his tutor’s epistemology—not so much as incorrect, but as useless—but he maintained Locke’s emphasis on the importance of reflection, often poetically calling it “soliloquy.” Unlike Locke, however, Shaftesbury placed particular importance on reflective scrutiny of our passions and affections. “In a creature capable of forming general notions of things,” he writes, “not only the outward beings which offer themselves to the sense are the objects of the affection, but the very actions themselves and the affections of pity, kindness, gratitude and their contraries, being brought into the mind by reflection, become objects.” Once our emotions become objects of reflection, moral sentiments arise as a form of reflective affection or disaffection for both our own affections and those of others. The fact that we have such reflective sentiments allows our benevolence to qualify as virtuous rather than as merely good. As Shaftesbury explains: Let us suppose a creature who wanting reason, and being unable to reflect, has notwithstanding many good qualities and affections, as love to his kind, courage, gratitude or pity. It is certain that if you give to this creature a reflecting faculty, it will at the same instant approve of gratitude, kindness and pity, be taken with any show or representation of social passion, and think nothing more amiable than this, or more odious than the contrary. And this is to be capable of virtue, and to have a sense of right and wrong. (IVM 1.3.3, p. 31)

Shaftesbury’s conception of moral sentiments as reflective, second-order affections for benevolent, first-order affections was then adopted and adapted by later sentimentalists in their own distinctive ways. Butler calls this reflective power “conscience.” Interpreting Romans 2:15, he distinguishes “the witness of conscience” from the law written in the gentiles’ hearts. The law of the heart is simply “the natural disposition to kindness and compassion . . . that part of the nature of man . . . which with very little reflection and of course leads him to society.” Conscience, by contrast, “is a superior principle of reflection . . . in every man which distinguishes between the internal principles of his heart as well as his external actions, which passes judgment upon himself and them . . . It is by this faculty, natural to man, that he is a moral

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agent, that he is a law to himself” (5S 2.8, p. 37). While Butler insists on the importance and (as will be discussed later) the authority of this reflective faculty of conscience, he is deliberately vague as to its precise nature and mode of operation. Conscience seems to draw on all the other faculties of the human mind, although Butler never specifies precisely how. He merely asserts that it can be “considered as a sentiment of the understanding or as a perception of the heart or, which seems the truth, as including both” (5S Dissertation 1, p. 69). Hutcheson, by contrast, gives a very particular account of the nature and operations of this reflective moral faculty, calling it “the moral sense.” While other sentimentalists occasionally use the phrase, Hutcheson was the thinker who took the idea of a moral sense most literally. In addition to the wellknown five powers of Lockean sensation that give us access to the external world—seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—Hutcheson insisted that we are also in possession of a number of as-yet unrecognized internal senses, powers of Lockean reflection through which we observe our own sensations and evaluate their objects. Like the powers of sensation, Hutcheson insists that the powers of reflection are literally senses. They are innate in their origin and automatic in their operation in exactly the same way as the external senses of taste or smell. In his initial presentation of this thesis, the 1725 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson begins by arguing for an internal sense of beauty or aesthetic value. “This superior power of perception is justly called a sense,” he argues, “because of its affinity to other senses in this, that the pleasure does not arise from any knowledge . . . but strikes us at the first with the idea of beauty” (IBV 1.1.13, p. 25). Then, this sixth sense being established, he goes on to argue that “it will be no difficult matter to apprehend another superior sense, natural also to men, determining them to be pleased with actions, characters, affections” (IBV Preface, p. 10). This seventh sense is the moral sense, which according to Hutcheson, automatically approves of benevolent desires and disapproves of malicious ones. While others might attempt to explain our reflective approval of benevolence on the basis of more basic principles of human psychology, Hutcheson insists that no further explanation of the moral sense can be given, at least none beyond the fact that it was implanted in us by God for the achievement of his own benevolent purposes. Hutcheson admits that his critics might find this moral sense an “occult quality” (IBV 2.7.3, p. 178) appeal to which is no more useful explanatorily than Molière’s satirical appeal to opium’s “dormative power” to describe how the drug puts us to sleep. Hume and Smith were both to reject as “absurd” (T 3.1.2.6) the non-explanation of the moral sense put forward by “those who resolve the sense of morals into original instincts of the human mind” (T 3.3.6.3). They instead insist that the etiology of our moral sentiments can surely be traced to more basic psychological phenomena,


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sympathy foremost among them. Hume and Smith criticize Hutcheson’s failure to do so on the grounds of parsimony. “Nature . . . acts here, as in all other cases, with the strictest economy,” Smith writes, “and produces a multitude of effects from one and the same cause” (TMS VII.iii.3.3, p. 321).16 If there is anything in moral evaluation that cannot be traced to more basic psychological principles, Smith acknowledges, “I would be glad to know what remains, and I shall freely allow this overplus to be ascribed to a moral sense, or to any other peculiar faculty, provided anybody will ascertain precisely what this overplus is” (VII.iii.3.16, p. 326). In his later work, Hutcheson responds that only the moral sense can explain the automaticity of much moral judgment, a phenomenon that is also responsible for the revival of the idea of an inborn, specialized moral faculty by twenty-first-century psychologists.17 Hutcheson claims nothing but a natural moral sense could “account for that immediate ardor of love and goodwill which breaks forth toward any character represented to us as eminent in moral excellence, before we have had any thoughts, or made any inquiries into his state” (SMP 1.3.5, Vol. I, p. 48). To this, one can respond with Hume’s observation that, as with many mental phenomena, “however instantaneous” moral judgment may be “it proceeds from certain views and reflections which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, though they may the person himself who makes them” (T 2.1.11.3). Arguments of the sort that Hume and Smith leveled against Hutcheson have also been used in recent years to argue against the revival of his conception of an innate moral sense.18 In order to emphasize their differences with Hutcheson, Hume and Smith used the phrase “moral sense” less often than their predecessors did, mostly speaking instead of “moral sentiments.”

II. Religious and Metaphysical Foundations 1. The Happiness of Virtue Unlike empirical psychologists today, Enlightenment sentimentalists moved quickly from descriptive to normative questions. Once we have properly described human moral psychology, Shaftesbury insists “it remains to inquire what obligation there is to virtue, or what reason to embrace it” (IVM 2.1.1, p. 45). As this quotation indicates, the word “obligation” had a broader meaning in the eighteenth century than it does today. An obligation to perform an action simply meant an overriding reason to do it, one that ruled out the possibility of omitting it. This determinative reason could be self-interested as easily as it could be disinterested or moral.19 Shaftesbury was particularly interested in what was then known as an “interested obligation” to virtue. “If by obligation we understand a motive from self-interest sufficient to

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determine all those who duly consider it, and pursue their own advantage wisely to a certain course of actions,” he writes, “we may have a sense of such an obligation . . . by considering how much superior we esteem the happiness of virtue to any other enjoyment” (IBV 2.7.1, p. 177). The sources of the happiness of benevolence and virtue are, for Shaftesbury, twofold. First are the joys that derive from the benevolent affections themselves. These pleasures are a key feature of virtually everything we enjoy, which lose their savor if we cannot share them with others. “So insinuating are these pleasures of sympathy,” Shaftesbury writes, “and so widely diffused through our whole lives, that there is hardly such a thing as satisfaction or contentment of which they make not an essential part” (IVM 2.2.1, p. 62). Even more important, benevolent pleasures are among the only ones that we can enjoy “freely and without reserve” without upsetting the larger balance of our affections. “I know no other consequence from indulging such a passion than that of growing better natured and enjoying more and more the pleasures of society,” Shaftesbury writes (SAA 3.2, pp. 191–92). Alongside the joys that stem directly from our benevolent affections are those that come from reflectively approving of them in ourselves. “Every reasoning or reflecting creature is, by his nature, forced to endure the review of his own mind and actions,” Shaftesbury writes (IVM 2.2.1, p. 69). For this reason, human happiness is only possible when “together with the most delightful affection of the soul there is joined a pleasing assent and approbation of the mind to what is acted in this good disposition and honest bent” (IVM 2.2.1, p. 61). Our goal is “a mind . . . well composed, quiet, easy within itself and such as can freely bear its own inspection and review” (IVM 2.2.1, p. 66). Given this emphasis on the happiness of a virtuous life, it may be surprising that Shaftesbury showed so much hostility toward existing arguments that virtue is in our self-interest. In addition to Hobbesians who argued that justice and morality are artificially constructed to serve the purposes of self-interested agents, Shaftesbury also excoriated theologians who saw morality as fundamentally grounded in divine reward and punishment. He thought such Christian moralists, including his own tutor Locke, “have made virtue so mercenary a thing, and have talked so much of its rewards, that one can hardly tell what there is in it, after all, which can be worth rewarding . . . For to be bribed only or terrified into an honest practice bespeaks little of real honesty or worth” (SC 2.3, p. 61). While Shaftesbury himself, like his intellectual opponents, believed virtue to be the path to happiness, he was insistent that this consideration was always far from the mind of the virtuous themselves—so long, at least, as their minds had not been corrupted by philosophy or religion. “A common honest man, while left to himself, and undisturbed by philosophy and subtle reasonings about his interest,” Shaftesbury writes, “gives no other answer to the thought of villainy than that he can’t


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possibly find in his heart to set about it, or conquer the natural aversion he has to it” (SC 4.1, pp. 82–83). If Butler was correct in the argument against the selfish system outlined earlier, the fact that the virtuous do not see virtue as a mere means to happiness is what allows it to contribute so significantly to their happiness in the first place. The problem with this view is that it seems to preclude the very sort of philosophical reflection that Shaftesbury clearly thought was essential to achieving human perfection. Even if the thought had never occurred to them before, Shaftesbury’s readers quickly learn that the best way to promote our private interest is through virtuous, benevolent affections. Once in possession of this knowledge, it is difficult to see how we can continue to pursue the good of others without seeing their good, on some level, as a means to our own. Under Shaftesbury’s view, this would destroy the moral worth of our benevolent affections. Under Butler’s, it might even destroy the happiness that they could otherwise provide. Hutcheson offers a rather elegant route out of this bind, based on the fact that “neither benevolence nor any other affection or desire can be directly raised by volition” (1738 Addition IBV 2.2.3, p. 220). Instead, they are “determinations of our nature, previous to our choice from interest, which excite us to action, as soon as we know other sensitive or rational beings, and have any apprehension of their happiness or misery” (ENC 1.4.2, p. 67). If an imaginary reflective creature without benevolent affections were to decide that only by gaining them could it achieve happiness, its attempt to do so could never succeed. As for real-world human beings who already possess such affections, learning that the possession of these affections is the key to our happiness cannot change the fact that they never were under our control and never were the kind of faculties that we could willfully deploy as means to some further end. To be sure, it is “of the highest importance to all to strengthen [these affections] as much as possible, by frequent meditation and reflection” (ENC 1.6.1, p. 111), but Hutcheson expressed real doubts about the extent to which this is actually within our power. Shaftesbury, however, took a different view. Although it is certainly true that we cannot directly decide to feel any particular benevolent affection at any particular moment, it is nonetheless the case that, upon reflection, we may resolve to undergo the “reforming work” of “introducing into the affectionate part [of the mind] some gentle feeling of the social and friendly kind” (IVM 2.2.1, p. 67). Not only are we capable, over time, of introducing firstorder benevolent affections into our soul; we are also capable of revising our reflective moral sentiments. “We may esteem and value, approve and disapprove, as we would wish,” Shaftesbury insists (MRT 3.2, p. 114). The fact that we can control these affections and sentiments is very important to Shaftesbury, since he accepts the Stoic dictum that we must not bother ourselves with things that are not within our power, and seek happiness only from that which we

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control (See MRT 4.1, p. 122). Since it is in our power to achieve the happiness of virtue, and yet we must not pursue virtue for the sake of this happiness, Shaftesbury believes that we must also have some other, unselfish reason to pursue virtue. For Shaftesbury, this “disinterested obligation” was provided by natural teleology.

2. The Standard of Nature Though he condemns those mercenary types who pursue virtue for the sake of happiness, Shaftesbury repeatedly praises those who, in developing their character, “deliberately endeavored to frame it by the just standard of nature” (SAA 3.3, p. 218). Here again, the Stoics and other ancient ethicists were Shaftesbury’s inspiration. Hutcheson observes that, like Plato and Aristotle before them, “the Stoics define virtue to be an agreement or harmony with ‘nature’ in our affections and actions” (MEM 4.29, fn., p. 53). For Shaftesbury, as for his ancient predecessors, the universe is a well-ordered, purposive whole made up of well-ordered, purposive parts designed to work harmoniously together. In order to understand any phenomenon, natural or artificial, one must understand the purpose, or final cause, of its design. Shaftesbury here utilizes one of the watchmaker analogies so popular in the eighteenth century: If a passenger should turn by chance into a watchmaker’s shop, and thinking to inform himself concerning watches, should inquire of what metal, or what matter, each part was composed . . . without examining what the real use was of such an instrument, or by what movements its end was best attained and its perfection acquired, it is plain that such an examiner as this would come short of any understanding in the real nature of the instrument. (SAA 3.1, p. 181)

The explanation of any phenomenon remains incomplete without determining its purpose or final cause, moral and psychological phenomena included. Unsurprisingly, given both his insistence on the reality of benevolence and his conception of the universe as a harmonious whole, Shaftesbury believes the study of our natural affections and reflective sentiments reveals that their purpose is to lead us to pursue the good of others, and of the larger cosmic system of which we are all a part. Individual human beings, he concludes, exist not for their own sake, but for the sake of the good of the whole. Only by pursuing this naturally given end do we have any hope of achieving happiness, but our reason for doing so is the fact that it is the vocation allotted to us by our place in a purposive universe. Personal happiness is only a byproduct of pursuing our assigned task for its own sake. The ancient Stoics reached similar conclusions without making any real use of our benevolent affections, appealing simply to the obvious subservience


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of parts to wholes. The result was the Stoic commitment to natural law as discoverable on the basis of rational inquiry into the purposive nature of the universe, a commitment revived by the rationalist natural law theorists of the early modern era. Since Shaftesbury’s own inquiry on the matter is little different, his ethics arguably also rests on rationalist natural law foundations. Eighteenth-century British rationalists such as Richard Price claimed Shaftesbury as one of their own (by virtue of his appeal to cosmic teleology) as surely as did sentimentalists (by virtue of his appeal to the economy of the passions).20 Hume, for one, admitted that, although Shaftesbury was basically a sentimentalist, the “elegant” Lord was not “entirely free from . . . confusion” on these foundational questions (EPM 1.4). The reliance on natural teleology plays a similar role in the work of Butler and Hutcheson. All three operated under a fundamentally premodern conception of scientific explanations as requiring appeal to final as well as to efficient causes, to the purposes of nature or its designer rather than simply to the nonpurposive forces responsible for bringing a given phenomenon into being. The eighteenth century was a transitional period in the history of science, one in which Hutcheson could simultaneously maintain that “only an efficient cause is properly called a cause” (SM 1.4.5, p. 93) and that “we should not exclude the so-called final causes from physics” (SM 3.5.3, p. 183). If final causes are rightly part of natural philosophy or science, they are even more important in moral philosophy. According to Butler, “observations of final causes” in this field “show us what course of life we are made for, what is our duty, and in a peculiar manner enforce upon us the practice of it” (15S 6, p. 74). If Shaftesbury’s commitment to natural teleology brings him close to rationalist natural law theory, Hutcheson’s brings him close to divine command theory. “All such as believe that this universe, and human nature in particular, was formed by the wisdom and counsel of a Deity,” Hutcheson writes, “must expect to find in our structure and frame some clear evidences showing the proper business for mankind, for what course of life, what offices we are furnished by the providence and wisdom of our Creator” (PMIC I.1.1, p. 24). The main justification for empirically examining human psychology, rather than directly appealing to the intentions of the deity, is simply epistemological. “In this art, as in all others, we must proceed from the subjects more easily known, to those that are more obscure, and not follow the priority of nature,” Hutcheson writes. We therefore should not “deduce our first notions of duty from the divine will, but from the constitution of our nature, which is more immediately known, that from the full knowledge of it we may discover the design, intention and will of our Creator as to our conduct” (PMIC I.1.1, p. 24). Hume objects to this conception of nature as a harmonious and purposive whole, whether a result of divine design or immanent teleology. In the Treatise, Hume complains that while Shaftesbury was a “great genius,” he nonetheless

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fell victim to “vulgar” prejudices “concerning the uniting principle of the universe” (T 1.4.6.6, fn.). He insists in a letter to Hutcheson that ethics is best carried out without reliance on a conception of nature “founded on final causes, which is a consideration that appears to me pretty uncertain and unphilosophical.” Disputes on the natural vocation of humanity and our intended role in a purposive universe are, in Hume’s view, “endless, and quite wide of my purpose.”21 Yet while Hume’s version of sentimentalism has greater appeal to secular moral and political philosophers today, the fact that the theories of Hutcheson and Butler rest on unambiguously religious grounds should neither be held against them nor against Enlightenment sentimentalism more generally. To the contrary, if sentimentalism is to provide a widely shared basis for our moral and political commitments in religiously and philosophically pluralistic societies, then it must be presented in a way attractive to those who insist that their convictions have an ultimately religious or metaphysical foundation.22 Yet if sentimentalism is also to be attractive to those who reject such religious and metaphysical views, it must also be capable of being presented in a free-standing fashion, without appeal to a divine creator or a grand cosmic whole. It took the religiously and metaphysically skeptical Hume to work out this free-standing theory.

3. The Authority of Conscience Like Shaftesbury, Butler made frequent appeal throughout his ethics to final causes, but he placed far greater emphasis on the special authority of conscience than he did on the vocation of humanity as such. Like Shaftesbury’s idea of cosmic harmony, Butler’s idea that a part of the mind has legitimate authority over the rest is inspired by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In Hutcheson’s translation, Marcus Aurelius says that the rational soul claims authority over the rest of the psyche “very justly, as by its own nature fitted to command, and employ all these lower powers” (MEM 7.55, p. 90). Indeed, as the introduction made clear, such a hierarchical view of the proper psychic regime can be understood as the distinguishing feature of moral rationalism. In attempting to reintroduce an element of psychic hierarchy into sentimentalism, however, Butler does not wholly abandon what I have described as its commitment to psychic democracy. For Butler, it is not an isolated faculty such as reason alone that is capable of performing authoritative moral legislation, but rather a psychologically holistic reflective power—incorporating both reason and sentiment in their capacity to observe and judge their own operations—which we earlier saw that he labeled “conscience.” “Conscience or reflection,” Butler claims, “plainly bears its marks of authority” because it wields judgment over all the other powers of the mind; it “claims the absolute direction of them all, to allow or forbid their gratification.”


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He argues that it is in the nature of our second-order reflections to overrule our first-order affections, “a disapprobation of reflection being in itself a principle manifestly superior to a mere propension” (5S Preface 24–25, pp. 16–17). This is not to say that, should conscience condemn one of our first-order affections, it will always prove the stronger psychological principle, capable of extirpating all challenges to its judgments. Even when it fails to do so, however, conscience has right on its side. The difference between first and second order mental powers, “not being a difference in strength or degree,” is, for Butler, “a difference in nature and kind” (5S 2:11, p. 38), the difference “which everybody is acquainted with between mere power and authority” (5S 2:14, p. 39). This is a normative moral distinction, not a descriptive psychological one, and Butler explains it by analogy with political morality. “As in civil government the constitution is broken in upon and violated by power and strength prevailing over authority,” he writes, “so the constitution of man is broken in upon and violated by the lower faculties or principles within prevailing over that which is in its nature supreme over them all” (5S 3.2, p. 41; 2.13, p. 39 and Preface 24–25). Butler criticizes his sentimentalist predecessors for their failure to develop this idea. “The not taking into consideration this authority, which is implied in the idea of reflex approbation or disapprobation,” he writes, “seems a material deficiency or omission in Lord Shaftesbury’s inquiry concerning virtue” (5S Preface 26, p. 17). It is not that Shaftesbury fails to recognize the moral importance of reflective self-evaluation. As has already been demonstrated, self-examination or “soliloquy” is in fact central to Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Shaftesbury even foreshadows Butler to the extent that he agrees that reflective self-evaluation is “properly called conscience” (IVM 2:2:1, p. 69). But it is true that Shaftesbury did not think that conscience carried any special authority. For him, the importance of conscience stems not from the fact that this faculty has a right to rule the soul, but rather from the fact that reflective self-approbation is a necessary element of human happiness. And in this, as Hume would later argue, it was Butler, and not Shaftesbury, whose sentimentalist ethics suffered from a serious deficiency. Hume expressed his objections to Butler’s conception of the authority of conscience in a letter to Hutcheson. Early in his career, Hutcheson seemed to adopt something like Shaftesbury’s view on the matter. The younger Hutcheson acknowledged that much of the happiness of virtue stems from reflective self-approbation, from our tendency “to be pleased and happy when we reflect upon our having done virtuous actions, and to be uneasy when we are conscious of having acted otherwise” (IBV 2:7:1, p. 177). In his early writings, however, there is little indication that Hutcheson believed conscience or the moral sense to carry a special authority independent of its necessary contribution to human happiness. As Butler’s influence on Hutcheson’s philosophy increased, however, this position began to change.

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In his 1730 inaugural lecture as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, Hutcheson adopts Butler’s view of conscience (which he identifies with the moral sense described in his own earlier works) as “to hegemonikon,” Greek for “the ruling principle,” the single faculty “to which all things were made subject, and rightly so, in the integral state of our nature” (NSM, p. 199). By the time of his 1742 Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (later translated as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy), the fact that our moral sense can judge all the other powers of the mind takes on central importance as the mark of its authority. “This nobler sense,” Hutcheson writes, “is plainly the judge of the whole of life, of all the various powers, affections and designs, and naturally assumes a jurisdiction over them . . . That this divine sense or conscience . . . should be the governing power in man appears . . . immediately from its own nature” (PMIC 1.1.12, p. 40). Upon reviewing Hutcheson’s Institutio, Hume complains: You seem here to embrace Dr Butler’s opinion in his sermons on human nature, that our moral sense has an authority distinct from its force and durableness, and that because we always think it ought to prevail. But this is nothing but an instinct or principle, which approves of itself upon reflection, and that is common to all of them.23

Hume knew that this argument against Butler would have a considerable hold on Hutcheson. Far from arguing that conscience or the moral sense derives a special authority from its reflective self-approbation, Hutcheson had earlier denied that the moral sense is even capable of evaluating itself. Although our moral sense can approve or disapprove of our actions and emotions when we reflect upon them, “none can apply moral attributes to the very faculty of perceiving moral qualities, or call his moral sense morally good or evil, any more than he calls the power of tasting sweet or bitter, or of seeing straight or crooked, white or black” (ENC 2.1, p. 149). Of course, there is an obvious problem with this analogy. While our sense of sight allows us to evaluate visible objects, and our sense of taste allows us to evaluate edible ones, the former sense is no more itself a visible object than the latter is an edible one. By contrast, our moral sense allows us to evaluate human sentiments and actions. Since these evaluations are themselves human sentiments, they are capable of being evaluated morally. Any sense or faculty for which human performances are part of its evaluative domain can judge its own actions similarly. Hume therefore argues that some, if not all, of our individual faculties are indeed capable of evaluating themselves, our moral faculties among them. Butler, and later Hutcheson, believed that our conscience or moral sense wields a special authority because we have a sense that it ought to do so. Since the claim that conscience has right on its side in its conflicts with the other powers of the mind is itself a moral judgment, Hume argues that it is a good example of a human faculty judging itself.


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Hume then goes on to observe that, whenever a faculty is capable of such self-evaluation, the verdicts it returns will almost certainly be positive, which should come as no surprise when it is serving as a judge in its own case. The mere fact that they approve of themselves thus cannot be held to establish their authority over the rest of the mind. As a teenager, my self-approving yet sophomoric sense of humor often led me to laugh at my own asinine jokes, but this was hardly grounds for treating its determinations as authoritative. To be sure, our intellectual faculties can and should turn on themselves and judge whether the beliefs to which they lead us are true or warranted—as our moral faculties can reflect on themselves and judge whether their evaluations are good or praiseworthy. Yet why is it important, for example, for our aesthetic faculties to reflect back on themselves and judge whether their tastes are sublime or beautiful? More generally, why is a mental faculty’s ability, taken in isolation, to approve of itself grounds for treating the determinations of that faculty as normatively authoritative in the first place? 24 Butler and Hutcheson, of course, can give a religious answer to these questions: a faculty’s ability to approve of itself can be taken as a sign that it was intended by its divine designer to wield authority in its relevant domain. This is precisely the view of conscience’s authority in a (possibly apocryphal) fragment from Epictetus, which Hutcheson uses as one of the epigraphs for the Insitutio: “God has committed men to the government of their own natural conscience. This governor we never should disobey, for it is offensive to God” (PMIC, p. 6). Perhaps this is why the heretical Hume’s arguments failed to convince Hutcheson to abandon his move away from Shaftesbury toward Butler with regard to the special authority of conscience. To the contrary, Butler’s influence on this point is all the more obvious in Hutcheson’s last work, the System of Moral Philosophy, as are the unambiguous appeals to the authority of God. As Hume’s arguments demonstrate, however, it is God’s authority that is actually doing the normative work in Hutcheson and Butler’s arguments regarding conscience, and not the faculty’s authority in itself. As has already been discussed, Hume has good reasons for rejecting all such appeals to divine intensions. Recognizing that Hume rejects the idea of a faculty’s self-approval as a source of normative authority is particularly important given that prominent commentators have attributed something resembling Butler’s view to Hume. Christine Korsgaard and Annette Baier maintain that Hume puts forward a theory of “normativity as direct reflexivity” under which “a faculty’s verdicts are normative if the faculty meets the following test: when the faculty takes itself and its own operations for its object, it gives a positive verdict.”25 A fuller discussion of Hume’s actual account of normativity will have to wait until chapter 2, where I will argue that Hume is closer to Shaftesbury on this matter than to Butler, albeit with an account of the happiness of virtue relying neither on the teleological metaphysics of the former nor the theology of the latter.

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III. Theories of Justice 1. Justice as Benevolence Given their opposition to Hobbes, it should come as no surprise that sentimentalists reject the idea that a social contract can determine principles of justice, although it may play a role in the first formation of government.26 “It is ridiculous to say there is any obligation on man to act sociably, or honestly, in a formed government and not in that which is commonly called the state of nature,” Shaftesbury writes. Far from being able to create principles of justice ex nihilo, he claims a social contract assumes principles of justice are already operative: [T]hat which could make a promise obligatory in the state of nature must make all other acts of humanity as much our real duty and natural part. Thus faith, justice, honesty and virtue must have been as early as the state of nature, or they could never have been at all . . . He who was free to any villainy before his contract will and ought to make as free with his contract when he thinks fit. The natural knave has the same reason to be a civil one, and may dispense with his politic capacity as oft as he sees occasion. (SC 3:1, pp. 68–69)27

By rejecting the artificiality of civil justice, sentimentalism represents a return to the ancient view of human beings as political animals. “Our political and social capacity,” Shaftesbury claims, is as “natural and essential in our species as the parental and filial kind” (MRT 3:1, p. 190). It also allies the sentimentalists with the natural law tradition, which sought to formulate universal principles according to which any given system of positive law can be judged as just or unjust. In contrast to rationalist natural lawyers, however, sentimentalists could not see legal principles as built into the universe independent of human psychology, waiting to be discovered through the rational deductions of moral metaphysicians. For sentimentalists, as Hutcheson put it, “the laws of nature are inferences we make by reflecting upon our inward constitution, and by reasoning upon human affairs, concerning that conduct which our hearts naturally must approve” (SMP 2.17.2, Vol. II, p. 119). Of the three authors under discussion in this chapter, only Hutcheson was to develop a full system of natural jurisprudence. Although it would be going too far to describe the philosophies of Shaftesbury or Butler as wholly apolitical, they did lack Hutcheson’s emphasis on the importance of legal justice. Shaftesbury, in particular, assumes that, if only individuals achieved a benevolent balance of passions in their souls, a just polity would surely follow. “A public spirit can come only from a social feeling or sense of partnership with human kind,” he writes, “And thus morality and good government go together” (SC 3.1, p. 67). Although Hutcheson was to do much more than Shaftesbury to derive principles of natural law from our moral sentiments,


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he maintained Shaftesbury’s view of a smooth continuity between ethics and politics, seeing political justice as a direct outgrowth of personal benevolence. According to Hutcheson, benevolence can determine natural jurisprudence in two distinct ways. Some principles of justice stem from our benevolence for particular individuals. “[B]y our natural sense of right and wrong, and our sympathy with others, we immediately approve any persons procuring to himself or his friends any advantages which are not hurtful to others, without any thought either about a law or the general interest of all,” Hutcheson writes. “Hence everyone is conceived to have a right to act or claim whatever does no hurt to others, and naturally tends to his own advantage, or to that of persons dear to him” (PMIC 2.2.1, pp. 111–12). Such is the origin, for example, of individual property rights; Hutcheson insists that we need not “have recourse to any old conventions of all men to explain the introduction of property” (PMIC 2.6.4, p. 142). He instead points to the fact that allowing others’ to enjoy the fruits of their labor is clearly an example of benevolence to them, while interfering with this enjoyment is the opposite. As a result, our moral sense cannot help but approve of the former and disapprove of the latter. “Thus therefore we should judge,” Hutcheson concludes, “that it is inhuman and unjust, without the most urgent necessity, to obstruct the innocent labors others have begun and persist in” (PMIC 2.6.2, p. 138). At the same time, however, we also have a benevolent concern for the welfare of all our fellow human beings in the aggregate. Benevolence thus leads us, as Hutcheson so famously put it, to judge “that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers” (IBV 2:3:8, p. 125). Hutcheson maintains that, when our benevolence toward one comes into conflict with our benevolence toward all, it is the latter that ought to hold sway. “Our moral sense, though it approves all particular kind affection or passion,” he writes, “also approves the restraint or limitation of all particular affections or passions by the calm universal benevolence. To make this desire prevalent above all particular affections is the only sure way to obtain constant self-approbation” (ENC 1.2.2, p. 33). As a result, principles of justice derived from benevolence toward all take precedence over principles derived from benevolence toward particular individuals or groups. It is the role of reason “to discern what actions really tend to the public good in the whole, that we may not do that upon a partial view of good which afterwards, upon a fuller examination, we shall condemn and abhor ourselves for” (ENC 1:4:4, p. 76). In this respect, Hutcheson is an obvious forefather of what later became known as utilitarianism. One important difference between Hutcheson and the classical utilitarians of the following century, however, is that Hutcheson rejected what is now known as consequentialism. He insisted that “moral good and evil consists not in the external events, but in the affections and purposes of the soul” (PMIC 2.3.7, p. 125). All benevolent affections are

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good, regardless of the consequences of following them, but some are better than others. The “public sense” of benevolence toward all is to be preferred to all private benevolence toward individuals or groups, not because of the greater good produced by it, but because our moral sense prefers it as the more laudable affection, as expressing a greater degree of benevolence. Political justice takes precedence over private acts of kindness or mercy for this reason; our moral sense informs us that the proper economy of our passions and affections must give priority of the former over the latter. At the same time, however, we do not show the proper attitude of extensive, public benevolence if we do not take great care to consider all the possible consequences of our actions. Consider the case of someone considering violating an established law in a way that would, at least in the short run, do far more good than harm. Under even an ideal code of law, such a scenario is certain to arise with some frequency. “[M]any laws prohibit actions in general even when some particular instances of those actions would be very useful,” Hutcheson admits, “because an universal allowance of them, considering the mistakes men would probably fall into, would be more pernicious than an universal prohibition, nor could there be any more special boundaries fixed between the right and wrong cases” (IBV 2:3:10, p. 126). When we consider violating such a law, Hutcheson insists that “we should consider all the consequences, even of a remoter kind, which must ensue upon diminishing the deep reverence men should have for these laws” (PMIC 2.16.2, p. 207). In most cases, upon doing so we will find that “it is the duty of persons to comply with the generally useful constitution.” If disobedience is indeed required, we “must patiently resolve to undergo those penalties which the state has, for valuable ends to the whole, appointed, and this disobedience will have nothing criminal in it” (IBV 2:3:10, p. 126). When he acknowledges the reality of cases in which we must obey a law in which this obedience is nonetheless of no direct benefit to any object of our benevolence, Hutcheson is also forced to acknowledge the existence of a very strange category of individual rights in such cases. Such a right is “but rather a shadow of right than any thing deserving that honorable name . . . in the use of which no man can be approved by God, or his own heart upon reflection.” Hutcheson calls these “external rights,” and says they arise “when doing, enjoying or demanding from others is really detrimental to the public, and contrary to the sacred obligations of humanity, gratitude, friendship or such like, and yet for some remote reasons it is for the interest of society not to deny men this faculty, but on the contrary in some instances to confirm it” (PMIC 2.2.2, p. 112). The benevolent and virtuous would never insist on these external rights, but should the selfish and vicious do so, the virtuous are prevented by their own benevolence from doing anything but respecting this immoral decision. Hutcheson gives the example of a miser’s right to hoard wealth, or even to demand repayment from a virtuous debtor.


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As will be seen in chapter 3, Hume uses examples along roughly the lines of Hutcheson’s “external rights” to insist that justice cannot simply be a matter of natural, benevolent sentiments, but must also be a matter of artificial conventions. In his letter on the Institutio, Hume chides Hutcheson for being too “afraid to derive any thing of virtue from artifice or human conventions”28 Although, for most sentimentalists, Mandeville was a bête noire, Hume provocatively includes him among the “late philosophers in England who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing” (T Intro.7) because of his insights into the role of artifice, convention, and self-interest in our commitment rules of justice so strict as to require repaying a debt to even the most vicious miser. Hutcheson, however, concludes that as long as external rights are indeed socially useful there is nothing artificial or selfish about our obligation to respect them. “[W]hatever appears necessary for preserving an amicable society among men,” he insists, “must necessarily be enjoined by the law of nature” (PMIC 2.2.2, p. 112).

2. Injustice and Resentment Hume was not the only sentimentalist who was dissatisfied with Hutcheson’s theory of justice as benevolence, or of virtue as benevolence more generally. Butler, for one, maintained “benevolence and the want of it, singly considered, are in no sort the whole of virtue and vice.” Butler’s arguments on this point foreshadow many of the most convincing rebuttals to classical utilitarianism, most importantly those built around the fact that while utilitarians are deeply concerned about maximizing aggregate welfare, they do not take the distribution of this welfare into account. If benevolence were all that mattered morally, Butler observes, we “would be indifferent to everything but the degrees in which benevolence prevailed, and the degrees in which it was wanting. That is, we should neither approve of benevolence to some persons rather than to others, nor disapprove injustice and falsehood upon any other account” (5S Dissertation 8, p. 73). Yet nothing could be farther from the actual judgments of our conscience or moral sense. As Butler writes: [S]uppose one man should, by fraud or violence, take from another the fruit of his labor, with intent to give it to a third who he thought would have as much pleasure from it as would balance the pleasure which the first possessor would have had in the enjoyment, and his vexation in the loss of it; suppose also that no bad consequences would follow, yet such an action would surely be vicious. Nay further, were treachery, violence and injustice not otherwise vicious than as foreseen likely to produce an overbalance of misery to society then, if in any case a man could procure himself a great advantage by an act of injustice as the whole foreseen inconvenience likely to be brought upon others by it would amount to, such a piece of injustice would not be faulty or vicious at all, because it would be

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The Enlightenment of Sympathy no more than, in any other case, for a man to prefer his own satisfaction to another’s in equal degrees. (5S Dissertation 8, p. 73)

In other words, Butler recognizes justice is more a matter of distributional fairness among individuals than it is a matter of universal benevolence for all indiscriminately. In order to explain and justify this sense of fairness, sentimentalists must look first for its origins in the fabric of human psychology. They must explain why it is, in Butler’s words, “that we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all consideration which conduct is likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery” (5S Dissertation 8, p. 73). They must identify the passion or affections responsible for our sense of fairness and demonstrate how “every man carries about him this passion which affords him demonstration that the rules of justice and equity are to be the guide of his actions” (15S 9, p. 100). There is a powerful, yet undeveloped, suggestion in Shaftesbury’s writings that our sense of “just and unjust” finds its origin in “a natural presumption or anticipation . . . on which resentment or anger is founded” (MPR 3.2, p. 234). Butler takes up this suggestion by explaining that resentment is what a person naturally feels when he has been treated in a manner “which he thinks other than what is due to him” (15S Preface, p. xvi). This feeling, moreover, can be shared sympathetically; individuals “have this resentment in behalf of others, as well as of themselves” (AR 1.3, p. 53) To be given less than what you are due by a responsible moral agent is, in the terminology of the day, to suffer an injury at that agent’s hands. Butler therefore concludes that “injury is the only natural object of settled resentment,” that “men do not in fact resent deliberately anything but under this appearance of injury” (15S Preface, p. xv).29 From this psychological fact, Butler thinks it is easy to deduce the final cause or purpose of resentment. “The natural object or occasion of settled resentment then being injury, as distinct from pain or loss,” Butler writes, “it is easy to see, that to prevent and to remedy such injury, and the miseries arising from it, is the end for which the passion was implanted in man” (15S 8, p. 97). The fact that we feel resentment allows us to maintain our natural balance of passions when sympathy might otherwise lead us to excessive mercy for wrongdoers. “Since . . . it is necessary for the very subsistence of the world that injury, injustice and cruelty should be punished,” Butler writes, “and since compassion, which is so natural to mankind, would render that execution of justice exceedingly difficult and uneasy, indignation against vice and wickedness is, and may be allowed to be, a balance to that weakness of pity, and also to anything else which would prevent the necessary methods of severity” (15S 8, p. 99).


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Although Hutcheson admits that resentment of the sort that Butler describes is natural, useful, and widespread, he nonetheless argues that resentment cannot be the source of our sense of justice. “This passion,” he writes, “however wisely implanted, must be under the control of a higher principle” (SMP 2.3.2, Vol. I, p. 256). Hutcheson maintains that only general benevolence—a desire for the public good—can provide the appropriate criterion for when resentment should be indulged and when it should be condemned as excessive. “Neither anger, nor hatred of the criminal, nor even that honest indignation at moral evil which is natural to every good man, should be the sole springs of punishing,” he says, “but rather a calm regard to the common interest, and the safety of the innocent” (PMIC 3.8.9, p. 273). Butler, however, argues that there is a way to put natural resentment “under the control of a higher principle” without appealing to the public good in this way. He begins from the observation that “vice in general consists in having an unreasonably and too great regard to ourselves in comparison of others” (15S 10, p. 117). When attempting to bring his resentment under control or when attempting “to have a due natural sense of the injury, and no more” an injured party “ought to be affected toward the injurious person in the same way any good men, uninterested in the case, would be” (15S 9, p. 108). The goal is to see one’s injury as anyone else would see it, and react as they would react. We must, as Adam Smith would later put it, adopt the perspective of an impartial spectator and judge to what degree our resentment would be warranted in his view. Butler writes: We are in such a peculiar situation, with respect to injuries done to ourselves, that we can scarce any more see them as they really are than our eye can see itself. If we could place ourselves at a due distance, i.e., be really unprejudiced, we should frequently discern that to be in reality inadvertence and mistake in our enemy, which we now fancy we see to be malice or scorn. From this proper point of view, we should likewise in all probability see something of these latter in ourselves, and most certainly a great deal of the former. Thus the indignity or injury would almost infinitely lessen, and perhaps at last come out to be nothing at all. (15S 9, p. 109)

Here, in a sketchy form, are all the essential elements of Smith’s theory of justice, the most sophisticated such sentimentalist theory yet devised and the basis for a complete and plausible sentimentalist system of natural jurisprudence. It would be up to Hume, Smith, and Herder collectively to develop the free-standing, liberal, and pluralist version of sentimentalism that still has much to contribute to political philosophy and political practice today. Their work would have been impossible, however, were they not building on foundations laid by Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson.

C HAPTER

2

Hume’s Free-Standing Sentimentalism

Although he is universally celebrated as one of history’s greatest philosophers, David Hume has long been interpreted primarily as a destructive skeptic.1 In the sphere of moral philosophy, Hume is best known for his arguments against the moral power of reason, famously summarized in the audacious claim that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” (T 2.3.3.4). Passion is left as the master of the soul by default once it is conclusively established that reason is incapable of assuming that lofty position. And since normative justification is essentially rational justification, the moral sentiments that are products of passion cannot be normatively justified. Hume’s sentimentalism is thus understood as a wholly destructive form of moral skepticism. Such a view goes awry in a number of ways. First, it fails to see that Hume’s reflective sentimentalism is as much a positive doctrine as a negative one, arguing that moral sentiments are the source of our convictions, not merely that reason alone is not. Second, it fails to see that these moral sentiments are not the product of passion alone, but of an entire mind in harmony with itself, the faculty of reason included. Third, it fails to see that only the convictions of a mind at peace with itself can be normatively justified. Recent commentators who read Hume, not in terms of his refutation of his rationalist opponents, but in terms of his own constructive project, have seen that Hume’s moral philosophy does not rely on an abject, oft-caricatured slavery of reason to the whims of passion.2 To the contrary, they have seen Hume’s ethical project as one designed to draw all our mental faculties—rational and emotional alike—into harmonious reflective equilibrium.3 Far from the moral skeptic that he has often been believed to be, Hume in fact provides a freestanding ethics built from a psychologically holistic account of moral reflection.4 This self-supporting reflective sentimentalism remains Hume’s most important contribution to normative political theory. It demonstrates that our mature moral sentiments do not depend on external sources of authority, and can themselves provide adequate grounds for our commitment to justice. 40


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The first two sections of this chapter focus on the descriptive phase of Hume’s free-standing sentimentalism. The first section of this chapter is devoted to Hume’s description of the faculty of sympathy and of how this faculty gives rise to our unrefined moral sentiments. In order to support stable, widely shared moral standards, our initial moral sentiments then undergo a considerable process of refinement and correction. The course of this developmental process is discussed in the second section of this chapter. The third section of this chapter then argues that Hume’s moral psychology must not be understood as merely descriptive. To the contrary, Hume maintains that mature, corrected moral sentiments have genuine authority over our evaluations and behavior. The reflective stability of a mind governed by such sentiments, he argues, is a necessary component of human happiness. Far from advocating a form of moral skepticism, Hume’s sentimentalist ethics is intended to help us better commit ourselves to genuine virtue, while rejecting both our own immediate inclinations and the false virtues we may endorse mistakenly.

I. Sympathy and the Moral Sentiments 1. The Nature of Sympathy To a much greater extent than those of his sentimentalist forebears, Hume’s descriptive etiology of the moral sentiments in the Treatise is built primarily from the psychological phenomenon of sympathy. Here, Hume most often uses the word “sympathy” to refer to a specific faculty of emotional communication that he describes in some detail, but he does not restrict himself to this technical use of the term. In the later restatement of his philosophy in the two Enquiries, this detailed anatomy of sympathy has basically disappeared, although suggestions of it remain in footnotes and casual asides. As a result, Hume uses the term far less frequently—generally speaking instead of humanity or fellow-feeling.5 Regardless of what it is called, the communication of sentiments from one person to another may, at first, seem mysterious. After all, we have no direct access to the mental states of others. The passion of another, Hume writes, is “known only by its effects and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation which convey an idea of it.” We can then move from a sensory impression of the signs of another’s passion to an idea of the passion, as we so often move from impressions to ideas. When we experience sympathy, however, “this idea is presently converted [back] into an impression and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity as to become the very passion itself” (T 2.1.11.3). Hume argues that the ideas of another’s sentiments that sympathy can enliven may be acquired through any of the means by which we can acquire

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factual beliefs more generally. Given sufficient experience of which human passions normally arise in a given set of circumstances, for example, the mere view of these circumstances may produce a sufficiently vivid idea of the passion to set the process of sympathy in motion, even when no one is actually feeling the passion with which we sympathize.6 This is the source of our sympathy with those killed in their sleep or otherwise victimized unaware (see T 2.2.7.6). Indeed, even when both the sensible signs of another’s passion and the circumstances that normally produce it are absent, a vivid idea of another’s passions drawn from memory or imagination may be enlivened by sympathy (see T 2.2.9.13). While Rousseau was later to argue that pitié is a matter of sheer instinct— “the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection”7—Hume’s account of sympathy contains an important, and often overlooked, cognitive element.8 The fact that Hume believed that sympathy necessarily involves an idea as well as an impression of another’s passion allows him to speak of rational and irrational forms of sympathy. Hume maintained that passions may be termed irrational either when they are “founded on the supposition of the existence of objects which really do not exist” or “when in exerting any passion in action, we choose means insufficient for the designed end and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects” (T 2.3.3.6). It is clear that sympathy can go wrong in either or both of these ways. To use Philip Mercer’s terminology, sympathy can be misplaced when we form mistaken ideas about another’s state of mind, just as it can be misguided when we fail to take the appropriate means to the ends it suggests to us.9 In order to avoid these cognitive errors, sympathy must be accompanied by sound reason, both in inferring the (actual or hypothetical) passions of others and in deliberating about which actions will best achieve the ends that sharing these passions suggests to us. No amount of reasoning, however, could ever transform the mere idea of another’s sentiments into a sensible impression of them. In performing such a transformation, sympathy runs contrary to the usual operations of the human mind. The transition from an idea to an impression does happen occasionally, as when the mere idea of some revolting item of food makes us ill. Yet since this is the exception to the usual psychological movement from an impression to an idea—we usually think about what we have previously experienced, rather than vice versa—each instance of its occurrence requires some special explanation. Hume’s explanation begins from the basic similarity of all human beings, including a significant degree of uniformity in the passions that they feel. Given our own susceptibility to the passions we see in others, a sufficiently vivid idea of these passions will naturally leads us to think about ourselves. We recall an affectively loaded memory of our previous experience of similar passions or we imagine our potential vulnerability to them. Hume now relies on his earlier argument that ideas and impressions are distinguished only by


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the “manner and vivacity” of their appearance in the mind. The difference between these two types of mental phenomena can therefore “be removed, in some measure, by a relation betwixt the impressions and ideas” (T 2.1.11.7). Mere association with the highly vivid sense of ourselves, for example, can enliven the ideas we relate to ourselves into impressions. Sympathy occurs when the idea of another’s passion is, by this means, enlivened into the experience of an analogous passion. Yet what is important for Hume’s later applications of this theory of sympathy are not the specifics of its internal operation, but rather the observable variations in the strength of our sympathy with others, which this theory predicts.10 And the primary prediction of Hume’s account of sympathy is that, the greater degree of similarity between two individuals or their passions, the easier and stronger is the transmission of sentiments between them. Contiguity in space and time, as well as preexisting ties of blood or affection, can also give us a greater sense of closeness to the candidate objects of our sympathy (see T 2.1.11.6). Although Hume always insists that sympathy is always possible with any of our fellow human beings, based solely on our similarity as members of the same species, he also argues that “we must be assisted by the relations of resemblance and contiguity in order to feel the sympathy in its full perfection” (T 2.1.11.8). In its uncorrected operations, sympathy thus strengthens all preexisting social divisions, drawing those who are already similar or connected to one another tighter still. Sympathy, Hume argues, is responsible for the basic principle of social organization that sociologists now call homophily, leading like to gravitate toward like (see T 2.2.4.6).11 The homogenous social groups that result operate as sects in the religious sphere and as parties or factions in the political sphere, the divisive bugbears of Enlightenment social thought.12 Sympathy, as Hume describes it, must therefore undergo a considerable process of evolution before it can play a central role in our impartial moral sentiments.

2. From Sympathy to the Moral Sentiments There are, in Hume’s analysis, two distinctively moral sentiments, positive “approbation” and negative “disapprobation.” Neither of these is a species of sympathy or communicated feeling per se (see T 3.1.2). Instead, Hume maintains of approbation and disapprobation (as he does of pride and humility) that “it is impossible we can ever, by a multitude of words, give a just definition of them, or indeed of any of the passions” (T 2.1.2.1). That said, Hume nonetheless rejects as “absurd” Hutcheson’s argument “that in every particular instance, these sentiments are produced by an original quality and primary constitution” (T 3.1.2.6), and hence that no etiology of approbation and disapprobation is possible. To the contrary, Hume argues that they are produced by the already-familiar faculty of sympathy.

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Hume, as is well known, categorizes the virtues into qualities of character that are useful or directly agreeable either to their possessor or to others. We approve of such useful or agreeable traits wherever we encounter them, regardless of whether we receive any direct benefit. “[T]he pleasure of a stranger, for whom we have no friendship,” Hume reasons, “pleases us only by sympathy” (T 3.3.1.8). And just as the virtues we praise bring pleasure to their possessors or those they encounter, so too do the vices cause pain to their possessor and those they encounter, pains with which we may sympathize. Sympathy is thus distinguished from approval in that it is our sympathy with the effects of a person’s character (felt by himself or others) that leads us to approve or disapprove of the cause of the feelings with which we sympathize. The objects of our sympathy are thus distinct from the object of our moral evaluation.13 Note that it is the sympathetic response of a spectator engaged in moral evaluation and not the sympathetic motives on the part of a moral actor that is basic to Hume’s discussion of virtue. That said, however, a sympathetic moral judge is highly likely to approve of an actor with benevolent, compassionate motives. “No qualities are more entitled to the general good-will and approbation of mankind than beneficence and humanity,” Hume writes in the second Enquiry, “or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others, and a generous concern for our kind and species” (EPM 2.1.5). Before moving on, it is also important to note that, just as we may sympathize with imagined feelings when presented with their usual causes, even if these causes are inoperative, so too can we approve of inoperative virtues. We imagine the effect that these virtues usually have, sympathize with these imagined feelings, and our approval thus does not depend on their actual effects in any particular instance. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord describes Hume’s position on this point as the “Bauhaus theory” of approval, according to which something commands approbation “in virtue of being well suited for the achieving of certain ends or the solving of certain problems,” regardless of whether it succeeds in actually doing so.14 As well-designed chairs are still laudable when sitting in a museum unsat upon, so too, as Hume writes, “virtue in rags is still virtue; and the love which it procures attends a man into a dungeon or desert, where the virtue can no longer be exerted in action, and is lost to all the world” (T 3.3.1.19). As will be seen in chapter 3, this “Bauhaus” element of Hume’s ethics will prove critical to understanding his theory of justice.

3. Varying Sympathy, Biased Moral Sentiments Since our moral sentiments are derived from sympathy with any and all of those who are affected by another’s character, to qualify as moral our positive feelings toward another must not be the result of effects on ourselves alone. In this way, moral evaluations are distinct from evaluations of others made from a self-interested perspective. “The good qualities of an enemy are hurtful


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to us; but may still command our esteem and respect,” Hume writes (T 3.1.2.4). Of course, personal animosity often leads to the conviction that an enemy is vicious, leading us to confuse self-interested sentiments with moral ones. Many apparently moral evaluations are actually the dictates of self-interest in disguise.15 Several recent commentators have ascribed to Hume the belief that any bias in our moral evaluations is proof that they are really derived from selfinterest, not actual moral sentiments.16 Yet while Hume certainly believes self-interested sentiments are commonly mistaken for moral ones, he also believes that a sentiment can be genuinely moral and yet biased. The moral sentiments, after all, are derived from sympathy, which itself is naturally stronger for those with whom we have a connection of blood, affection, resemblance, or contiguity. Hume notes that “our first and most natural sentiment of morals” will therefore give preference to those who benefit our friends and loved ones (T 3.2.2.11), as well as to those whose characters are most like our own or who are most pleasing to those with characters like our own (see T 3.3.3.4). We therefore must distinguish between an evaluation that fails to qualify as moral at all from one that is indeed moral, but nonetheless biased. When I fail to consider the effects of my friend’s character on others but nevertheless call him virtuous, I am mistaking affection for moral approval. When I look to the effects of his character on only those who are connected or similar to me in some regard—those with whom I naturally feel the strongest and most immediate sympathy—then my sentiments toward my friend are genuinely those of moral approval, but my evaluation is biased.17 Since our immediate moral sentiments will likely be biased, it is inevitable that different individuals will judge the same character differently. If moral evaluation is purely a matter of sentiment, however, it is unclear how this disagreement is to be adjudicated. Sentimentalism, according to a certain clichéd line of thought, leaves us no more to able to account for our moral evaluations than we can for our aesthetic tastes, since it places moral virtue, like physical beauty, in the eye of the beholder. At one point in the Treatise, Hume does indeed seem to advocate a form of moral relativism along these lines: “The distinction of moral good and evil is founded on the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character,” Hume here argues, “and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows, that there is just so much vice or virtue in any character, as every one places in it, and that it is impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken” (T 3.2.8.8). Hume’s moment of relativism, however, is immediately qualified in a footnote stating that “in what sense we can talk either of a right or a wrong taste in morals, eloquence or beauty, shall be considered afterwards” (T 3.2.8.8, fn. 80), an apparent reference to a planned fourth book of the Treatise on “criticism”

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(i.e., aesthetics), which was never written. Given the absence of any discussion of this topic from the published version of the Treatise, we must now turn to the fullest statement of his aesthetic views available, the essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” Hume here rejects the clichéd notions that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and hence that there is no accounting for taste. To the contrary, it is impossible to understand Hume’s ethics or aesthetics unless we come to see how such an accounting is both possible and necessary.

II. Moral Development 1. The Standard of Taste Over the course of his lifetime, Hume changed his position as to the degree of diversity found among human moral judgments. “There is such a uniformity in the general sentiments of mankind,” he writes in the Treatise, that the question of how to resolve moral disagreement is “of but small importance” (T 3.2.8.8, fn. 80). In his later essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” however, Hume takes an opposite view. “The great variety of taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world,” he observes, “is too obvious not to have fallen under everyone’s observation” (EMPL, p. 226). Hume offers an explanation as to why he earlier underestimated this level of diversity grounded in the nature of evaluative language. “There are certain terms in every language, which import blame, and others praise,” Hume writes, “and all men, who use the same tongue, must agree in their application of them.” All competent users of a language “concur in applauding justice, humanity, prudence, veracity; and in blaming the opposite qualities,” he explains. “And no one, without the most obvious and grossest impropriety, could affix reproach to a term, which in general acceptation is understood in a good sense, or bestow applause, where the idiom requires disapprobation (EMPL, pp. 227–28). As a result of this feature of moral language, it is easy to praise the virtues in general, for their praiseworthiness is a feature of their very definitions. The difficult task—the task that involves actual moral evaluation rather than mere linguistic facility—is to apply these terms of approbation in particular cases. Religious writers, Hume observes, thus often praise the virtues in general, while advocating particular acts of great viciousness (EMPL, p. 229). Once we cease to mistake shared linguistic conventions for genuine moral agreement, and come to appreciate the genuine divergence among human moral judgments, Hume acknowledges that “it is natural for us to seek a standard of taste: a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled” (EMPL, p. 229). Here, Hume acknowledges that a certain line of relativist argument, akin to that advocated in the Treatise, would make such a standard impossible. “All sentiment is right,” this line of reasoning maintains,


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“because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself.” Every one of us therefore simply “ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others” (EMPL, pp. 229–30). As is so often the case in Hume’s philosophy, however, such skeptical conclusions are undermined by common sense and the practices of everyday life. Although we have all, at one time or another, spouted the cliché that there’s no accounting for taste, we regularly demand exactly such an accounting from our fellows nonetheless, requiring them to explain both their aesthetic and moral sentiments. Sentiments differing from our own can sometimes be justified to us, and we can be won over to our fellow’s position. Yet when another’s judgment seems patently absurd, we simply reject it as incorrect. One who would argue for the aesthetic equality of Melrose Place and Macbeth—or, in Hume’s own example, that of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost—“would be thought to defend no less an extravagance than if he had maintained . . . a pond as extensive as the ocean” (EMPL, p. 231). When we are faced with such outlandish evaluations, “the principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot” (EMPL, p. 231). Some account must be given, however, of why a taste for Shakespeare is preferable to one for Aaron Spelling, and why acts of genuine benevolence are superior to the instances of inhumanity that are so often praised with the empty epithet of virtue. In everyday life, Hume observes, we all believe some to be better judges than others and appeal, in matters of aesthetic and moral disagreement, to this “higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of compositions of genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts” (“Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in EMPL, p. 6). In order to achieve such a refined taste, we need to undergo a “progress of the sentiments,” moving beyond our immediate emotional reactions to phenomena.18 What is needed, then, is to specify the features that mark such a refined taste, features that we seek to acquire in ourselves and to impart to our children over the course of their moral development. Despite his famous denigration of reason, Hume acknowledges that sheer rational ability is often a central factor in the proper appreciation of an aesthetic object. “In many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts,” Hume argues in the second Enquiry, “it is requisite to employ much reasoning in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection” (EPM 1.9). Recall that sympathy, too, must be accompanied by sound reasoning in order to avoid being misplaced or misguided; irrational sympathy can lead the moral sentiments astray. Critical thinking, however, could rid us of misplaced or misguided sympa thy and hence change our moral convictions. As with our appreciation of much artistic beauty, there are thus “just grounds to conclude that moral beauty . . . demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give

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it a suitable influence on the mind” (EPM 1.9). Far from Rousseau, who argues that reason kills our instinctual feelings of pitié,19 Hume thus maintains that reason plays a central role in refining our sympathy-derived moral sentiments. Just as reason can help correct our moral and aesthetic sentiments, Hume also describes a “delicacy of imagination, which is requisite to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions” (EMPL, p. 234). The ability to imagine and feel fine distinctions, like the ability to reason about them, is often partly the result of natural gifts, but is always improvable through education and practice. “A cultivated taste for the polite arts,” Hume writes, “improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions.” (“Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in EMPL, p. 6). The recipients of a humanistic education “feel an increase of humanity . . . Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages” (“Of Refinement in the Arts,” in EMPL, p. 271). Here, again, Hume’s views can be helpfully contrasted with Rousseau’s. Rousseau argues that just as reason acts contrary to natural pitié, so too does civilization more generally; in such advanced states of human development, ethics and politics must seek a foundation independent of such primitive feelings.20 By contrast, Hume maintains that civilization and education can only help refine the sentiments, making them more sensitive to the feelings of our fellows—and hence more suitable as grounds for a commitment to genuine justice and virtue. Finally, Hume argues that, in order to properly judge any given object, the critic “must preserve his mind free from all prejudice and allow nothing to enter his consideration but the very object which is submitted to his examination” (“Of the Standard of Taste” in EMPL, p. 239). The need for, and the possibility of, ridding oneself of bias is obvious in the case of aesthetic judgment. We all understand that doting parents are poor evaluators of their children’s creations, but that a talented critic can successfully forget any personal connections he may have to the artist when evaluating her work. Swept up in the contemplation of the art itself, such a successful critic has “imposed a proper violence on his imagination” and has “forgotten himself for a moment” (“Of the Standard of Taste” in EMPL, p. 240). By the end of his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume is confident that he has identified whose evaluations are to be taken as authoritative in aesthetic disputes. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice,” he writes, “can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (EMPL, p. 241). It may be difficult to determine who qualifies as such a competent critic, but “these are questions of fact, not of sentiment. Whether any particular person be endowed with good sense and a delicate imagination, free from prejudice,


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may often be the subject of dispute . . . But that such a character is valuable and estimable will be agreed by all mankind” (EMPL, p. 242). There is no guarantee, however, that all refined tastes will always be in agreement. “Where there is such a diversity in the internal frame or external situation as is entirely blameless on both sides, and leaves no room to give on the preference above the other,” Hume admits, “in that case a certain degree of diversity in judgment is unavoidable, and we seek in vain for a standard by which we can reconcile the contrary sentiments” (EMPL, p. 244). We may be perfectly content to leave such conflict unresolved in the aesthetic sphere. While the claim that Bunyan is to be preferred to Milton is clearly absurd, whether Milton is to be preferred to Shakespeare may never be fully resolved.21 Yet we cannot live with such indecision in the moral sphere, particularly with regard to matters of justice.

2. The General Point of View In addition to the elements common to the moral and aesthetic spheres, which lead to a need for, and allow the possibility of, an authoritative standard of refined taste, further features particular to moral evaluation demand still greater consensus. In order to bring us closer to achieving a single standard for moral judgment, Hume introduces the concept of correcting our moral sentiments by considering the object of our evaluation from a more general point of view. The idea of general points of view is meant to correct the bias built into our sympathy, which Hume understands as plausible grounds for an objection to the idea of deriving moral distinctions from that faculty in the first place. While our sympathy is necessarily stronger for those to whom we have some connection, our moral evaluations, we feel, ought not to vary accordingly. Since “sympathy varies without a variation in our esteem,” one might falsely conclude that the moral sentiments cannot be the product of sympathy (T 3.3.1.14). Hume replies that when we have refined and fully developed moral sentiments, we make our evaluations of others, not from our particular perspective, but instead, “fix on some steady and general points of view and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation” (T 3.3.1.15). There is a parallel here to our judgments concerning external objects derived from our sense experiences. In both the sensory and the moral cases, “the imagination adheres to the general views of things, and distinguishes betwixt the feelings they produce, and those which arise from our particular and momentary situation” (T 3.3.1.23). Hume explains: All objects seem to diminish by their distance: But though the appearance of objects to our senses be the original standard by which we judge of them, yet we do not say, that they actually diminish by the distance; but correcting the

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appearance by reflection, arrive at a more constant and established judgment concerning them. In like manner, though sympathy be much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and a sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous; yet we neglect all these differences in our calm judgments concerning characters of men. (T 3.3.3.2)

An appeal to some general or common point of view in the moral context, however, cannot be an appeal to objectivity. The very fact that Hume speaks of the relevant perspectives in the plural makes clear that this is not his intended meaning. We cannot correct our immediate moral sentiments through appeal to how virtuous or vicious someone is independent of all human reactions, since virtue and vice are themselves a matter of such reactions. Instead, we try to view this person from the perspective of those who are affected by the character trait being evaluated, either that of “the person himself, whose character is examined, or that of persons who have a connection with him” (T 3.3.1.30). It is our sympathy with these individuals that was responsible for our moral evaluations in the first place. Since we must evaluate others from some humanly possible point of view, the perspective of those with whom we are sympathizing is the best candidate for the job. Rather than striving for an impossible objectivity, we therefore “confine our view to that narrow circle in which any person moves, in order to form a judgment of his moral character” (T 3.3.3.2). Our reason for treating such perspectives as authoritative for purposes of moral judgment cannot be that a person “really is” as virtuous or vicious as he appears to his circle of acquaintances.22 Hume instead argues that appeal to general points of view in achieving moral consensus speaks to basic human needs, allowing us to avoid the inter- and intrapersonal “contradictions” that would otherwise plague us. “Nothing is more certain from experience,” Hume writes in Book I of the Treatise, “than that any contradiction either to the sentiments or passions gives a sensible uneasiness, whether it proceeds from without or from within, from the opposition of external objects or from the combat of internal principles” (T 1.4.2.37). It is clear from this passage that Hume’s moral theory is meant to help us avoid “contradictions” involving psychological tension from opposing sentiments, rather than the logical incompatibility of contradictory beliefs per se. Our goal here is not rational consistency, but emotional tranquility. Hume most often speaks of the contradictions of sentiments arising from self-interested or biased moral sentiments as a matter of conflict between individuals with opposing moral views. “We are quickly obliged to forget our own interest in our judgments of this kind,” he writes, “by reason of the perpetual contradictions we meet with in society and conversation, from persons that are not placed in the same situation and have not the same interest with ourselves.” In order for “our sentiments to concur with those of others,”


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we must all agree to consider only “the tendency of any passion to the advantage or harm of those who have any immediate connection or intercourse with the person possessed of it” (T 3.3.3.2). At times, Hume presents the need for such agreement as the need for a shared language of moral discourse. “We every day meet with persons who are in different situations from ourselves, and who could never converse with us on any reasonable terms were we to remain constantly in that situation and point of view which is peculiar to us,” he writes (T 3.3.3.2). To be sure, the sharing of a common moral language is critically important for many aspects of modern life; Hume mentions, for example, that such a language is necessary “in company, in the pulpit, on the theatre, and in the schools” (T 3.3.3.2). For those twentieth-century philosophers who came to see moral philosophy primarily as the analysis of moral language, as well as those grappling with the legacy of this mode of philosophizing today, the argument from our discursive needs is of particular interest, sharply distinguishing Hume from the later “emotivists” who sometimes claimed to analyze moral language in a Humean spirit. As observed earlier, however, moral language is capable of giving an appearance of moral consensus where none actually exists. General points of view are meant to aid in the achievement of a more authentic and substantive level of agreement than that which exists between those who join together in praising “justice” and “benevolence” while applying these words to radically different characters. Unlike some of his twentieth-century intellectual heirs, Hume’s own orientation toward ethics always privileges the anatomy of our actual sentiments over the analysis of the language we use to describe them. The social need for appeal to a common point of view in the achievement of moral consensus goes much deeper psychologically than the mere need for common terms of discourse. Our need for a general point of view stems from our insatiable desire for the company of our fellows—a need which, like the moral sentiments that must be corrected for its sake, is itself a product of sympathy. Since sympathy is the origin of so many of our most basic emotions almost all of our passions must whither absent those with whom we can share them. In a flight of eloquence uncharacteristic of the Treatise—but which echoes the famously overblown style of Shaftesbury, who made a very similar argument (see IVM 2.2.1, p. 62)—Hume boldly declares: We can form no wish which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoyed apart from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable. Whatever other passions we may be actuated by—pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge or lust—the sole animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor would they have any force were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others. Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to

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The Enlightenment of Sympathy serve and obey one man, let the sun rise and set at his command, the sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him. He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least with whom he may share his happiness and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy. (T 2.2.5.15)

Society is absolutely essential for us, but is impossible without some shared standards of conduct and character to govern our interactions. While we can coexist indefinitely amidst irresolvable aesthetic disagreement, we must have a common viewpoint for purposes of ethical judgment in order to live together at all. Although some degree of moral disagreement will still be inevitable, the existence of a shared moral viewpoint enables us to negotiate our social coexistence despite this disagreement, hopeful that our arguments will result in the achievement of real consensus. As sympathy is responsible for our need for society and hence for shared moral standards, so too does sympathy make us palpably uncomfortable when faced with sentiments vehemently at odds with our own. “When a person opposes me in any sentiment which I am strongly bent upon, and rouses up my passion by contradiction,” Hume writes, “I have always a degree of sympathy with him, nor does my commotion proceed from any other origin” (T 3.3.2.3). When I feel sympathy with those whose feelings are so opposed to my own, “my sympathy with him goes not so far as entirely to change my sentiments and way of thinking, yet it seldom is so weak as not to disturb the easy course of my thought” (T 3.3.2.2). A genuine state of psychological disequilibrium or “contradiction” will therefore result from any strong disagreement between two individuals; genuinely opposing sentiments (one transferred from the other by sympathy) will form in the mind of each.23 On a subject as important to all of us as the moral standards that govern our interactions, the desire to avoid such contradiction will result in a practice of appeal to a perspective meant to resolve disagreement and maintain the social union that our sympathetic nature makes so vitally necessary for us. Hume’s arguments regarding the need for a general point of view are often presented exclusively in these social terms and the drive for moral consensus that they evoke is sometimes tied to Hume’s political conservatism.24 Opposing this school of interpretation, Annette Baier writes that, for Hume, “the problem that [corrected] morality solves is deeper; it is as much intrapersonal as interpersonal,” solving “contradictions in our individual sentiments over time.”25 In his analysis of the resolution of intrapersonal contradictions through correction of our moral sentiments from a general point of view, moreover, the reformist potential of Hume’s ethics becomes most evident, for it is here that Hume makes explicit why we can never fully exclude any of our fellows from the sphere of our moral concern.


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Our uncorrected moral sentiments may lead to internal contradictions, Hume argues, because “our situation, with regard to both persons and things, is in continual fluctuation, and a man that lies at a distance from us may in a little time become a familiar acquaintance” (T 3.3.1.15). The same vicious or virtuous act, which once harmed or benefited only those so distant from ourselves that we barely bothered to evaluate it, may thus come to our attention quite dramatically. As Hume writes in the second Enquiry: Virtue, placed at . . . a distance, is like a fixed star which, though to the eye of reason it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed as to affect the senses neither with light nor heat. Bring this virtue nearer by our acquaintance or connection with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbation converted into the warmest sentiments of friendship and regard. (EPM 5.2.43)

Even individuals who normally feel sympathy only for those within a certain sectarian circle are likely to experience moments of strong sympathy for an outsider whose suffering is made suddenly, vividly present. At these moments of attention, much of what we once thought virtuous may now appear as vicious—seeing it as we now do as causing pain to those outside our narrow circle of strong sympathy. The mercilessness of a general who gives no quarter to our foreign enemies, or the cruelty of a taskmaster who disciplines our barbarian slaves, is no longer seen as a virtue once we come to see and feel the suffering of foreigners or slaves. Just as we wish to avoid the psychological contradictions that arise from strong moral disagreement between ourselves and others, so too do we wish to avoid such contradictions from our own moral evaluations changing so dramatically over time. Those with fully developed moral sentiments thus always form moral evaluations from a general point of view, for only by doing so can they make steady judgments of virtue and vice that give equal weight to the consequences of a character on all affected by it. None of those affected by a character trait evaluated from a general point of view can be excluded from our concern; Hume writes that fully developed moral sentiments must come to “comprehend all human creatures” (EPM 9.1.7). As Hume repeatedly insists, any human being is potentially the object of our sympathy and appeal to the general point of view is meant to insure that those for whom we might feel strong, immediate sympathy tomorrow are not excluded from our moral evaluations today. To be sure, oppressive social institutions may successfully shield the feelings of certain others from our view, or may cultivate our own characters so that we are insensible to their feelings, greatly reducing the chances for sympathy. Hume speaks specifically of slavery in this regard, observing “the little

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humanity commonly observed in persons accustomed from their infancy to exercise so great authority over their fellow creatures and to trample upon human nature.” Such institutions allowed a nation of slaveholders, such as the ancient Romans, to have “shaken off all sense of compassion towards that unhappy part of their species” (“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” in EMPL, p. 383, 385). There is, however, no guarantee that even such intensely oppressive social institutions will always succeed in excluding their victims from our sympathy. The breakdown of such institutions comes when the plight of the excluded is somehow “brought nearer” to us and the circle of our moral concern is thereby expanded. The century after Hume’s death was marked by exactly such a breakdown in oppressive social institutions. This was the age when urbanization and industrialization brought the classes into constant contact, when social fluidity meant that the person who is one day one’s inferior may the next be one’s equal, and when such authors as Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe gave “eloquent recital” to the sufferings of the poor and enslaved. W.E.B. DuBois thus writes: The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others the transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou known Life?”26

Those commentators who emphasize Hume’s conservatism often imagine that Hume would have decried the egalitarian revolutions that followed his death. Their (often good) reasons for doing so will be addressed in the next chapter’s discussion of Hume’s theory of justice, but here we see that important elements of Hume’s ethics suggest that this conjecture is mistaken.27

3. The Psychological Power of Corrected Moral Sentiments Despite the deep need, both interpersonal and intrapersonal, for us to correct the biases of our moral evaluations by appeal to a general point of view, our original, biased moral sentiments may remain unchanged. “The passions do not always follow our corrections,” Hume admits, “but these corrections serve sufficiently to regulate our abstract notions and are alone regarded when we pronounce in general concerning the degrees of vice and virtue” (T 3.3.1.21). While they may not have full control over our feelings, the corrections made from a general point of view are therefore acknowledged to have “authority over our reason, and to command our judgment and opinion” (T 3.3.1.18). Strictly speaking, of course, Hume’s philosophy precludes this association of mature moral judgment with reason, but as Hume argued in Book II of the Treatise, reason in this sense is not the faculty of reason proper


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(i.e., that which determines truth and falsehood), but rather the product of our calm passions. These feelings do not have the violence of the emotions more commonly labeled “passions,” and their “tranquility leads us into a mistake concerning them, and causes us to regard them as conclusions only of our intellectual faculties” (T 2.3.9.13). Our need to correct our moral sentiments produces only calm passions of this kind. Stemming from the calm desire to minimize contradictions between the various sentiments produced by sympathy over the long term, they are often opposed to the dictates of the violent passions of self-love or uncorrected moral sentiments. “Generally speaking,” Hume admits, “the violent passions have a more powerful influence on the will” (T 2.3.9.13). This explains why we so often fail to act on the basis of our own acknowledged moral evaluations, particularly when the relevant sympathy is weak and the evaluations made from a general point of view diverge significantly from our uncorrected moral sentiments. Hume writes that: My sympathy with another may give me the sentiment of pain and disapprobation when any object is presented that has a tendency to give him uneasiness, though I may not be willing to sacrifice any thing of my own interest, or cross any of my passions, for his satisfaction . . . Sentiments must touch the heart to make them control our passions, but they need not extend beyond the imagination to make them influence our taste. (T 3.3.1.23)

That said, Hume also argues that when calm passions identified with “reason” are “corroborated by reflection, and seconded by resolution,” they may prove capable of controlling more immediate, violent passions even “in their most furious movements” (T 2.3.9.13). Hume identifies a virtue he calls “strength of mind” with the ability to act on calm, settled principles of action (T 2.3.3.10). The goal of moral development is to make the corrected moral sentiments the predominant inclinations in our souls, giving us the strength of mind to govern our moral evaluations, as well as our behavior, according to the principles of action that they provide. To be sure, if we find that we lack such strength of mind, and our evaluations or behavior are determined by uncorrected moral sentiments or other violent passions, a mere will to change our psychological make-up is pointless. It is our sentiments, as Hume famously argued, which determine our actions, and “the will never creates new sentiments” (T 3.2.5.5). If, however, we recognize the need to refine our moral taste, begin to correct our evaluations from a general point of view, and act in accordance with the principles that result, we may eventually find ourselves able to do so. We will begin by changing our actions, not our sentiments. Finding himself without some virtuous motive or principle, Hume writes, a person “may hate himself upon that account and may perform the action without the motive

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from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice that virtuous principle, or at least to disguise to himself as much as possible his want of it.” In this way, “a person may perform an action merely out of regard to its moral obligation” (T 3.2.1.8). Whenever we face strong opposition “the efforts, which the mind makes to surmount the obstacle, excite the spirits and enliven the passion” (T 2.3.4.6), so the recalcitrance of our own uncorrected sentiments will only further spur us to rise to the challenge. Hume is optimistic that eventually we will find ourselves governed by refined, corrected moral sentiments. He writes: Let a man propose to himself the model of a character which he approves; let him be well acquainted with those particulars in which his own character deviates from this model; let him keep a constant watch over himself and bend his mind by a continual effort from the vices towards the virtues, and I have no doubt but, in time, he will find in his temper an alteration for the better. (“The Skeptic,” in EMPL, p. 170)

III. Hume’s Normative Theory 1. Hume as a Normative Theorist Many recent commentators have argued that, despite its normatively loaded talk of moral “progress” and “correction,” Hume’s ethics is essentially a descriptive project in empirical social science.28 Indeed, Hume’s own description of his aim is that of finding “those universal principles, from which all censure or approbation is ultimately derived.” This, Hume observes, “is a question of fact” (EPM 1.10). In discussing his descriptive methodology, Hume contrasts “the painter” of morals with “the anatomist.” Painters of morals depict virtue “in the most amiable colors, borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence.” Such eloquent authors “make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments . . . so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honor” (EHU 1.1). Anatomists of morals, on the other hand, “regard human nature as a subject of speculation and with a narrow scrutiny examine it in order to find those principles which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action or behavior” (EHU 1.2). Hume classifies his own work as anatomical, not painterly. Hume first contrasted the painter and the anatomist of morals in a 1739 letter to Francis Hutcheson, who had criticized an early draft of the Treatise for lacking “warmth in the cause of virtue.” Hume responds that one must examine morality with the attitude of either an anatomist or a painter; he cannot “conceive these two characters united in the same work.” Nonetheless, just as an anatomist “can give very good advice to a painter or statuary,” so


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too is he persuaded “that a metaphysician may be very helpful to a moralist.” Hume thus assures Hutcheson that he will revise the Treatise and see “if it be possible to make the moralist and metaphysician agree a little better.”29 There is, however, no a priori guarantee that the moral anatomy will prove helpful for painterly exhortations to virtue. As has already been mentioned, there are certain anatomies of morality which, if correct, would make it difficult or impossible to endorse our moral commitments reflectively. Indeed, one of the foremost deflationary genealogists of morals in Hume’s own era provides the source of Hume’s simile. In the introduction to the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville writes that just “as those that study the anatomy of dead carcasses may see that the chief organs and nicest springs more immediately required to continue the motion of our machine are . . . but small trifling films and little pipes,” so too may those who study man’s nature find “that his vilest and most hateful qualities” are the source of the virtues of which he approves.30 When an anatomist discovers that morality is the product of our “vilest and most hateful qualities,” he can only become the adversary of the painter, who must insist that such truths remain secret lest we come to hate morality. While a deflationary account of morality may successfully explain moral evaluation and behavior from a third-person perspective, it cannot be used to justify one’s own evaluations and behavior. In declaring his intention to make the painter and anatomist agree in his own work, Hume shows his hope that his own account of the origins of morality will render the dictates of our moral faculties all the more “satisfactory to the human mind” and make it capable of standing “the test of the most critical examination” (T 1.4.7.14). This distinction between mental operations that can withstand critical reflection and those that cannot appears throughout Hume’s philosophy; his goal is always to help us distinguish between the two. In Book I of the Treatise, for example, Hume compares the psychological principles that produce the ideas of cause and effect to those responsible for the common habit of anthropomorphizing animals and inanimate objects. While principles such as the transition from causes to effects “are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin,” the principles of anthropomorphism “are neither unavoidable to mankind, nor necessary, or so much as useful in the conduct of life . . . and being opposite to the other principles of custom and reasoning may easily be subverted by a due contrast and opposition.” It is for this reason, Hume argues, that “the former are received by philosophy and the latter rejected (T 1.4.4.1).31 Unlike our anthropomorphist tendencies, corrected moral sentiments are clearly worthy of our reflective approval. A psyche governed by these sentiments is in what later philosophers would call reflective equilibrium, capable

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of approving itself and hence at peace with itself. Regulating our behavior and our evaluations of others through the judgments of corrected moral sentiments is necessary for achieving this reflective equilibrium.

2. The Happiness and Dignity of Virtue Among Hume’s many arguments for the reflective stability of the morally developed psyche, Christine Korsgaard has identified two basic “points of view from which morality is assessed . . . first, the point of view of self-interest, and second, the point of view of the moral sense itself.”32 The first of these points of view establishes what Hume, following his sentimentalist predecessors, calls our “interested obligation” to virtuous behavior (EPM 9.14). From the second of these points of view, the corrected moral sentiments’ reflexive self-endorsement establishes what Hume, at the conclusion of the Treatise, calls “the dignity of virtue.” Hume here explicitly contrasts this dignity of virtue with the self-interested “happiness . . . of virtue” that he discusses elsewhere (T 3.3.6.6). As the dignity of an individual depends largely on her sense of self worth, so too does the dignity of virtue depend on what might be called (to use an unfortunately degraded phrase of our own time) mature moral sentiments’ “self-esteem.” In the conclusion of the Treatise, Hume writes that our sense of virtue “must certainly acquire new force, if when reflecting on itself, it approves of those principles from whence it is derived, and finds nothing but what is great and good in its rise and origin” (T 3.3.6.3). Having a compassionate character is approved by corrected moral sentiments as a virtue (see, e.g., T 3.3.3.3). If the moral sentiments develop from sympathy, as Hume claims they do, they will thus approve of themselves as the products of our virtuous, rather than our vicious, dispositions. In this way, “not only virtue must be approved of, but also the sense of virtue: And not only that sense, but also the principles from whence it is derived. So that nothing is presented on any side, but what is laudable and good” (T 3.3.6.3). In other words, while debunkers of morality such as Mandeville argue that our moral faculties would disapprove of the vicious elements of our nature responsible for their own development—and Mandeville’s moral anatomy thus leads the moral sentiments to undermine themselves—Hume’s anatomy inspires a feeling of self-approbation on the part of these same sentiments. The dignity of virtue is a matter of a very narrow form of reflective equilibrium, one internal to the moral faculty alone. In Korsgaard’s terminology, the dignity of virtue is a matter of our moral sentiments successfully bearing the test of their own “direct reflexivity.” As a result, the dignity of virtue alone is not sufficient to establish its normative authority. As has been shown in chapter 1, Hume explicitly rejects what Korsgaard calls the theory of “normativity as direct reflexivity.” If this account of normativity were the only


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one available to Hume, then this would be a very good case for the position that Hume’s ethical project is a purely descriptive one.33 Yet it is important to note that, at the conclusion of the Treatise, Hume never speaks of an individual mental faculty bearing its own survey. To the contrary, he argues “that a mind will never be able to bear its own survey that has been wanting in its part to mankind and society” (T 3.3.6.6; emphasis added). Hume’s concern here is not to insure that our moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and other faculties can each approve of themselves when taken in isolation, but rather that a mind as a whole can approve of itself when reflecting on itself as a whole. His interest is not in the direct reflexivity of our various faculties, but in the holistic reflective stability of the human mind as such. Hume’s approval of the moral sentiments at the end of the Treatise, while certainly noting the reflexive self-endorsement of corrected moral sentiments taken in isolation, presents this internal consistency as a necessary, but hardly sufficient, element of a more holistic sort of psychological equilibrium. For Hume, what is important to consider about any given faculty is whether it can find a place in a mind that is reflectively stable, all things considered.34 Of course, such general reflective stability would be impossible if any single faculty were to fail the test of direct reflexivity, but it would also be impossible if any two faculties were unable to approve of one another. 35 If our moral sentiments or the virtues of which they approve were to be rejected by our intellectual faculties as somehow false or unwarranted—or if they were to be rejected by our aesthetic faculties as somehow ugly or distasteful—then these too might be reasons for rejecting such sentiments in our search for reflective equilibrium. It is also important to note what reasons Hume gives at the end of the Treatise for pursuing this holistic reflective equilibrium in the first place. Hume here explicitly says that we strive to be able to bear our own survey, not for its own sake, but for the “peace and inward satisfaction” such stability provides (T 3.3.6.6). As has already been observed, Hume sees human beings as having a strong desire to avoid psychological “contradiction” from any source—be it internal or external—in order to avoid the painful “uneasiness” such contradiction creates. Echoing Shaftesbury, Hume presents the “inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct” that come from the ability to bear our own survey without painful psychological contradiction as “very requisite to happiness” (EPM 9.23).36 Although such satisfaction with oneself cannot be said to be the whole of human happiness—which Hume repeatedly insists also requires a wide variety of other goods—it can certainly be thought to be a necessary part of it. This is why Hume devotes so much of his moral philosophy to emphasizing how a commitment to treat the evaluations of our corrected moral sentiments as authoritative is wholly compatible, not only with the quest for reflective equilibrium as such, but also with the self-interested pursuit of all the other myriad goods necessary for individual happiness.

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3. Sources of the Happiness of Virtue Hume, of course, refuses to avail himself of the traditional Christian argument for our interested obligation to virtue—the claim that one’s eternal salvation or damnation in the afterlife depends on the merit of one’s character and conduct in this world (see NHR 14.6). Rather than appealing to a future state, Hume insists—like Shaftesbury and the ancients from which he took inspiration—that “in the present order of things, virtue is attended with more peace of mind than vice, and meets with a more favorable reception from the world” (EHU 11.20).37 Yet the standard Kantian rebuttal to both ancient and religious eudemonism is that they fail to capture the essence of morality as categorically binding. Whether, like Hume and the ancients, one argues that virtue is the means to this-worldly happiness, or one instead maintains the religious position that virtue in this world is the path to other-worldly bliss in the next, one is still treating virtue as a mere means, robbing it of its unconditional normative authority. Even if we reject such Kantian ideas, we might still be concerned that, for reasons outlined by Shaftesbury and Butler in the previous chapter, treating virtue as a mere means to happiness is self-defeating. Not only will doing so rob our actions of any genuine virtue, it may also deny us the happiness that can come only when we pursue our goals for their own sake. This objection to appealing to the happiness of virtue seems tenable when one considers Hume’s account of virtue’s “favorable reception from the world,” which certainly seems to treat virtue as a mere means. Given the strong social need for shared standards of moral judgment—and, in turn, the individual’s strong psychological need for society—the social benefits of living up to moral standards are obvious. Gaining the approval of our fellows will not only allow us to bear our own survey when participating sympathetically in their sentiments about us; it will also aid us in virtually all our practical aims. Procuring the esteem of others, as Hume puts it in a later essay, “facilitates every enterprise and undertaking, besides the satisfaction which immediately results from it.” Indeed, the approval of others is so useful that “prosperity is naturally, though not necessarily, attached to virtue and merit, and adversity, in like manner, to vice and folly” (“Of Impudence and Modesty,” EMPL 552–53). Elements of the mercenary tone that Shaftesbury criticized persist in the Treatise and second Enquiry even when Hume turns from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal sources of the happiness of virtue. One of the most important sources of the intrapersonal happiness of virtue—the pleasure of satisfactorily bearing our own survey—has already been discussed at some length. Another obvious intrapersonal reason for endorsing our moral sentiments is the violence it would do to our psyche to try to rid ourselves of them. These sentiments, Hume argues, “are so rooted in our constitution and


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temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, it is impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (T 3.1.2.8). We can never hope to achieve happiness unless we make peace with these inevitable features of our nature, granting them our reflective approval rather than struggling in vain to purge them from our souls. These arguments are echoed in the words of the Epicurean who—alongside the Stoic, Platonist, and Skeptic—elaborates his worldview in Hume’s four essays on the ancient philosophical schools. “When by my will alone I can stop the blood, as it runs with impetuosity along its canals,” Hume’s Epicurean claims, “then may I hope to change the course of my sentiments and passions” (EMPL 140). The philosophical contributions of all four of Hume’s essays on the ancient philosophical schools are coming to be appreciated in the secondary literature, as commentators begin to move away from the unfortunately still-common view that Hume’s own opinions are to be identified exclusively with those of the Skeptic in the final essay.38 Increasingly, commentators are coming to realize that Hume’s own ethical position is closer in some respects to that of his Stoic.39 For those unfamiliar with the debt that previous sentimentalists owed to the ancient Stoics, this may seem surprising. Unlike Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, in most of his writings Hume does not attempt to reclaim Stoic ideas for sentimentalist purposes, but instead subjects the ancient school to very harsh criticism. Hume repeatedly attacks what he describes as the Stoics’ “refined system of selfishness,” whose perverse goal is to have us “reason ourselves out of all virtue, as well as social enjoyment” (EHU 5.1). “Epictetus,” Hume remarks in the second Enquiry, “has scarcely ever mentioned the sentiment of humanity and compassion, but in order to put his disciples on their guard against it” (EPM App. 4.14). Worst of all is Epictetus’ dictum that “when your friend is in affliction . . . you may counterfeit a sympathy with him, if it give him relief, but take care not to allow any compassion to sink into your heart, or disturb that tranquility which is the perfection of wisdom” (EMPL 540).40 Under Hume’s view of the ancient school, unlike Hutcheson’s more charitable interpretation, the Stoic sage does not cultivate his kind affections, but instead summons all his intellectual powers to kill the sentiments that would spur him to virtuous action. In his “grave philosophic endeavor after perfection,” the Stoic thus “strikes at all the most endearing sentiments of the heart, and all the most useful biases and instincts which can govern a human creature” (EMPL 539). Yet it is important to realize that Hume’s intention in his four essays, explained in a footnote, “is not so much to explain accurately the sentiments of the ancient sects of philosophy, as to deliver the sentiments of sects that naturally form themselves in the world, and entertain different ideas of human life and happiness” (EMPL 138). The Epicurean is thus not so much a representative of the ancient philosophical school of that name as “the man

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of elegance and pleasure” (EMPL 138), while the Platonist is “the man of contemplation, and philosophical devotion” (EMPL 155), and the Stoic is “the man of action and virtue” (EMPL 146). Hume’s essay “The Stoic” is thus not meant as a description of a particular ancient philosophical school, but is meant to elucidate the happiness of a life “of action and virtue,” and hence the normative authority of the moral sentiments that approve of such a life. The Stoic who speaks in Hume’s essay is as opposed to the selfish, indolent, and unfeeling elements of ancient Stoicism as is Hume. The ideal individual whom he describes “knows that in this sullen apathy neither true wisdom nor true happiness can be found” and “feels too strongly the charm of the social affections ever to counteract so sweet, so natural, so virtuous a propensity.” Indeed, this sentimentalist Stoic stands against Epictetus on precisely that point on which Hume also opposes the ancient sage most adamantly: Epictetus’s disparagement of sympathy and compassion. Rather than feigning compassion when it can ease the suffering of others without letting it touch his heart, this Stoic’s ideal individual feels such sentiments deeply. “Even when, bathed in tears, he laments the miseries of the human race, of his country, of his friends, and unable to give succor, can only relieve them by compassion,” Hume insists, “he yet rejoices in the generous disposition and feels a satisfaction superior to that of the most indulged sense” (EMPL 151). As much as he breaks from the ancient Stoics on the value of sympathy and the moral sentiments derived from it, Hume’s Stoic also breaks from Hume’s Epicurean in emphasizing our ability to shape our own psychology, and hence to refine our immature sympathetic feelings in ways that directly echo Hume’s own account of moral development in the Treatise and second Enquiry. In this emphasis on our ability to shape our own psychology, Hume’s Stoic draws on themes first developed by Shaftesbury—the author whose views probably come closest to those described in this essay, and whose florid style Hume appears to be aping.41 Yet this Stoic does not appeal to a metaphysical standard of nature, above and beyond everyday human concerns, to justify the process of self-correction. He instead makes the original observation that the process of self-correction is itself an essential component of our happiness. The joy involved comes from the work itself, not from the successful attainment of our goal. Just as we savor great happiness in “the pursuit even of the most worthless prey,” so too does the joy of industry “render the cultivating of our mind, the moderating of our passions, the enlightening of our reason, an agreeable occupation” (EMPL 149). Hume himself can acknowledge the truth in the arguments of both his Epicurean and his Stoic on this point. Like his model Cicero, Hume is an Eclectic, and finds some truth in the worldview of all philosophical schools.42 In the moral philosophy that Hume elsewhere presents in his own name, the


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moral sentiments are initially derived from inescapable features of our nature, such as our faculty of sympathy. But mature, authoritative moral sentiments are also the product of a long process of moral development—a process which, like all great quests, brings fulfillment both in the journey and in the destination. Hume’s Stoic, however, differs from his Epicurean by emphasizing the happiness which virtue brings, not as a product of virtue itself, but as a byproduct of the active struggle to attain virtue for its own sake. As was seen in the previous chapter, Butler believed this to be true of many of the primary objects of our desire, which can only make us happy if we desire them for reasons independent of the principle of self-love. Regardless of whether this is true so generally, Hume’s Stoic certainly believes it to be true with regard to virtue. Nature, according to the Stoic: . . . has provided virtue with the richest dowry; but being careful, lest the allurements of interest should engage such suitors as were insensible of the native worth of so divine a beauty, she has wisely provided that this dowry can have no charms but in the eyes of those who are already transported with the love of virtue. (EMPL 153)

Although Hume’s Stoic here adopts the language of nature’s intentions, it is clear from Hume’s other writings that this talk of natural teleology cannot be understood literally. Unlike Shaftesbury’s arguments from the standard of nature, Hume’s argument here is grounded solely in the empirics of human happiness. As is so often the case with the sources of human happiness, virtue provides satisfaction only if we seek it for its own sake. In this way, the happiness of virtue comes only from the proper appreciation of its dignity. For Hume, this dignity does not depend on the harmony of virtue with some purposive cosmic order, but only on the directly reflexive harmony of our moral faculty with itself, a necessary element of the broadly reflective harmony of a virtuous mind as a whole. “As harmonious colors mutually give and receive a luster by their friendly union,” the Stoic argues, “so do these ennobling sentiments of the human mind” (EMPL 152). As in much of ancient ethics, virtue is here seen as the beauty of the soul, worthy of our disinterested, quasi-aesthetic appreciation. If we pursue this beautiful harmony for its own sake, happiness will be the byproduct.

4. The Unhappiness and Indignity of False Virtues Yet it is misleading to speak of virtue as the harmony of the soul without specifying the nature of the specific virtues at issue. Hume himself, for example, entirely rejects the ascetic morality built around “celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues.” Such false virtues, he argues, provide us with no interested obligation to govern ourselves by them as a means to happiness:

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They serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment. We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupefy the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. (EPM 9.1.3)

These alleged virtues cannot be commanded by any set of moral sentiments that can find a place in a reflectively stable mind. No superstition is sufficiently powerful “to pervert entirely these natural sentiments” and make them approve of such monstrosities without some psychological tension, some lingering sense that approving of them is a sort of madness. When considering the monkish virtues, “we justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices” (EPM 9.1.3). If Hume’s normative justification of the corrected moral sentiments is meant to serve as a vindication of the virtue of justice specifically, the content of this virtue must therefore be examined with an eye toward its candidacy as part of a happy and reflectively stable psyche. Far from failing to provide us with any resources for normative political theorizing, Hume’s ethics may give us good reason to reject some of the virtues that Hume himself recommends, just as Hume himself rejects the monkish virtues of mortification and self-denial. Hume’s conception of justice, I will argue in the next chapter, is ultimately worthy of dismissal for such reasons. This conception of justice would, on Hume’s own account, fail to find an authoritative place in the stable psyche of a happy, morally mature individual. Hume’s sentimentalist ethics thus suggests that we must find an alternative theory of justice. I will argue in later chapters that excellent sentimentalist candidates are provided by Hume’s friend Adam Smith and his admirer J. G. Herder.

C HAPTER

3

Hume’s Conservative Sentimentalism

The relationship between Hume’s political views and his broader philosophy has long been the subject of deep disagreement. Bertrand Russell, for one, maintained that Hume’s philosophical and political positions are necessarily disconnected, as they are for any respectable philosopher. In responding to a critic who could find no connection between Russell’s abstract philosophy on the one hand and his political writings on the other, Russell freely admitted that there was no such connection. Russell explained that he was in full agreement with Hume on most philosophical matters, and in utter disagreement with Hume on most political matters, and that politics had nothing to do with philosophy for either of them.1 Others, however, have maintained that Hume’s political views were a direct outgrowth of his broader philosophy. Since Hume’s philosophy as a whole is conventionally interpreted as almost entirely negative in character, those who adopt this latter view often draw a straight line from moral or epistemological skepticism to political conservatism. John Stuart Mill wrote that Hume’s “absolute skepticism in speculation very naturally brought him round to Toryism in practice.” A philosophical skeptic is naturally a political conservative, Mill explains, because if “one side of every question is about as likely as another to be true, a man will commonly be inclined to prefer that order of things which, being no more wrong than every other, he has hitherto found compatible with his private comforts.”2 Mill’s depiction of Hume as a political conservative by virtue of his philosophical skepticism has since become the subject of voluminous scholarly debate. Currently, there is no more agreement on the degree of Hume’s conservatism than there is on the degree of his skepticism, let alone on the degree of connection between the two.3 Yet by now it should be clear that, at least with regard to moral matters, Hume was not the destructive skeptic that Mill describes. The first half of this chapter will now go on to argue that, just as Hume is not a moral skeptic or relativist, neither is he an entirely uncritical political conservative—one who adopts an unthinking complacency with 65

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regard to existing social and governmental institutions. Unlike the common designation of Hume as a moral skeptic, however, his common designation as a political conservative is in large measure accurate. Hume is indeed a defender of most existing social and political conventions. Yet Hume defended these conventions by reference to a sophisticated theory of justice, one that sought to combine the sentimentalism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson with the best elements of the “selfish system” of Hobbes and Mandeville. This hybrid theory was, in turn, to be as great an influence on Mill’s own tradition of utilitarian philosophical radicalism as it was on the rival nineteenth-century movement that became known as “conservatism.” While Mill is thus wrong in his picture of a simple and straightforward connection between Hume’s philosophy and his politics, Russell is equally wrong to deny the existence of any such connection at all. Hume’s theory of justice clearly depends on his broader philosophy, on his ethics if not also his epistemology. After all, if we approve of Hume’s conception of justice as a virtue for reasons that can accurately be described as Humean, we must do so according to the principles of approval and disapproval laid out in Hume’s sentimentalist ethics. This is not to say, however, that all those who accept Hume’s sentimentalist ethics must also accept his theory of justice. To the contrary, I will argue that moral disapproval of Hume’s conception of justice is actually justified by Hume’s own reflective sentimentalism. After describing Hume’s theory of justice in the first half of this chapter, I will then proceed in the second half to lay out the sentimentalist case against it. Ultimately, I conclude that the normatively authoritative, sympathy-derived moral sentiments described in the previous chapter provide sufficient reason to reject Hume’s justice as more of a vice than a virtue. The reasons for rejecting this conception of justice are entirely internal to Hume’s own philosophy. There is even some evidence that Hume himself began to recognize them late in his philosophical career, and that they are responsible for the alternative sentimentalist theory of justice developed by Hume’s close friend Adam Smith. Smith’s liberal sentimentalism will then be the subject of chapter 4.

I. Hume’s Theory of Justice 1. Humean Justice as an Artificial Virtue Hume’s entire catalogue of the virtues in the Treatise is organized around the distinction between virtues he calls “artificial” and those he calls “natural.” Artificial virtues such as justice involve obeying conventional rules, which Hume sees as human creations, while natural virtues such as benevolence involve no such conventions. By his own admission, the labels that Hume


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gives to these two types of virtue are misleading, and he abandons the terminology of “natural” and “artificial” virtues in his later writings.4 “Mankind is an inventive species,” Hume explains, “and where an invention is obvious and absolutely necessary, it may as properly be said to be natural as anything that proceeds immediately from original principles, without any thought or reflection.” The rules of justice may thus be artificial, but “they are not arbitrary,” nor is it improper to call them “laws of nature, if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species” (T 3.2.2.19).5 Philosophers have used the term “justice” in a wide variety of ways. Sometimes justice is understood primarily as a virtue of social systems, at other times as a virtue of individuals. Sometimes justice becomes a sort of catch-all term for the virtues generally—whether of individuals or societies—while at other times its usage is far narrower. Hume uses the term “justice” to designate the individual virtue of obedience to the rules that allow for social cooperation, particularly in the economic sphere. Hume’s understanding of justice thus has the benefit of tying the character trait he identifies as the justice of individuals to features of the social systems under which an individual lives. Yet Hume refrains from describing society’s rules themselves as just or unjust—a troubling feature of his usage to which we will have occasion to return. Social rules are often cruel or useless, and Hume does not hesitate to call for their reform when they are, but they are never unjust per se, at least not in Hume’s sense of the term. Also troubling is that the social rules at issue when Hume discusses justice are almost exclusively those governing the accumulation and exchange of property. Compared to today’s use of the term, Hume’s may seem far too constricted on this point. Much of what Hume says about justice, however, is also true of the other virtues that he calls “artificial”—virtues such as “allegiance” (i.e., obedience to the law and legitimate government of one’s country), fidelity to promises, and faithfulness in marriage. All of these virtues involve obedience to rules needed for a functioning society, be they the rules of the economic sphere, the domestic sphere, or the political sphere. Whether any or all of the extra-economic artificial virtues ought to be brought together with Hume’s narrow notion of justice as part of a single, wider virtue is basically a semantic issue. Regardless, Hume’s theory of justice and its kindred artificial virtues is the centerpiece of his moral philosophy. Twice as much space is devoted to these topics as to the natural virtues in Book 3 of the Treatise, four times more than to the refutation of moral rationalism.6 If we roughly identify the realm governed by the artificial virtues with politics, then it might be said that Hume’s ethics is meant primarily as a foundation for his political philosophy. That Hobbes and Mandeville were correct to treat justice and its kindred virtues as the product of human invention is clear to Hume from the fact that they involve strict rules or laws. Rules are not the natural outcome of our

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moral sentiments. Under Hume’s theory, approbation and disapprobation are capable of infinite gradation, and hence “vice and virtue, moral good and evil, and indeed all natural qualities, run insensibly into each other, and are, on many occasions, indistinguishable.” In the realm of the artificial virtues, however, “rights, and obligations, and property, admit of no such insensible gradation.” Instead, “a man either has a full and perfect property, or none at all, and is either entirely obliged to perform any action, or lies under no manner of obligation” (T 3.2.6.7). Hume argues that we can have no natural motive, independent of all human invention, for governing our behavior according to such rigid rules, let alone for giving our moral approbation to those who do so. These rules often dictate behavior that, taken in isolation, is neither useful nor agreeable to ourselves or to others—neither the particular others with whom we may sympathize, nor the aggregate of others who make up society as a whole. The rules of justice, for example, demand repayment of a loan regardless of our continued need for the funds at question. Indeed, we must repay the loan even if our creditor is profligate or malicious, and will use the money to harm himself or others (see T 3.2.1.9–13, 3.2.2.22). Hume’s position on this point represents a strong break with Hutcheson, who argues that even seemingly useless “external rights” can be justified as the natural product of benevolence. In order to understand either the motivation we have for being just or the moral approbation we have for just individuals, Hume argues that we must not consider the individual acts demanded by justice in isolation, but rather as part of a larger pattern of behavior governed by artificial rules. This approach was helpfully elucidated by John Rawls in an early article on what he calls “practices.” Practices, Rawls writes, “are logically prior to particular cases” and involve “the specification of a new form of activity” that “necessarily involves the abdication of full liberty to act on utilitarian and prudential grounds.” A practice is in this sense is governed by a set of artificial rules, and “appeal is made to those rules to correct the behavior of those engaged in it.”7 The sphere of life governed by the artificial virtues is in this respect like a sport or a game. It is no more possible to understand the motive for “stealing a base” independent of the practice of baseball than it is to understand the motive for “repaying a loan” independent of the practices of promising and property-exchange. The good that stems from an artificial virtue comes not from each individual virtuous act, but from the existence of the practices under whose rubric these acts occur. While each instance of a naturally virtuous act is either useful or immediately agreeable to oneself or others, this is not the case for the artificial virtues. Hume compares the natural virtues “to a wall, built by many hands, which still rises by each stone that is heaped upon it.” The artificial virtues, however, are like “a vault, where each individual stone would, of


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itself, fall to the ground, nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts” (EPM Appx. 3.5) An artificial practice is not only logically prior to the behavior it explains, but also temporally prior. It is impossible to follow the rules of a practice, or evaluate another’s behavior according to those rules, until that practice has already been established. Justice, like baseball, has a history, and Hume wishes to trace it, to discover “the manner in which the rules of justice are established by the artifice of men.” This history determines the content of the rules of justice and the behaviors they require. The origins and content of justice, in turn, are a separate matter from “the reasons which determine us to attribute to the observance or neglect of these rules a moral beauty or deformity” (T 3.2.2.1). Not all participation in practices, after all, is worthy of our moral approbation. While participation in the practice of justice is generally considered highly virtuous, the practice of gladiatorial combat is clearly vicious, regardless of how strictly one adheres to the rules of the game. Indeed, we think somewhat better of a gladiator who violates the rules of his practice out of benevolence for his adversary, though it would be better still if this practice were abandoned entirely. In order to explain why we morally approve of the economic practices governed by the rules of justice in the narrow sense—as well as the other social practices governed by other, related artificial virtues— Hume first traces the origins of these practices in the evolution of human conventions. Like Enlightenment philosophers so often do, Hume here offers a hypothetical history, meant less as a description of justice’s actual invention than of the principles in human nature that make such an invention possible.

2. The Development of Humean Justice Hume’s description of justice as a human invention may give us incorrect preconceptions about the sort of story he will tell about its origins. Most inventions, be they mechanical devices or rule-governed practices, are the conscious products of individuals (think Thomas Edison or James Naismith, inventor of basketball) or of groups of individuals working collaboratively. Rather than describing a great legislator or a group of social-contractors deciding on the rules to govern human society, however, Hume presents the gradual development of these rules as an evolutionary byproduct of the correction of humanity’s sense of self-interest. The evolution of justice begins (as Enlightenment-era hypothetical histories so often do) in a state of nature. Hume’s emphasis on the importance of sympathy in human nature precludes the Hobbesian possibility that this state of nature is an endless war of all against all. Instead, a Humean state of nature is marked by the biased operation of immediate sympathy, which draws

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people close to those connected to them by blood, affection, or resemblance, while keeping all others at an emotional distance. The result is not total anarchy, but a lawless clannishness, where families, larger kinship-based clans, or other forms of faction find themselves constantly under threat from those with whom they do not have strong sympathy.8 The rules of justice provide the means to extend cooperation from the sphere of those with whom we feel strong, extensive sympathy to those who lie outside this sphere. We wish to do so, not out of benevolent concern for these others, but because such cooperation is in our own long-term self-interest, as it is also in the long-term self-interest of those with whom we cooperate. Not only will cooperation end our natural state of mutually destructive conflict, but it will allow for far greater success in the pursuit of our ends than any individual, family, or clan could achieve without the assistance of outsiders. In a world of limited resources, however, the main obstacle to such cooperation is the constant temptation to seize these resources from those with whom we have little immediate sympathy, transferring them to ourselves and the objects of our greater sympathy. This temptation can only be overcome by entering into a conventional scheme that assigns possession of particular resources to particular individuals and allows only for voluntary exchange. “By this means,” Hume writes, “everyone knows what he may safely possess, and the passions are restrained in their partial and contradictory motions” (T. 3.2.2.9). Since the benefit of mutual cooperation on a small scale becomes readily apparent without any great degree of rational deliberation, the conventions of justice arise first in small societies composed of just a few families or clans. Gradually, as several small societies begin to “maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connections” (EPM 3.1.21). The greater the sphere of mutually beneficial cooperation grows, the greater the benefit of justice to ourselves and our loved ones. The sentiments derived from our narrow, limited sympathy are thus controlled—not by other sentiments derived from broader sympathies—but merely by an improvement in the means of their own satisfaction. Hume argues that “this alteration must necessarily take place upon the least reflection, since it is evident that the passion is much better satisfied by its restraint, than by its liberty” (T 3.2.2.13). The “gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue” thus necessarily follows from the “natural progress of human sentiments” (EPM 3.1.21). Unfortunately, as societies expand, the advantages of mutual cooperation with those ever-increasingly distant from us, while growing always greater, also become less vivid for creatures of limited foresight and imagination. The calm passion with which we pursue our long-term interests through adherence


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to the rules of justice will often be overpowered by the violent passion for the immediate gain that can come from their violation. Thus “when men have observed . . . it is impossible for them, of themselves, to observe those rules in large and polished societies, they establish government as a new invention to attain their ends, and preserve the old, or procure new advantages, by a more strict execution of justice” (T 3.2.8.5). It is therefore the job of magistrates “to oblige men, however reluctant, to consult their own real and permanent interests.” With the formation of government, “obedience is a new duty which must be invented to support that of justice, and the ties of equity must be corroborated by those of allegiance (“Of the Origin of Government,” in EMPL, p. 38). This development of the practices of justice and allegiance—based entirely as it is in the reflective self-correction of self-interest—need not necessarily imply any expansion of sympathy or development of the moral sentiments. “It is therefore a just political maxim,” Hume writes, “that every man must be supposed a knave. Though at the same time it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact” (“Of the Independency of Parliament,” in EMPL, p. 42). There is nonetheless a strong analogy between the refinement and correction of the moral sentiments discussed in chapter 2 and this correction of self-interest through the development of justice and allegiance. In both of these developmental processes, “nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections” (T 3.2.2.9). These two parallel processes, moreover, are mutually supporting, for the process of moral development described earlier would be impossible without the concurrent development of a society governed by justice, just as the existence of such a society would be impossible without resolving moral disagreement within it by appeal to a general point of view.9

3. The Content of Humean Justice A reflectively corrected sense of self-interest will necessarily lead us to embrace some system of justice and government, but it will not determine the specific shape this system takes. To the contrary, Hume argues that we should almost always rest satisfied with whatever system under which we happen to find ourselves living. He writes: The same interest . . . which causes us to submit to magistracy, makes us renounce itself in the choice of our magistrates and binds us down to a certain form of government and to particular persons without allowing us to aspire to the utmost perfection in either. The case is here the same as that law of nature concerning the stability of possession. It is highly advantageous, and even absolutely necessary to society, that possession should be stable; and this leads us to the establishment of such a rule: But we find that were we to follow the same advantage in assigning

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The Enlightenment of Sympathy particular possessions to particular persons, we should disappoint our end and perpetuate the confusion which that rule is intended to prevent. (T 3.2.10.3)

Based on such passages, some have maintained that Hume is entirely indifferent to the particular form that the rules of justice take, as well as to the particular government that enforces these rules.10 While this is clearly an exaggeration, the precise nature and degree of Hume’s complacency with regard to existing political institutions—a complacency that after Hume’s death came to be identified with the ideology of “conservatism”—is the subject of voluminous debate. Part of the disagreement here may be attributable to semantics. Hume’s conception of justice fails to capture important features of what is ordinarily meant by the term today, restricted as it is to being a virtue of individuals, and never a virtue of social systems. By using the word “justice” to refer exclusively to the virtue of abiding by conventional rules, Hume cannot evaluate these rules themselves in terms of their justice.11 This, however, does not imply that they cannot be criticized in other terms, and Hume does not hesitate to do so when it seems warranted. Indeed, Hume advocates an ideal of a federal, republican form of government and a system of property laws that, without rendering possession insecure by making it vulnerable to continual redistribution, would promote material equality between individuals.12 Yet Hume also argues that, when it comes to justice and government, “the spirit of innovation is in itself pernicious, however favorable its particular object may sometimes appear” (“Of the Coalition of Parties,” in EMPL, pp. 495–96). Hume urges us to approximate his ideals more closely only through “such gentle alterations and innovations as may not give too great disturbance to society” (“Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in EMPL, p. 514). As he explains with the opening lines of his essay on the “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”: It is not with forms of government as with other artificial contrivances, where an old engine may be rejected if we can discover another more accurate and commodious, or where trials may be safely made even though the successes be doubtful. An established government has an infinite advantage by that very circumstance of it being established . . . To try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age; and though he may attempt some improvements for the public good, yet will he adjust his innovations as much as possible to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution. (EMPL, pp. 512–13)

All successful governments and codes of law, however, will share important similarities “because the purposes to which they tend are everywhere exactly similar. In like manner,” Hume reasons, “all houses have a roof and walls,


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windows and chimneys, though diversified in their shape, figure, and materials” (EPM 3.2.45). These similarities allow Hume to discuss his theory of justice in the terminology of natural law. Derived from the facts of human nature, Hume’s natural jurisprudence outlines the features that any workable legal code is likely to possess. Many of the traditional natural law positions on such subjects as the acquisition of property and the authority of magistrates are presented in the Treatise in this context. Systems of positive law that depart radically from natural law do so at their peril. “The less natural any set of principles are which support a particular society, the more difficulty will a legislator meet with in raising and cultivating them,” Hume argues (“Of Commerce,” in EMPL, p. 260). That said, the natural law is only a rough guide to successful legislation. Since our interest is so much greater in having some stable system of justice and government rather than in having any particular system, all questions of justice are ultimately “subordinate to the authority of civil laws, which extend, restrain, modify, and alter the rules of natural justice according to the particular convenience of each community” (EPM 3.2.34).

4. The Moral Approbation of Humean Justice While it is important not to neglect the distinction between the reflective correction of self-interest that leads to the conventional rules of justice and the reflective correction of our moral sentiments, it is also important to see how the outcomes of these two processes ultimately relate to one another. Understanding the relation between the two developmental processes is necessary to answer Hume’s question of “why we annex the idea of virtue to justice and of vice to injustice” (T 3.2.2.23). Only the refined moral sentiments of those with considerable rational and imaginative discernment, Hume argues, would approve of justice as a virtue. Just actions are rarely immediately agreeable, nor is their utility obvious to the untrained eye. Given that individual acts of justice, taken in isolation, are often deleterious, it takes considerable reflection to shift our attention from the effects of individual actions to the effects of the larger, rule-governed practices of which they are a part. Approbation, Hume writes, “may arise either from the mere species or appearance of characters and passions, or from reflections on their tendency to the happiness of mankind and of particular persons” (T 3.3.1.27). Our approbation of justice clearly belongs to the latter category. Fortunately, however, “custom and education assist interest and reflection” in this regard (T 3.2.2.26). Even if most of us would be unable to discern the virtuousness of justice on our own, we nonetheless approve of the virtue. Relying as they do on the justice of their populace for their continued existence, societies will necessarily instill respect for the virtue in all their members from a very early age. Yet while “the artifice of politicians may assist

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nature in the producing of those sentiments which she suggests to us” (T 3.2.2.25), Hume intends to explain how the virtuousness of justice might occur to refined souls independent of these artifices. Only an independent ground for the approbation of justice can maintain us in this approbation if we begin to question the habits instilled in us by our education and upbringing. Hume’s account focuses more on the disapprobation of injustice than the approbation of justice. Once the relevant social practices are established, we expect most of our fellows to behave justly most of the time, and only those who violate conventional rules require a special act of evaluation. We notice the effects of unjust behavior most obviously when we ourselves suffer as a result of injustice, either through direct victimization or through the insecurity that results from a condition of general lawlessness. If we have developed into more sensitive moral judges, we equally notice the baleful effects of injustice even when it is in no way prejudicial to ourselves, seeing it as “prejudicial to human society and pernicious to everyone that approaches the person guilty of it.” Hume continues: We partake of their uneasiness by sympathy, and as every thing, which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is called vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner is denominated virtue, this is the reason why the sense of moral good and evil follows upon justice and injustice . . . Thus self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice: But a sympathy with the public interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue. (T 3.2.2.24).13

Talk of “sympathy with the public interest” along these lines appears throughout Hume’s discussions of justice and the artificial virtues in the Treatise.14 It is difficult, however, to make sense of what such a phrase could mean, given Hume’s account of sympathy as the transformation of the idea of another’s passion into an experience of that passion in oneself. As Knud Haakonssen notes, “sympathy with the public interest” would seem to imply sharing the feelings of “a group with a changing membership of nonspecific persons.” Haakonssen argues, however, that Hume’s account of the faculty of sympathy suggests “we can only have sympathy with specifiable individuals,” and is thus incompatible with the idea of “sympathy with the public interest.”15 Yet it must be said in Hume’s defense that Haakonssen makes his point too strongly. Although Hume’s examples almost always involve the sympathy of individuals for particular others, the account of sympathy in the Treatise does not explicitly preclude sympathy with groups. If I can form an idea of a passion already fully shared by a number of persons, this idea could surely be enlivened into an impression through the faculty of sympathy.


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Haakonssen correctly notes that the members of such a group must be specifiable, but this does not pose a problem for Hume’s argument. One group of individuals who share certain sentiments when confronted with an act of injustice in their midst is the “narrow circle” of those directly and adversely affected by this act of injustice. Sympathy with the feelings of exactly such a circle, remember, is what causes us to denominate the character trait responsible for their suffering a vice. In the special case of justice and the other artificial virtues, the circle of those indirectly affected is admittedly quite wide. It may plausibly be said to include virtually all the members of the society in which the injustice occurs—all of whom have an interest in the maintenance of the cooperative practices dependent on the rules of justice. Sympathy with the shared sentiments of such a broad swath of a society might correctly be referred to as “sympathy with the public interest.” It is important not to confuse concern for each member of a society derived from sympathy with the public interest with a desire to maximize aggregate welfare in that society. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord observes that, for Hume, “having the institutions that constitute justice is in the interest of each (taken seriatim) not all (taken collectively).” Hume’s argument thus does not rest on a notion of aggregate utility of the sort later developed by Bentham, or on any such “appeal to an overarching measure of interpersonal value.”16 Indeed, Hume denies the reality of Hutcheson’s universal benevolence, or any such moral concern for humanity considered in the aggregate. “In general, it may be affirmed that there is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind merely as such,” he writes. “It is true, there is no human . . . whose happiness or misery does not in some measure affect us when brought near to us and represented in lively colors, but this proceeds merely from sympathy and is no proof of such a universal affection to mankind” (T 3.2.1.12). Absent sympathy with particular, specifiable others, we will have no moral concern for them and it is impossible to feel sympathy for a vague abstraction like “mankind.” It is critical to Hume’s theory of justice, moreover, that our sympathy with the public interest is normally “too weak to control our passions,” even if it “has sufficient force to influence our taste and give us the sentiments of approbation or blame” (T 3.2.2.24). Recall that our need for justice is derived from the natural biases in our sympathy, which lead us to promote our own good and that of those close to us at the expense of those for whom we feel little or no concern. “It is only from the selfishness and confined generosity of man, along with the scanty provisions nature had made for his wants,” Hume reminds us, “that justice derives its origin” (T 3.2.2.18). As a result, “if men had been endowed with such a strong regard for public good, they would never have restrained themselves by these rules” (T 3.2.6.6). Were the limitations of our sympathy ever to be radically overcome—were we ever to become “so replete with friendship and generosity that every man has the

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utmost tenderness for every man and feels no more concern for his own interest than for that of his fellows”—then “the use of justice would, in this case, be suspended by such an extensive benevolence” (EPM 3.1.6). Justice, in other words, is a virtue only among those who know that they are not perfectly virtuous and wins the approbation of our corrected, unbiased moral sentiments only because we know that our moral sentiments are normally strongly biased.

II. The Sentimentalist Case against Hume’s Theory 1. The Sensible Knave Hume’s theory of justice, like his theory of the moral sentiments discussed in the previous chapter, might be thought to be merely descriptive. Hume might simply be explaining how societies governed by conventional rules of justice arise over time, and how we come to approve morally of those who obey society’s rules, without suggesting that our moral approval is warranted. But this is clearly not Hume’s intent; Hume explicitly says that he deems justice to be fully worthy of our moral approval and that the sources of justice’s normativity are the same as those for all the other genuine virtues. In his discussion of both the happiness and the dignity of virtue at the conclusion of the Treatise, Hume writes that all of his arguments on these points “may be extended to justice” (T 3.3.6.4). Given the origins of justice in the self-correction of self-interest, and its subsequent approbation by our mature moral faculties, it would seem likely that a strong commitment to abide by the conventional rules of justice could indeed be part of a happy and reflectively stable psyche. Self-interest, our immediate and biased sympathetic sentiments, and our impartial, corrected moral sentiments all seem to concur in recommending this virtue, at least according to the account given in the Treatise. In Hume’s later writings, however, tensions that might undo this apparent equilibrium begin to emerge. Self-interest, for one, might not always recommend strict adherence to the rules of justice, thus undermining our interested obligation to the virtue. “Some extraordinary circumstances may happen,” Hume admits in the essay “Of the Origin of Government,” “in which a man finds his interests to be more promoted by fraud or rapine than hurt by the breach which his injustice makes in the social union” (EMPL, p. 38). Given that he maintained in the Treatise that it is always shortsightedness—and not a genuine understanding of our long-term interests—which is the cause of our selfish violation of the rules of justice, Hume’s admission represents a real change in his position. This change is brought out all the more in the second Enquiry, where Hume introduces the now-famous figure of the


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“sensible knave” to illustrate a possible exception to his general argument for the happiness of virtue. The passage in question is worth quoting at some length: Treating vice with the greatest candor and making it all possible concessions, we must acknowledge that there is not, in any instance, the smallest pretext for giving it the preference above virtue with a view to self-interest; except, perhaps, in the case of justice, where a man, taking things in a certain light, may often seem to be a loser by his integrity. And though it is allowed that without a regard to property no society could subsist, yet, according to the imperfect way in which human affairs are conducted, a sensible knave, in particular incidents, may think that an act of iniquity or infidelity will make a considerable addition to his fortune without causing any considerable breach in the social union and confederacy. That honesty is the best policy, may be a good general rule, but is liable to many exceptions: And he, it may perhaps be thought, conducts himself with most wisdom who observes the general rule and takes advantage of all the exceptions. (EPM 9.2.22)

With his discovery of this problem in the Enquiry, Hume backs away from his earlier claim that any cost imposed on individuals through their strict adherence to a rule of justice “is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule and by the peace and order which it establishes in society.” Hume had once maintained that, when all adhere strictly to the rules of justice, “every individual person must find himself a gainer on balancing the account, since, without justice, society must immediately dissolve, and everyone must fall into that savage and solitary condition which is infinitely worse than the worst situation that can possibly be supposed in society” (T 3.2.22). To be sure, if the sensible knave thought that his society would “immediately dissolve” upon a single act of injustice, then it would clearly be in his own interest to refrain from committing the deed, which would destroy civilization as he knew it. The idea that any single act of injustice could lead to society’s dissolution, however, is preposterous. Despite the frequency with which the rules of justice are violated in all known societies—our own included— many continue to survive nevertheless. Hume’s sensible knave realizes that universal obedience to the rules of justice is not necessary for this social practice to function successfully; very widespread, but not quite universal, obedience will suffice. The knave also realizes that it is often in his personal interest to make himself an exception to the pattern of obedience to these rules. His realization is justly celebrated as an early precursor of what later developed into the more general free rider problem, illustrating that individuals can best profit from systems of mutual cooperation if they can successfully share in the rewards accrued without contributing toward the costs. When one is deciding whether to obey the conventional rules of justice, the situation at hand is closer to that of the

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prisoner’s dilemma of twentieth-century game theory (in which there are strong incentives to defect from cooperative schemes) than it is to a what is now known as a coordination problem (in which there are no such incentives).17 This makes the conventions of justice unstable in a way they would not be if they were conventions in David Lewis’s later, technical sense of the term, which are exclusively solutions to coordination problems.18 Some critics of Hume’s theory of justice argue that this theory falls apart completely with the appearance of the sensible knave in the second Enquiry. Hume, such critics argue, has no available answer to the sensible knave.19 Strictly speaking, this is true; Hume has no answer that will convince the sensible knave to change his knavish ways. This is not to say, however, that Hume has no means of demonstrating the happiness and dignity of justice for those of us who are not such knaves. He writes: I must confess that if a man think that this reasoning much requires an answer, it will be a little difficult to find any which will to him appear satisfactory and convincing. If his heart rebel not against such pernicious maxims, if he feel no reluctance to the thoughts of villainy or baseness, he has indeed lost a considerable motive to virtue; and we may expect that his practice will be answerable to his speculation. But in all ingenuous natures, the antipathy to treachery and roguery is too strong to be counterbalanced by any views of profit or pecuniary advantage. Inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct; these are circumstances very requisite to happiness and will be cherished and cultivated by every honest man who feels the importance of them. (EPM 9.2.23)

Recall that the happiness of virtue, and hence our interested obligation to be virtuous, stems not only from our mercenary, self-centered interests. Virtue also promotes our other-directed interests—helping us to win us the approval of our fellows and to negotiate the various, often conflicting sentiments we feel for them—as well as giving us the peace of mind that comes from being able to bear our own survey. All these sources of the happiness of virtue, in turn, rely on the possession of an active faculty of sympathy. Hume’s story of the origins of justice traces the development of the relevant social practices independent of our moral approbation of them and hence independent of our potentially broad sense of sympathy with any and all of our fellow human beings. The sensible knave, however, demonstrates that a sense of justice without a sense of virtue is inherently unstable. Although each of us has an interest in having social practices governed by the rules of justice, we each also have an interest in disobeying these rules whenever it is possible to do so without putting these practices at any real risk. What stops us from doing so is a concern for the interests of others and for how we appear in their eyes, both of which are outgrowths of sympathy.


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The sensible knave thus only presents a real problem to those, such as David Gauthier, who interpret Hume as offering a fully Hobbesian, contractarian theory of justice wholly independent from his sentimentalist moral theory.20 Hume argues that self-interest alone cannot lead us to comply with the rules of justice and thus stands as opposed to Gauthier’s neo-contractarianism as he was opposed to the more literal social contract theory of his own day. In order to maintain our commitment to justice, we must have a regard for the beneficial results justice will have for others, as well as for ourselves. The sensible knave shows that, just as abiding by the artificial virtue respecting marital fidelity does not benefit the unmarried, so too will abiding by justice often fail to benefit the just individual. In both cases, however, “those who have no interest are carried along with the stream, and are also apt to be affected with sympathy for the general interests of society” (T 3.2.12.7). Their reliance on sympathy adds to the dignity of the artificial virtues without detracting from their happiness. These virtues are still largely the product of enlightened self-interest, and while it is hardly vicious, such an origin is unlikely to command our strongest feelings of approbation. Yet we now see that the artificial virtues, like the natural virtues, rely on the possibility of our feeling sympathy with any and all of our fellows. Our approbation of this origin allows for the directly reflexive stability of our moral faculties— as it establishes the dignity of the virtues generally, so too does it establish the dignity of the artificial virtues in particular. Sentimentalists have always maintained that, without sympathy, an individual can attain neither the artificial nor the natural virtues, nor is such a person capable of developing the moral sentiments necessary to distinguish between vice and virtue in the first place. Recall that Shaftesbury pointed out that “the natural knave has the same reason to be a civil one” (SC 3.1, pp. 68–69). Hume himself admits that “where one is born of so perverse a frame of mind, of so callous and insensible a disposition as to have no relish for virtue and humanity, no sympathy with his fellow creatures” morality can have no appeal. “Such a one must be allowed entirely incurable, nor is there any remedy in philosophy,” Hume writes. “He has no remorse to control his vicious inclinations. He has not even that sense or taste which is requisite to make him desire to a better character” (“The Skeptic,” in EMPL p. 169). If we imagine a sensible knave to be entirely without sympathy for his fellows, then of course there is no way to convince such an amoral monster to behave justly—or to abide by any of the other virtues, for that matter. “But if, instead of this fancied monster, we suppose a man to form a judgment or determination in the case,” Hume counters in another context, “there is to him a plain foundation of preference” (EPM 6.1.5). “While the human heart is compounded of the same elements as at present,” Hume writes, “it will never be wholly indifferent to public good” (EPM 9.1.6). To be sure, this is an empirical claim, but, with the exception of

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clinical psychopaths (a group not known for their strict adherence to the rules of justice), it is almost certainly true.21 Some later thinkers might be uncomfortable with a system of normative moral or political philosophy so utterly dependent on factual claims about human nature, but reliance on empirical psychology is one of the distinctive features of reflective sentimentalism.22 The support that current research in descriptive moral psychology lends to Hume’s empirical claims will be discussed in the final chapter of this book.

2. The Sensible Utilitarian Although the sensible knave, qua knave, fails to present an insurmountable challenge to Hume’s theory of justice, his line of thinking suggests a far stronger objection to this theory. One need not be a knave, after all, to wish to violate conventional rules when doing so poses little or no threat to the larger social practice of which they are a part. As Hume repeatedly emphasizes, justice often demands individual acts that are not only harmful to oneself, but also to others, and even to society as a whole. “A single act of justice, considered in itself, may often be contrary to the public good,” Hume writes. “It is only the concurrence of mankind in a general scheme of action which is advantageous” (T 3.3.1.12). As the sensible knave argues, however, it is possible to violate the rules of justice in particular instances without undermining the general scheme. If our very reason for abiding by the rules of justice in the first place is a concern for the public interest, then surely the public interest can provide sufficient grounds for the occasional act of disobedience. In a seldom-cited passage from the essay “Of Passive Obedience,” Hume admits exactly this: As the obligation to justice is founded entirely on the interests of society, which require mutual abstinence from property in order to preserve peace among mankind, it is evident that when the execution of justice would be attended with very pernicious consequences that virtue must be suspended and give place to public utility in such extraordinary and such pressing emergencies. The maxim, fiat Justitia & rurat Coelum, let justice be performed though the universe be destroyed, is apparently false, and by sacrificing the end to the means, shows a preposterous idea of the subordination of duties. (EMPL, p. 489)

Hume goes on to argue, however, that this rather obvious consequence of treating justice as a means to advance the public interest—indeed, of treating justice as a means to any end—is best kept quiet. Even if individual acts of injustice may safely promote the public good, a widespread awareness of this fact and readiness to take advantage of it would surely undermine the social practices governed by the rules of justice. Although “a philosopher reasonably


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acknowledges in the course of an argument that the rules of justice may be dispensed with in cases of urgent necessity,” it would be a perverse “preacher or casuist who should make it his chief study to find out such cases and enforce them with all the vehemence of argument and eloquence.” The anatomist of justice may rightly acknowledge that the end of public utility should not be sacrificed to its usual means of attainment, but the painter or public teacher of justice would be “better employed in inculcating the general doctrine than in displaying the particular exceptions, which we are, perhaps, but too much inclined of ourselves to embrace and to extend” (EMPL, pp. 490–91).23 Hume makes an analogous point about the related artificial virtue of allegiance in his History when discussing the execution of Charles I. Although it is undoubtedly the case that, in cases of tyranny, the people have a right to resist their sovereign, “if ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to conceal the truth from the populace, it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example.” While philosophers must acknowledge many exceptions to the principle that obedience to existing governments best promotes the common good, “the doctrine of obedience ought alone to be inculcated” and “the exceptions, which are rare, ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings and discourses” (HE 59, Vol. 6, p. 544). Recall that according to Hume’s “Bauhaus” ethical theory, the fact that better effects may, in isolated instances, result from disobeying the rules of justice and allegiance than from obeying them does not make strict adherence to these rules any less virtuous. According to Hume, just as any virtue in rags is still a virtue, so too is obedience to the rules of justice morally praiseworthy even in those particular instances when it does more harm than good. In this, as in so many cases, our sentiments are determined by general rules. The natural power of general rules, in turn, is reinforced by the artifice of teachers, preachers, and politicians, who know that society will flourish best if their charges maintain a strict obedience to the rules of justice and do not go looking for occasions when these rules may be beneficially broken. In a true emergency, when obedience to the general rules of justice and allegiance would be utterly disastrous, the need for disobedience will be “so obvious and undisputed as to remove all doubt and overpower the restraint, however great, imposed by teaching the general doctrine of obedience” (HE 59, Vol. 6, p. 544). Yet while Bauhaus theory may provide a good description of how we normally make moral judgments, it seems unlikely that such a moral psychology can bear critical reflection. Hume is able to explain why we should approve of something because it is normally useful even in cases when it is not— human beings, after all, are creatures of habit—but it is quite another matter to justify such a pattern of evaluation.24 Our Bauhaus habits are sometimes best broken, particularly with regard to the virtue of justice—either for the sake of our own self-interest, as the sensible knave would argue, or for the sake of the

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public interest, as a sensible utilitarian would contend. The difficulty in overriding general rules does not imply that those of us capable of considering the particulars of the case at hand ought not do so. As Hume himself admits, “a strict adherence to any general rules, and the rigid loyalty to particular persons and families on which some people set so high a value, are virtues that hold less of reason than of bigotry and superstition” (T 3.2.10.15). An individual of refined and corrected moral sentiments should be able to carefully determine when the generally beneficial effects of obedience to the rules of justice (or the magistrates who enforce them) will not result in the case at hand, and when the social advantages of disobedience will outweigh the damage done to the social practice governed by these rules. To paraphrase the sensible knave, that we are all best off when all obey society’s conventions may be a good general rule, but it is liable to many exceptions, and he conducts himself with the most refined moral sentiments who observes the general rule and takes advantage, for the sake of others, of all the exceptions. To be sure, when our natural Bauhaus habits have been reinforced by a lifetime of education, adopting a critical stance toward the conventional rules of justice, let alone acting accordingly, may prove very difficult indeed. “All those opinions and notions of things to which we have been accustomed from our infancy,” Hume writes, “take such deep root that it is impossible for us, by all the powers of reason and experience, to eradicate them” (T 1.3.9.17). Hume admits, however, that the deeply ingrained results of education “are frequently contrary to reason” and “never upon that account recognized by philosophers” (T 1.3.9.19). Indeed, if only a few noble souls are able to move beyond habitual obedience to selective, enlightened disobedience, then the risks to the relevant social practices will be quite minimal. Most of such a sensible utilitarian’s fellows, after all, can be expected to obey the rules of justice out of education and habit, let the heavens fall when they may. In this way, a sufficiently reflective Humean may soon find herself a sort of Benthamite utilitarian.25 Interestingly, this seems to have been exactly how Bentham invented utilitarianism in the first place. No sooner had he read Hume’s Treatise, Bentham writes, than he “felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes . . . That the foundations of all virtue are laid in utility is there demonstrated, after a few exceptions made, with the strongest force of evidence: but I see not . . . what need there was for the exceptions.”26 Hume, of course, was not only an intellectual inspiration for Bentham and the utilitarian philosophical radicals, but also for Burke and the conservatives who so opposed this radicalism. Given his objections to innovation in politics discussed earlier, Hume might rightly have feared that those who believe that they could promote the public interest by violating the conventional rules of justice are almost certain to be mistaken. We are, after all, “but too much inclined” to find such exceptions (EMPL, p. 491) and are more likely to act on them out of knavish self-interest than out of a genuine concern for the


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public good. Given the imperfection of the individual mind, to try to promote the good of the public interest directly, rather than by following established conventions, may ultimately prove self-defeating. This argument— advocated by Henry Sidgwick, among many others—allows for a wholly consistent utilitarian conservatism.27 The more limited we believe the powers of the individual mind to be, the greater will be the conservatism that results from such an argument, and the fewer the violations of the rules of justice that we will accept. While Hume himself remains ready to endorse necessary injustices in cases of pressing emergency, Burke takes a more extreme position. “We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality,” Burke famously claims, “nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption.”28 Hume would never accept such an estimation of our ignorance; creatures so dependent on slowly accumulated wisdom would be incapable of reflective autonomy, accepting some of their inherited moral commitments while rejecting others. As long as he is unwilling to bite the Burkean bullet and deny any real efficacy to our powers of autonomous reflection, Hume must therefore be ready to admit that the acceptable exceptions to his conventional rules of justice may prove more numerous than he suggests. Sensible utilitarians ready and willing to act on these exceptions, unlike sensible knaves, are not vicious people. Far from being knavish, their motives are entirely laudable and are based on the same sentiments that lead to our moral approbation of justice in the first place: sympathy with the public interest. If Hume’s empirical claims are correct, of course, then the times when we face a conflict between our habitual approbation of justice and our sympathy with the public interest (from which this approbation ultimately derives) will be few and far between. This need not be the case, however, with conflicts between our approbation of justice and our other moral sentiments, which recommend other virtues.

3. The Sensible Humanitarian Even if Hume can respond to the objections raised by the sensible utilitarian by establishing that the public interest is best served by an almost inflexible adherence to the rules of justice, it nonetheless remains the case that the interests of particular individuals would be better served by their violation. “It may not, perhaps, be any individual person for whom we are concerned who receives benefit from justice,” Hume admits, “but the whole society alike.” In this respect, the artificial virtues are unlike the natural virtues, for “every particular act of generosity, or relief of the industrious and indigent, is beneficial to a particular person who is not undeserving of it” (T 3.3.1.13).

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It would therefore not be surprising if the most important sort of morally laudable motives that might lead us to violate the rules of justice were those characteristic of the natural virtues.29 Hume often refers to such motives with the catch-all term “humanity.” This virtue appears only eight times in the Treatise, but a full fifty-eight times in the second Enquiry.30 Hume’s “humanity” roughly corresponds to the benevolent motives characteristic of the natural, altruistic virtues of the Treatise—virtues that are immediate expressions of our sympathy for individual others. Insofar as an act of natural virtue motivated by humanity achieves its intended end, it will directly lead to the happiness of some specific person or group. “When I relieve persons in distress, my natural humanity is my motive,” Hume writes, “and so far as my succor extends, so far have I promoted the happiness of my fellow creatures.” As should now be obvious, the same is not true of individual acts of justice. To the contrary, “if we examine all the questions that come before any tribunal of justice, we shall find that, considering each case apart, it would as often be an instance of humanity to decide contrary to the laws of justice as conformable to them” (T 3.3.1.12). Hume insists that this conflict is only apparent, a result of the immediate, uncorrected dictates of humanity. Only someone who is blind to the benefits of general practices, whose “views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own,” would think that “his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice” (EPM Appx. 3.7). When we take a long-term view, however, our benevolent concern for particular others will only lead us to adhere to the rules of justice all the more firmly, for “the whole scheme . . . of law and justice is advantageous to the society and to every individual” (T 3.3.1.12). As the sensible knave rejected this line of reasoning with regard to selfinterest, however—and as the sensible utilitarian rejected it with regard to the public interest considered in the aggregate—so too must we reject it with regard to the interest of those particular others for whom we feel the sentiments of humanity. Such individuals would be best off if we made exceptions to the general rules of justice in their favor whenever doing so would not threaten the continued existence of the practices governed by these rules. The demands of humanity will be the greatest for those who are least well off under a given system of justice. Despite Hume’s repeated assertions to the contrary, strict adherence to justice may thus be generally useful (promoting total, aggregate utility) while failing to be useful to each and every just individual (failing to promote “public” or “mutually expected” utility, to use Gauthier’s terminology), except when compared to a baseline condition of having no rules of justice at all.31 The proper comparison for our purposes here, however, would be between strict adherence to the rules of justice and


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an alternative situation in which, motivated by humanity, we make exceptions to these rules on behalf of the unfortunate whenever it is possible to do so without undermining the general scheme. For a cunning Robin Hood, such possibilities are almost always present. For any sensible humanitarian, even one without the wiliness of a Robin Hood, the artificial virtue of justice will regularly come into conflict with the natural virtues. When they do, Hume himself admits “it is more natural . . . to think that the tendencies of the latter virtue will affect our sentiments, and command our operation” (T 3.3.1.13). The moral approbation of justice requires considerable refinement of the moral sentiments, remember, while the approbation of the natural virtues comes quite easily to us all. Hume explains in the Treatise that “the imagination is more affected by what is particular than by what is general, and that the sentiments are always moved with difficulty where their objects are, in any degree, loose and undetermined” (T 3.3.1.13). He elaborates further in the second Enquiry: The social virtues of humanity and benevolence exert their influence immediately, by a direct tendency or instinct . . . and comprehends not any scheme or system nor the consequences resulting from the concurrence, imitation, or example of others . . . And as the good, resulting from their benign influence, is in itself complete and entire, it also excites the moral sentiment of approbation without any reflection on further consequences and without any more enlarged views of the concurrence or imitation of the other members of society. (EPM Appx. 3.2)

Hume assumes, however, that the features of our psychology that lead us to prefer the natural over the artificial virtues will not survive the refinement and correction of our moral sentiments. His implication is that, in cases of conflict, the artificial virtues will prevail over the natural in reflective equilibrium. Hume’s argument here is premised on the idea that the conflict between humanity and justice is a superficial one and that a reflectively corrected humanity will concur with obedience to the rules of justice as necessary for promoting the long-term interests of those for whom we feel humanitarian concern. Yet once we see that the conflict between justice and humanity is a real one—and that strict obedience to the conventions of justice may not actually be in the long-term interest of all those for whom we are concerned— then it seems a reflective individual should instead resolve this conflict in favor of humanity. Mere appeal to a general point of view will not decide the issue in favor of justice, particularly if this point of view is identified with that of the “narrow circle” directly affected by the injustice, all of whom are likely to benefit from our humanity. Although the defender of justice might argue that we must broaden this circle to consider the effects of our injustice on the rest of the society, the defender of humanity can plausibly argue that this is

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unnecessary. As the sensible knave made clear, remember, there should be no effects on the rest of society whatsoever from a successfully isolated act of injustice. If our action is kept secret from society at large, and serves to benefit only those whom it affects directly, then it is difficult to see how, under Hume’s account, it could ever be subject to the disapprobation of our refined and corrected moral sentiments. If we should imagine that certain members of society might fear the harm done to generally beneficial practices from our act of humanity—or if such fears actually do arise when our act is discovered— then these fears would be irrational, our sympathy with them misplaced or misguided. The moral sentiments stemming from our sympathy with these fears would then not bear the test of reflective scrutiny. Even if there were some negligible risk to the continued existence of practices governed by rules of justice from isolated acts of humanity that violate them, it still seems wrong to sacrifice a great good to the potential beneficiary of our humanity for a diffuse good barely felt by countless others in society. Nor does the harm done to society as a whole merit any consideration independent of the harm done to its individual members. In the first book of the Treatise, Hume commits himself to the ontological priority of individuals over collectives. “Twenty men may be said to exist,” he writes, “but it is only because one, two, three, four, etc. are existent; and if you deny the existence of the latter, that of the former falls of course . . . That term of unity is merely a fictitious denomination, which the mind may apply to any quantity of objects it collects together” (T 1.2.2.3). Later in the Treatise—when (as discussed earlier) Hume denies that there is any such thing as Hutchesonian universal benevolence—the moral priority of the individual over the collective is added to this ontological priority (see T 3.2.1.12). In a reflectively stable mind governed by the refined and corrected moral sentiments described in Hume’s ethics, Hume’s virtue of justice would thus seem to be given a very low priority, readily ceding its authority to the virtue of humanity. Insofar as many adhere to their society’s rules inflexibly, they do so only out of an unreflective obedience to habit, education, and the artifice of politicians—not out of sympathy with their fellow human beings or the moral sentiments that derive from it. Hume’s account of the psychology of justice as he understands it—the psychology of playing by the rules—now begins to look disturbingly like Mandeville’s moral psychology more generally. Under Hume’s theory, absolute justice can only be the result of our gullibility and our thoughtlessness, surely two of our most vile and hateful qualities. Such a sordid psychological origin can only undermine our commitment to the alleged virtue in question. According to Hume’s own standards, inflexible obedience to social conventions is thus seen not to be a virtue, but a vice.32 This is a paradigmatic example of one of the means by which reflective sentimentalism can lead us to reject any alleged value or virtue. Once we learn the true psychological etiology of our approval of Humean


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justice, this approval cannot successfully withstand the test of reflective self-scrutiny. There is, however, one important line of argument left in Hume’s writings that may save our commitment to justice as Hume understands it. In an often-overlooked appendix to the second Enquiry, Hume writes that: . . . after the laws of justice are fixed by views of general utility, the injury, the hardship, the harm which result to any individual from a violation of them enter very much into consideration and are a great source of that universal blame which attends every wrong or iniquity. By the laws of society, this coat, this horse, is mine and ought to remain perpetually in my possession; I reckon on the secure enjoyment of it; by depriving me of it, you disappoint my expectations and doubly displease me and offend every bystander. It is a public wrong, so far as the rules of equity are violated. It is a private harm, so far as an individual is injured. And though the second consideration could have no place, were not the former previously established—for otherwise the distinction of mine and thine would be unknown in society—yet there is no question, but the regard to general good is much enforced by the respect to particular. (EPM Appx. 3.11)

When humanity toward some prompts us toward an act of injustice, once social conventions are established and all of us come to rely on them, humanity toward others may prompt us away from the same act. Humanity toward the poor may inspire in us a desire to play Robin Hood, but “humanity towards the possessor” whose goods we consider stealing “engages us to leave with him what he has acquired by his sweat and labor; and what he has flattered himself in the constant enjoyment of” (EPM Appx.3.10, fn. 65). What is needed is some means of negotiating the conflicting dictates of our humanity for multiple others—some way of expressing our sympathetic concern for each by being fair to all when the interests of others conflict.33 In the liberal tradition, justice is often identified with such a commitment to interpersonal fairness, and not, as Hume identified it, with strict adherence to the conventional rules of one’s society. A roughly Rawlsian conception of justice as fairness can thus be seen as an outgrowth of our sympathetic concern for multiple others—albeit only once corrected in the manner and for the reasons that Hume describes, freeing our moral commitments of bias in favor of those for whom these feelings are naturally the strongest. A liberal conception of justice allows us to criticize society’s conventional rules as unjust when they are unfair, and our sympathy with those unfairly victimized by society leads us to demand social reform, or to practice civil disobedience if this reform is unduly delayed. Unlike Hume’s conception of justice, a liberal conception can successfully play the reflective role described in the opening passages of this book, enabling us to reject any law, institution, or political practice upon reflection if we conclude that it is unjust.

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A liberal concern for fairness to individuals, however, is not a feature of Hume’s own theory of justice, nor is it part of either the Benthamite utilitarian or the Burkean conservative traditions that developed out of it. What all these positions have in common is insensitivity to the claims of the individual and the propriety of the resentment an individual feels if sacrificed either to the public interest or to the dictates of traditional conventions. Contemporary liberals have generally been wary of Hume, afraid that the streams of thought growing from Hume’s work could never provide a normative justification of a theory of justice focused on fairness to individuals. Bentham and Burke, however, were not Hume’s only intellectual heirs, and it is exactly such a liberal sentimentalist theory of justice that Adam Smith begins to provide. To do so, however, Smith has to make significant revisions, not only to Hume’s theory of justice, but also to his account of the moral sentiments and of the faculty of sympathy from which they derive. These revisions will be the subject of chapter 4. Only recently have liberal political theorists such as Sharon R. Krause begun to realize that “despite the problems endemic to Hume’s own concept of justice, his broader sentiment-based approach to judgment and human agency may nevertheless provide valuable resources for the contemporary study of justice.” In order to “make good on its promise,” Krause writes, “Humean moral sentiment will need to be coupled with resources Hume’s own theory does not supply.”34 Although these “resources” may not be present in Hume’s own work, I will argue that they are available in the work of other reflective sentimentalists of his era, such as Adam Smith and J. G. Herder. We can only appreciate what reflective sentimentalism has to offer normative political theory today once we move beyond the confines of Hume’s own work and take into account the amendments offered by his sentimentalist critics.

C HAPTER

4

Adam Smith’s Liberal Sentimentalism

Given both their personal intimacy and the similarities in their sentimentalist moral philosophies, it might be tempting to treat David Hume and Adam Smith as a single intellectual team. If this were in fact the case, any criticism of Hume’s sentimentalism must necessarily also be a criticism of Smith’s. As Emma Rothschild has convincingly argued, however, “there is no reason to infer from the circumstance that Smith was Hume’s ‘dearest friend’ that they agreed on all subjects.”1 Although Hume’s name goes noticeably unmentioned in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his ideas are subjected to repeated criticism, especially his theory of justice and its grounding in sympathy with the public interest. That the emphasis on public utility in Hume’s theory of justice is one of the primary polemical objects of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments has been recognized since the book first appeared in 1759. Perhaps the first commentator to make this observation was none other than Hume himself. In an anonymous review of Smith’s Theory from the year of its publication, Hume writes, with his usual gift for irony: Our author subjoins many irrefragable arguments, by which he refutes the sentiments of Mr. Hume, who founded a great part of his moral system on the consideration of public utility. The compass to which we are confined will not allow us to explain them at full length, but the reader, who will consult the author himself, will find that philosophy scarce affords any thing more undeniable and conclusive.2

This chapter will elucidate the main ways in which Adam Smith’s sentimentalist theory of justice departs from Hume’s. It will begin with an objection to grounding political commitments in sympathetic sentiments voiced in the twentieth century by Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. Both Arendt and Rawls are concerned that, if our politics is inspired by a sense of sympathetic union with our fellow human beings, we will overlook the all-important distinctions among individuals necessary for an adequate conception of justice. The remainder of the chapter argues that, even if Hume’s sentimentalist 89

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theory of justice is liable to this criticism, Smith’s alternative theory is not. Smith’s is a distinctively liberal conception of justice grounded in an understanding of sympathy and the moral sentiments that fully appreciates the distinctions among individuals in a way that Hume’s public-interest-based theory fails to do. Smith’s political philosophy provides a systematic theory of justice that reaches normative conclusions akin to those of Lockean liberalism via an un-Lockean, sentimentalist path.3 Although Smith is also a famous defender of free markets and the liberal politics that are associated with them on economic grounds, it will be Smith’s views on sympathy, justice, and the moral sentiments that I will examine here. By correcting his friend Hume’s sentimentalist account of moral and political reflection, Smith developed an individualist, rights-based, and recognizably liberal conception of justice quite different from Hume’s conservative conception.

I. Sentimentalism and Individualism 1. Twentieth-Century Suspicion of Sympathy in Politics Sympathy and the moral sentiments are generally treated with suspicion in twentieth-century political theory. Yet many of those opposed to sentimentalism fail to grapple in any serious way with either Hume or Smith’s rival sentimentalist theories of justice. This neglect is particularly obvious in the case of Hannah Arendt, who treats political sentimentalism as a wholly French phenomenon, invented by Rousseau and perfected by Robespierre. Arendt has no objection to compassion as such, which she understands as the sympathy of a single person for the particular sufferings of a single other. Arendt goes on to argue that such sharing of emotion creates an intimate bond between sympathizer and sufferer and that “because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence.”4 As soon as it tries to enter the political sphere, compassion is thus perverted into what Arendt calls “pity,” a feeling directed not toward individuals but toward undifferentiated multitudes, typically the multitude of the suffering poor. Carried away by boundless pity for the teeming masses, the revolutionaries of the Terror were thus “insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing.”5 Although the Jacobins may have repeatedly spoken of pitié,6 it is implausible to argue that their revolutionary violence is a necessary consequence of the politicization of this sentiment. Hume’s own sentimentalist political theory is a clear counterexample, suffering as it did from an opposite sort of vice:


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an excessive complacency with regard to existing conventions. Indeed, the Terror might best be understood as not being motivated by any real sympathy or fellow-feeling at all. Following Adam Smith’s famous analysis, it may instead be attributable to “a certain spirit of system” capable of turning would-be reformers “to the madness of fanaticism.” Such radicals are “intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of . . . [some] ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been presented to them in . . . the most dazzling colors.” Blind to the defects in his idealized plan, the “man of system” cannot see the suffering its enactment will cause, a classic failure of sympathy. Such a fanatic is quite different from the truly compassionate statesman, “prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence,” who, in reforming the ills of society, “contents himself with moderating what he cannot annihilate without great violence” (TMS, VI.ii.2.15–16, pp. 232–33).7 Arendt’s analysis of the French-Revolutionary cult of political pity thus bears little direct relevance to Hume or Smith’s own sentimentalist accounts of moral and political reflection, which have obvious internal resources for the rejection of violent fanaticism. In contrast to Arendt, John Rawls argues in A Theory of Justice against a sentimentalist philosophical position explicitly described as “reminiscent of Hume and Adam Smith.”8 Yet Rawls’s real objection here is not to Hume or Smith, or even to reflective sentimentalism as such, but to a certain argument for utilitarianism, the theory of justice that Rawls sets up against his own.9 This argument for utilitarianism begins with an analysis of rightness. By definition, we might maintain, “something is right, a social system say, when an ideally rational and impartial spectator would approve of it from a general point of view should he possess all the relevant knowledge of the circumstances” (p. 161). Rawls declines to pass judgment on the correctness of this definition, but notes that it leaves the content of the ethical principles of which such a spectator would approve undetermined. Rawls observes that if, ex hypothesi, his own theory of justice is correct, then the ideal impartial spectator will surely approve this theory from a general point of view. In order to derive concrete principles from this definition of rightness, it therefore must be supplemented in some way, such as through further specification of the psychology of the spectator. It is here that sympathy and the moral sentiments come into play, for Rawls notes that we might plausibly imagine the spectator to be a “perfectly sympathetic being.” If we do so, Rawls believes we will find “a natural derivation of the classical principle of utility” (p. 162). This derivation begins with an understanding of sympathy, attributed to Hume, according to which sympathy “is quite literally a reproduction in our experience of the satisfactions and pleasures which we recognize to be felt by others” (p. 162). Normally, the results of this sympathy are not very strong, overwhelmed as they are by other sentiments, but we can imagine their dominance growing as our impartiality increases. If we can successfully imagine

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an omniscient, entirely rational and perfectly impartial being (emphasis on the “if”), then we can also imagine that this being is endowed with sympathy so great as to feel the sentiments of all individuals with all of their original vehemence. Such an ideal spectator “identifies with and experiences the desires of others as if these desires were his own” (p. 24), psychologically melding with the object of his sympathy. Let us now imagine that this spectator is asked to approve or disapprove of a given social system. He sympathizes fully with each person within this system in turn, and as each in turn melds with the spectator, they come to be united in a single psyche. As a single individual wishes to maximize pleasure and minimize pain over the course of her lifetime, so too does this spectator wish to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in the social system as a whole. Our ideal impartial spectator therefore allows “sympathetically imagined pains” to “cancel out sympathetically imagined pleasures, and the final intensity of approval corresponds to the net sum of positive feeling” (p. 163). Under the utilitarian view, Rawls concludes, it is such an impartial spectator “who is conceived as carrying out the required organization of the desires of all persons into one coherent system of desire; it is by this construction that many persons are fused into one” (p. 24). Rawls, of course, finds such a position morally anathema. By “conflating all persons into one,” by refusing to “take seriously the distinction between persons” (p. 24), utilitarianism violates the most basic of our intuitions concerning the sanctity of the individual. A society built on utilitarian principles, moreover, is likely to be unstable, for it requires individuals to be ready to sacrifice their welfare for the good of the whole whenever necessary. Such sacrifices can only be expected if each individual identifies fully with her fellows and this identification can only occur if “sympathy and benevolence” are “widely and intensely cultivated” (p. 155). Rawls doubts that such sentiments can ever be developed to the degree that utilitarianism demands. As Hume himself argued, moreover, if such a high degree of altruism ever were so widespread, then the conflicts that a theory of justice is needed to resolve would never arise.10 Classical utilitarianism, grounded upon sympathy, is thus untenable as a theory of justice. These are devastating objections to the utilitarian position, allegedly “reminiscent of Hume and Adam Smith,” which Rawls discusses. The clear inspirations for its formulation, however, are not Hume and Smith, but Hume and the utilitarians of succeeding generations whom he inspired. It is Hume whose account of sympathy is used here, Hume who defends a theory of justice involving an appeal to public (if not aggregate) utility, and Hume whose “circumstances of justice” exclude the possibility of perfect altruism. Smith’s sole contribution to the position in question is the phrase “impartial spectator.” Indeed, in his lectures on the history of moral philosophy, Rawls speaks of a “judicious spectator” rather than an “impartial” one, acknowledging


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that Smith used the latter phrase for a “somewhat different idea” than the Humean notion being examined.11 In A Theory of Justice, Rawls lumps Hume and Smith together in precisely the way that Rothschild warns against. On more than one occasion, he explicitly classifies them—along with their predecessors Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and their successors Bentham, J. S. Mill, and Sidgwick—as part of a continuous tradition of utilitarianism.12 It is unclear to what degree the sentimentalist utilitarianism to which Rawls objects can correctly be attributed to any thinker in this alleged tradition; it bears only a faint relation to Hume’s own position as outlined in previous chapters. And it certainly cannot be attributed to Smith, who stood adamantly opposed to the elements in Hume’s thought that were later developed into classical utilitarianism, as has been emphasized time and again in recent scholarship.13 It would thus make for an uninteresting chapter simply to argue that the ideas that Rawls claims are “reminiscent” of Smith’s would, were it not for the mention of an “impartial spectator,” barely even call them to mind. The real question is not whether Smith can avoid Rawls’s criticism of utilitarianism, but rather how he manages to do so while still maintaining his commitment to reflective sentimentalism.

2. Sympathy’s Potential Threat to Personal Separateness There are two separate but interrelated ways in which sympathy may be said to threaten the separateness of individuals: first by eliminating the distinction between a sympathizer and the individual object of her feeling and second by eliminating the distinction between the multiple objects of a single person’s sympathy. The first of these mechanisms is clear enough: we ordinarily speak of “identifying” with the objects of our sympathy, of feeling their pain “as our own,” even of “losing ourselves” in their suffering.14 The second of these mechanisms, however, requires a bit more explanation, for there is no obvious reason to suggest that two or more individuals who are objects of our sympathy at different times would become a single aggregate in our minds. According to Hume’s account, remember, sympathy is always felt for particular, specifiable others, a fact that contributes to the reflective instability of his theory of justice. Nor is this feature of sympathy attributable solely to Hume’s technical account of the phenomenon. In his lectures on rhetoric, Adam Smith suggests that the individualist nature of sympathy was observed as early as Demosthenes, the ancient rhetorician most skilled in arousing feelings of “compassion and indignation” in his audiences. Demosthenes knew not to speak of “the concerns of a whole people . . . which though very important will never affect the passions so highly as the distress of a single person” (LRBL ii.227, p. 187). Sympathy with aggregates, however, might be predicted as the result of the aggregation of individual experiences of sympathy. I identify with person A when I sympathize with him, then with person B when I sympathize with

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her, and hence I identify person A with person B. As my sympathy extends to each human individual in turn, these individuals are all identified with each other, and their welfare is identified with an aggregate conception of general utility. Such, at least, seems to be the mechanism at work in the psyche of Rawls’s ideal and impartial spectator. Arendt’s claim that private compassion for a single individual must necessarily degrade into pity for an undifferentiated multitude as soon as it tries to increase the number of its objects also seems to be based on this idea. Arendt acknowledges that compassion for multiple individuals, as individuals, is at least theoretically possible, but denies that the limited emotional capabilities of most human beings are capable of compassion for more than one or two others at a time. According to a (possibly spurious) Christian tradition that Arendt praises, “the sign of Jesus’ divinity clearly was his ability to have compassion with all men in their singularity, that is, without lumping them together into some such entity as one suffering mankind.”15 Like Arendt, Rawls acknowledges that sympathizing with multiple persons need not necessarily lead to an aggregate conception of general utility, but has trouble conceiving of any practical alternative. Sympathetic concern for multiple others, unless the interests of these persons are aggregated, would be “thrown into confusion once the claims of these persons conflict.”16 Rather than addressing this problem in the formulation of his theory of justice, Hume evades it. When it comes to maintaining the conventions that allow for beneficial social cooperation, the interests of all those with whom we sympathize simply do not conflict. The maintenance of society’s conventions, he argues, is in each and every one of our interests individually. As has been seen in the previous chapter, however, Hume’s claim that strict justice is always in the interest of all individually cannot withstand reflective scrutiny. An adequate theory of justice must address what should be done when our interests conflict. When a conflict of interests occurs, there can be no sympathy with the public interest in the sense that Hume describes, for there is no single sentiment shared by all members of the public. When the interests and sentiments of our fellows conflict, so too must our sympathies with them. The Benthamite utilitarian solution is to aggregate the interests of the multiple objects of our sympathy—allowing benefits to some to outweigh harms to others. As Rawls convincingly argues, however, this fails to recognize the essential separateness of the objects of our sympathy. A better alternative would be to find some way of expressing our sympathetic concern for each of our conflicting fellows by being fair to all of them, never forgetting that each is a distinct individual. Yet it is precisely this fact of separateness that Rawls and Arendt claim our experience of sympathy leads us to overlook. If sympathy in fact blurred the distinctions between us as they claim, reflective sentimentalism might indeed be incompatible with a liberal theory of justice built around individual rights and the inviolability of distinct persons.


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3. Smith’s Challenge: The Requirements of Individualist Sentimentalism In order to develop a liberal and individualist but still sentimentalist theory of justice, Smith must maintain sufficient distinction both between a spectator and the object of her sympathy and among the multiple objects of a single spectator’s sympathy. He must do so, moreover, while remaining true to the phenomenon of sympathy as we actually experience it, without relying on a miraculous faculty of the sort that Arendt attributes to Christ or that Rawls attributes to his ideal impartial spectator. As Smith makes clear, he has no interest in what sort of moral sentiments might lead “a perfect being” to approve of a theory of justice, but rather “upon what principles so weak and imperfect a creature as man actually and in fact approves of it” (TMS II.i.5.10, p. 77). It is worth noting that, in addition to citing Hume and Smith, Rawls cites Roderick Firth among the inspirations of the impartial spectator theory that he examines.17 The impossible being that Rawls describes actually bears much more resemblance to Firth’s “ideal observer” than to Smith’s “impartial spectator.” Like Firth’s ideal observer, Rawls’s impartial spectator is omniscient (with full knowledge of both all things past and all things future), “omnipercipient” (with perfect powers of imagination), perfectly disinterested, perfectly rational, and (now for the punch line) “in other respects . . . normal.”18 To be sure, Rawls replaces the perfect dispassion of Firth’s observer with perfect sympathy for all of humanity, but both represent what Firth calls “partial description[s] of God” insofar as “God is conceived to be an infallible moral judge.”19 By contrast, as T. D. Campbell has observed, in most instances where Smith speaks of the impartial spectator, he is merely speaking of “the ordinary person when he is in the position of observing the behavior of any person with whom he has no special connection and whose behavior does not affect him more or less than it affects anyone else.”20 While only God could be a Firthian ideal observer, all of us are regularly Smithian impartial spectators. The impartial spectator is an ideal type—not in Firth’s normative sense—but in Max Weber’s descriptive, sociological sense. The moral judgments that we naturally make when we are in the position of impartial spectators are what Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is, first and foremost, meant to explain. Throughout Smith’s moral philosophy, the perspective most often taken is of a disinterested spectator evaluating the actions of others, not that of the actor himself deliberating about his future actions. Only later does Smith set out to explain why, when we are not in the position of an impartial spectator—when we form moral evaluations of our friends, family, or ourselves, for example—we still feel that our moral judgments ought to remain impartial.21 This latter explanation will require reference to a kind of impartial spectator who is not a real-world human

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being, but a voice of conscience within such human beings. We make appeal to this imagined spectator for reasons analogous to those that Hume argues require appeal to a general point of view. In order to avoid the sort of social and psychological “contradictions” that Hume argued result from partial or biased moral sentiments, Smith suggests that we try to anticipate what will win the approval of an impartial observer and act or judge accordingly.22 There are, of course, important differences between Smith’s account of the development of an internal impartial spectator as a voice of conscience and Hume’s account of the need for appeal to a general point of view, but since these differences are not essential to understanding the two authors’ respective theories of justice, they can be bracketed for purposes of the present inquiry. What is important to note here is that Smith’s account of the correction of our biased moral sentiments, like Hume’s, builds from the social and psychological needs of real-world human beings and does not appeal to an independent standard of the sort provided by Firth’s ideal observer. Smith has good reason to turn his attention from perfect, divine sympathy to focus on the moral sentiments of actual human beings. It is not at all clear that the principles that govern the former need bear much relation to the principles that should govern the latter. Despite his insistence that the maximization of aggregate happiness is not an appropriate goal for mere mortals, for example, Smith considers the possibility that it might be an appropriate goal for God, given his “supreme wisdom” and “divine benignty” (TMS III.5.7, p. 166).23 Yet Smith’s concerns are human, not divine. Indeed, since his task is not to describe a perfect moral judge along the lines of Firth’s ideal observer, but the imperfect moral judges who we ourselves are, Smith grants that his “inquiry is not concerning a matter of right, if I may say so, but concerning a matter of fact” (TMS II.i.5.10, p. 77). That said, one must not overestimate the positive or “scientific” character of Smith’s moral and political philosophy at the expense of its normative character. Unlike Hume, Smith never provides a full explication of the normative authority of our mature, corrected moral sentiments. Like Hume, however, Smith acknowledges that coming to understand the facts concerning human moral sentiments cannot but help us correct and refine those very sentiments. Although he maintains that the work of moral philosophers is basically descriptive, Smith nonetheless notes that “they may often help both to correct and to ascertain our natural sentiments with regard to the propriety of conduct, and . . . form us to a more exact justness of behavior, than what, without such instruction, we should have been apt to think of” (TMS VII.iv.6, p. 329). If sympathy does not operate as Hume imagines it does, for example, then this might suggest a very different theory of justice from that which Hume justifies with reference to our sympathy with the public interest. If it is Smith’s theory of justice, rather than Hume’s, which receives the


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approval of our mature and reflectively stable moral sentiments, then it is Smith’s theory that Hume would have to acknowledge wields genuine normative authority.

II. The Space between Actor and Spectator: Sympathy and Moral Judgment 1. Smith’s Revised Anatomy of Sympathy Hume, remember, uses the term “sympathy” in a technical manner to describe the psychological mechanism by which the idea of another’s feeling is transformed into an impression of it. Smith uses the same concept in a much broader way, for he doubts that the processes that Hume describes can account for anything but a small minority of our experiences of fellow feeling. To be sure, there may be instances—such as when we see an individual inexplicably sobbing in pain or grief—in which the Humean account explains our sharing of sentiments. In most cases, however, sympathy “does not arise so much from the view [or, more broadly, the idea] of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it” (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12).24 In this way, Smith understands sympathy as often involving a further cognitive element missing from Hume’s account, in which any sufficiently vivid idea of another’s passion is almost automatically converted into an impression of that passion. Stephen Darwall classifies both Humean sympathy and Rousseau’s instinctual pitié as “the most rudimentary form of empathy,” which, borrowing a phrase from Kant, he calls “emotional contagion.” Smith’s account of sympathy, on the other hand, describes the difficult imaginative work of “projective empathy and simulation.” Rather than “simply copying others’ feelings or thought processes as we imagine them” Smith’s account of sympathy involves placing ourselves in the other’s situation and working out “what to feel, as though we were they.”25 The degree of cognitive and imaginative effort required by a spectator will vary with what the actor being observed is experiencing. A spectator’s sympathy may seem almost automatic when she is faced with strong, simple emotions such as sudden grief or joy, but will necessarily involve considerable imaginative effort with more complex and nuanced sentiments.26 In this way, Smith’s account of the operations of sympathy differs quite strikingly from Hume’s, and even more strikingly from the mechanics of Rousseau’s instinctual pitié.27 Smith has a wide variety of arguments at his disposal to establish the superiority of his anatomy of sympathy to Hume’s. Smith’s theory, for example, would seem to better explain cases of sympathy where the actor observed is not himself feeling the emotion that we experience sympathetically. This may happen when the actor is simply oblivious to the relevant elements of his

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situation, as when we feel sympathetic shame for a boor at a party, while he himself remains entirely unaware of how others view him. It may also happen when the actor in question is incapable of feeling the emotions that we imagine to be warranted by his situation, as is often the case when we feel compassion for infants, the insane, or (in one of Smith’s favorite examples) the deceased. When we contemplate the sad fate of a murder victim, “the anguish which humanity feels . . . at the sight of such an object,” obviously “cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer” (TMS I.i.1.11, p. 12). Yet Hume’s theory of sympathy can, with relatively little difficulty, account for the phenomena that Smith describes. Humean sympathy, remember, operates by transforming sufficiently vivid ideas of passions into sensible impressions. There is no reason that such ideas cannot be produced in the mind even when the object of our sympathy is not himself feeling the passion involved. Given sufficient experience of the passions of others, a sufficiently vivid idea of these passions may be caused not only by the direct sensory experience of another undergoing them, but also by the observation of the circumstances that normally produce them, by their recollection in memory, or even by their reconstruction in the imagination. Smith, however, has a number of other arguments in defense of his theory. Most importantly, Hume’s account of sympathy as emotional contagion predicts that sympathetically shared feelings will tend to reinforce each other. Under Hume’s theory, human minds are “mirrors to one another” in which “rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may often be reverberated” (T 2.2.6.21). Hume gives the example of “the pleasure which a rich man receives from his possessions” causing “pleasure and esteem” in a sympathetic spectator. The spectator’s feelings, in turn, “being perceived and sympathized with, increase the pleasure of the possessor,” which then in turn increases the pleasure of the spectator, which then still further increases the pleasure of the possessor, and so on (T 2.2.6.21). Yet while this may be a plausible description of shared pleasure, it is not a plausible description of sympathy with pain. Far from reinforcing our painful emotions, we find another’s sympathy with our miseries comforting. Indeed, when we are suffering, there is nothing we crave more than another’s sympathy. This is incompatible, however, with a theory of emotional contagion that depicts human minds (to cite another of Hume’s similes) as “strings equally wound up” for which “the motion of one communicates itself to the rest, so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature” (T 3.3.1.7). Far from begetting a corresponding movement, our experience of another’s sympathy with our pain actually begets an opposite movement and our pain is soothed. Hume, of course, was not ignorant of the fact that the sympathy of others eases our suffering. He observes as much in his discussion of the deep human


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need for the sympathy of others, writing that in solitude “every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable” (T 2.2.5.15). It is unclear, however, how Hume can explain the power of another’s commiseration to lessen our sorrows, given its obvious incompatibility with the mechanisms of sympathy that he describes. Hume addresses a similar problem when he puzzles over the pleasure that we take in our sympathy with the suffering characters in a theatrical or literary tragedy. Yet his solution to that problem—that our pleasure is produced by the “eloquence with which the melancholy scene is represented” (“Of Tragedy,” in EMPL, p. 219)—cannot explain why we would wish to sympathize with the ineloquent suffering of our real-world companions, let alone why such sufferers would find our sympathy comforting.28 By contrast with Hume, Smith argues that there is something about sympathy with another human being that is inherently pleasant to both parties involved, regardless of whether the feelings being shared are positive or negative. This observation, as Hume observed in a letter to Smith, is the “hinge” of Smith’s thought and one that Hume felt to be highly questionable. “If all sympathy were agreeable,” Hume writes, “a hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball” (CAS, Letter 36, p. 43). Smith’s reply to this objection can build on yet another argument at his disposal against Hume’s theory of emotional infection. Hume’s theory, Smith can rightly argue, would predict an experience of sympathy whenever one is vividly aware of another’s emotion. Yet no matter how vivid a spectator’s awareness or understanding of an actor’s feelings may be, she will not sympathize with those feelings if she sees them as inappropriate to the actor’s situation. Gilbert Harman gives the example of “someone who is very upset over a minor scratch on his knee from a fall . . . You can understand perfectly well how upset the person is without at all sympathizing with the person’s extreme agitation.”29 Unlike the mechanism of emotional infection, the mechanism of projective empathy involves discretion on the part of the spectator as to whether sympathy is called for. As Darwall has observed, empathetically placing ourselves in another’s situation and imagining how we would respond emotionally “puts us into a position to second the other’s feeling or dissent from it,” depending on whether the other’s feelings seem “warranted by features of the situation to which they apparently respond . . . If one is inclined to believe that another’s feelings are not warranted by her situation,” Darwall reasons, “this will make it more difficult to share them through projective empathy. Indeed, one’s relative inability to empathize will itself be an expression of thinking the other’s feelings to be unwarranted.”30 This, in turn, suggests an obvious reason why sympathy would always be, in some respect, pleasant for all parties involved. A hospital may not be a more pleasant place than a ball, but whether on the dance floor or in the emergency room we always crave the approval of those around us and we generally also prefer to approve of

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our fellows rather than to disapprove of them. The degree of one’s sympathy with another, both in Smith’s system and in ordinary language, implies a proportionate degree of approval.31

2. From Sympathy to Moral Judgment Smith moves from a discussion of sympathy and its operations to a discussion of the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval without any of the more indirect linkages between the psychological phenomena traced by Hume. Specifically, Smith moves directly to a discussion of the judgment of what he calls the “propriety” of an actor’s reaction to his situation. By sympathetically considering another’s situation, we can judge the degree to which his reactions to it (his emotions, choices, attitudes, actions, etc.) are proper or warranted. This sympathetic judgment involves a multistage process.32 First, a spectator imaginatively engages with the situation of an actor, imagining what it would be like to be that actor in that situation.33 Second, the spectator feels some reaction herself in response to this imagined situation. The emotions she feels are akin to those that she would feel if she were actually the actor in this situation, albeit without the vehemence that a real situation would inspire. The experience of this second stage of sympathy may or may not be pleasant and the imagined reactions of the spectator may or may not resemble the actual reactions of the actor. Indeed, the actor may not have any reaction to his situation at all, as when we sympathize with the deceased. Third, whenever possible, the spectator compares her reactions to the reactions of the actor, noting their degrees of similarity and difference. Fourth, there are the evaluations arising from this comparison—pleasurable approval to the extent that the actor’s and the spectator’s reactions to the situation in question resemble one another and painful disapproval to the extent that they do not. Yet Smith, like Hume, realized that our sympathy varies along with the closeness of our relationship to the objects of our feelings and hence that our judgments of propriety will be biased in favor of those closest to us. To avoid the social and psychological contradictions that result, an additional, fifth stage in the process of mature moral evaluation is required when we do not ourselves qualify as impartial spectators. In such cases, we correct our biased judgments through appeal to an imagined impartial spectator within, the functional equivalent of Hume’s appeal to the general point of view. It would be tempting to provide a precise definition in terms of the above process for each of the many words available for the sympathetic sentiments. Perhaps the contemporary notion of empathy (unavailable to Smith in the eighteenth century) could correspond to the first stage, or to the first and second stages combined. Compassion might refer to the process as a whole, albeit only when the experiences involved in stage two are painful. Sympathy


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might also refer to the whole process, but only when it results in moral approval. The English language, however, is not so precise, and Smith confusingly speaks of sympathy and compassion (as do we all) in many different senses. Smith sometimes uses the term sympathy to refer to stage one alone or to stage two alone; when it is used in these senses sympathy need not imply any moral approval at all. Yet Smith also calls moral approval itself “sympathy” (disapproval being termed “antipathy”) and the same name is given to the whole process to the extent that approval is the result.34 It is in this way that Smith can grant Hume’s criticism that in the “stage two” sense of the term, sympathy with painful feelings is itself painful, but in the sense that implies moral approval it is always pleasant.35 Regardless, Hume is certainly correct that it is here we find the hinge of Smith’s system. All of Smith’s moral philosophy, including his theory of justice, rests on this understanding of sympathy and moral approval. It is now possible to see how Smith’s understanding of sympathy escapes the first of the two pitfalls mentioned previously, that of dissolving the distinction between a spectator and the object of her sympathy. As the spectator initially imagines herself in the situation of the actor at the beginning of the multistage process of sympathy, she may, of course, be said to identify with the actor. For all real-world spectators, however, the identification with the objects of their sympathy must necessarily be incomplete. “The imaginary change of situation, upon which their sympathy is founded, is but momentary,” Smith writes. Although this “does not hinder them from conceiving a passion somewhat analogous to what is felt by the sufferer” it does hinder them “from conceiving any thing that approaches to the same degree of violence.” It not only reduces the strength of the reaction concerned but also “in some measure, varies it in kind, and gives it a quite different modification” (TMS I.i.4.7, pp. 21–22). Rawls would understand this weakening and modification to be a result of sympathy’s imperfection. A perfect sympathizer, an ideal impartial spectator, would identify completely with the object of her sympathy. Yet it is essential to Smith’s theory that sympathy can never be perfect in this way. If it were, the distance necessary for an appraisal of the actor’s reactions to his situation would be impossible. The spectator cannot forget that she is a separate person from the actor, for she must contrast the actor’s actual reactions to his situation with how she would react in his place. It is thus impossible for Smith to speak of “perfect” sympathy. Were our imaginative identification with an actor’s situation ever complete and our reaction to it utterly identical to his own, then it would be impossible to compare his original reactions with our sympathetic ones and hence to approve of his propriety.36 While the mental states of one person and their sympathetic analogues in another can “never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required” (TMS I.i.4.7, p. 22).

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III. The Space between Actors: Justice and Natural Jurisprudence 1. From Propriety to Justice Although judgments of propriety and impropriety are the most basic form that moral evaluations take under Smith’s system, they are not the only ones. Smith also describes judgments of what he calls “merit” and “demerit,” which are based on “the beneficial or hurtful nature of the effects” which an actor’s response to his situation “aims at, or tends to produce” (TMS I.i.3.6–7, p. 18). This might make it seem that merit and demerit are to be determined along consequentialist lines. If your reactions to your situation point toward good consequences, then they are meritorious. If they point toward bad consequences, then they are worthy of demerit. Such consequentialist judgments would be independent of the nonconsequentialist judgments concerning propriety described earlier. This is not, however, how Smith feels that we judge merit and demerit. To the contrary, judgments of merit are based on judgments of propriety. Specifically, they are built from two such judgments. Here, in addition to judging the reactions of an actor to his situation, a spectator also judges the reactions to the actor of someone we will call the “patient”—the person who is the object of the actor’s emotions, attitudes, or actions. Smith emphasizes two possible reactions that a patient may have to the actor: a pleasant stance of “gratitude” that is related to the spectator’s judgment of an actor’s merit or an unpleasant stance called “resentment” that is related to demerit. We need not consider gratitude or merit at any length here, however, since it is resentment and demerit that are important for Smith’s theory of justice. In order to explain how we judge demerit, Smith argues that it is natural to oppose that which causes us sorrow. Insofar as we approve of another’s sorrow and think it warranted by his situation, we will to that extent approve of this opposition. “The indolent and passive fellow-feeling, by which we accompany him in his sufferings,” Smith writes, “readily gives way to that more vigorous and active sentiment by which we go along with him in the effort he makes, either to repel them or to gratify his aversion to what has given occasion to them. This is still more peculiarly the case when it is man who has caused them.” When the cause of an individual’s suffering is another human individual’s willful behavior, the opposition to this cause takes the form of what Smith, following Butler, calls “resentment.” Smith observes, “when we see one man oppressed or injured by another, the sympathy which we feel with the distress of the sufferer seems to serve only to animate our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender” (TMS II.i.2.5, p. 70).37 Like Butler, Smith recognizes that resentment takes its unique form from the fact that its objects—the human causes of an individual’s sorrow—are


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themselves beings about whom we can form judgments of propriety and impropriety.38 The goal of resentment is therefore not merely to force its object to cease causing us pain. Rather, we desire that the object of our resentment should recognize the impropriety of his behavior. We therefore desire that he be punished and “not only that he should be punished, but that he should be punished by our means, and upon account of that particular injury which he had done to us.” The goal of such punishment is not to cause pain to that which has caused pain to us, but to make the offender “grieve for that particular wrong which we have suffered from him. He must be made to repent and be sorry for this very action” (TMS II.i.1.6, p. 69). The offender must be made to understand “that the person whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner” (TMS II.iii.1.5, pp. 95–96). In this way, any warranted feeling of resentment is dependent on a prior judgment that the emotions and actions that caused this feeling were improper or unwarranted. Resentment aims at making our offender recognize the great impropriety of his own behavior and the propriety of the sorrow that it has caused us. The result of this recognition would be a kind of reconciliation that brings both offender and offended into a state of sympathetic harmony. The means for achieving this goal—namely, punishment—nonetheless unavoidably involve suffering for the offender. Since it includes a desire to cause the suffering of another, resentment is classified as what Smith calls an “unsocial” passion. “With regard to all such [unsocial] passions,” Smith writes, “our sympathy is divided between the person who feels them, and the person who is the object of them. The interests of these two are directly opposite” (TMS I.ii.3.1, p. 34). In order to judge the propriety of a patient’s resentment, and hence of the demerit of an actor’s behavior, the spectator therefore must sympathetically judge each in turn. First, she considers the degree to which the actor responded with propriety to the situation that caused him to act so as to draw the patient’s resentment. To the extent that he did, his behavior cannot be worthy of demerit, for “where there is no disapprobation of the motives of the person who does the mischief, there is no sort of sympathy with the resentment of him who suffers it” (TMS II.1.3, p. 71). Even if a patient is suffering as a result of the behavior of the actor, to the extent that we sympathize with the actor’s reaction to his situation and hence approve of him, we may sympathize with the patient’s sorrow, but not with his resentment per se.39 Only after the impropriety of an actor’s behavior has been established can a spectator then judge the extent to which it is worthy of demerit. To do so, her sympathetic attention is now turned toward the patient and she judges the propriety of his resentment.40 To the extent that this resentment is deemed proper, her attentions finally turn once again to the actor, whose behavior she now disapproves of, not only as improper, but also as worthy of demerit. “The sense of demerit,” Smith thus concludes, is “a compounded sentiment . . . made

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up of two distinct emotions: a direct antipathy to the sentiments of the agent and an indirect sympathy with the resentment of the sufferer” (TMS II.i.5.5, p. 75). Justice, as a characteristic of persons, is, for Smith, the virtue that allows an individual to avoid demerit. Justice prevents him from drawing the warranted resentment of those with whom he interacts as determined through the sympathetic evaluation of this resentment by an impartial spectator. In this way, Smith sees justice as “upon most occasions, but a negative virtue,” one that “only hinders us from hurting our neighbor” (TMS II.ii.1.10, p. 82).41 Personal injustice takes the form of what Smith, like Butler, calls “injury” to another, and necessarily “does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.” Since the proper reaction to injury involves a warranted desire for punishment, unlike other virtues justice “is not left to the freedom of our own wills,” but “may be exhorted by force” (TMS II.ii.1.5, p. 79). Yet “to prevent the confusion which would attend upon every man’s doing justice to himself, the magistrate, in all governments that have acquired any considerable authority, undertakes to do justice to all and promises to hear and to redress every complaint of injury” (TMS VII.iv.36, p. 340). By primarily discussing justice as an individual virtue, however, Smith does not deny that justice can also be understood as a system of moral rules. Indeed, all of the virtues can be understood in this way. Such general rules, however, never wield moral authority independent of our particular judgments of the propriety and merit of individual behavior. To the contrary, Smith insists that the general rules of morality “are ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve or disapprove of.” More specifically, they are derived from our particular moral judgments by a process of induction. “We do not originally approve or condemn particular actions because, upon examination, they appear to be agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general rule,” Smith writes. “The general rule, on the contrary, is formed by finding from experience that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.” The spectator who witnessed the commission of the first homicide—the slaying of Abel by Cain, say—would thus detest this crime “instantaneously and antecedent to his having formed to himself any general rule” prohibiting an abstract category of actions known as “murder” (TMS III.4.8, p. 159). Once general rules are inductively derived from particular moral judgments, however, they take on an important role of their own. Consideration of the general patterns of moral approval among human beings may help correct irregularities in our own particular moral judgments. Indeed, this is the way that we “regulate the better part of our moral judgments,” bringing greater consistency to what otherwise might be a rather haphazard collection of individual


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acts of approval and disapproval (TMS VII.iii.2.6, p. 319). With regard to most virtues, however, it is important to remember that the inductive generalizations we rely on to provide greater regularity to our judgments are only rules of thumb—rules of thumb, moreover, whose moral authority stems solely from the particular judgments from which they are derived. There may thus be a certain “awkward and pedantic” impropriety among those who give too great a weight to general rules in their moral deliberations (TMS III.6.10, p. 175). Yet the situation is somewhat different with regard to the general rules of justice. The regularity of our moral judgments is crucially important with regard to this virtue, for it is only here that we feel our decisions, or those of the magistrate who decides in our stead, should be enforced coercively. Fortunately, given their greater relative importance, the rules of justice may be formulated with greater precision than the rules regarding other virtues. Presumably (though Smith is never explicit on this point) this is due to the generally negative character of justice; it is much easier to specify, in general, what will qualify as a concrete injury to an individual than what will qualify as an act of courage or magnanimity. Smith thus compares the rules of justice to rules of grammar and the rules of other virtues to the rules of “what is sublime and elegant in composition” (TMS III.6.10, p. 175). The former are relatively precise and utterly indispensable, while the latter serve only as rough guides for particular judgments.

2. Smith’s Natural Jurisprudence Attempts to codify precisely the rules regarding most human virtues lead only to pedantic and misleading casuistry. By contrast, the rules of justice can and should be so codified, given their unique status as both relatively specifiable and coercively enforceable. If a magistrate follows a particular codification of these rules, then her decisions are more likely to be both impartial and proper than if she relied on her own sympathetic judgment alone. Each polity develops its own system of positive law and “every system of positive law may be regarded as a more or less imperfect attempt towards a system of natural jurisprudence, or towards an enumeration of the particular rules of justice” (TMS VII.iv.36, p. 340). A polity may thus be called just to the degree that its positive law is a successful approximation of the natural law—that is, to the degree that its legal code accurately reflects the general rules of justice that may be inductively derived from particular impartial judgments. Unlike Hume’s theory of justice, Smith’s theory thus allows us to criticize an existing social order as unjust. Our proper and impartial sympathetic approval of the warranted resentment of those victimized by an unjust society leads us to demand social reform. Smith understands natural jurisprudence, as a branch of moral philosophy, to consist of “an inquiry into what were the natural rules of justice independent

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of all positive institutions.” The goal of natural jurisprudence is to establish “a theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations” (TMS VII.iv.37, p. 341). Smith’s understanding of natural jurisprudence thus places him firmly within the modern natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf; Smith explicitly praises the former for coming closest to providing a complete system of natural law. At the end of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith promises to give his own account of the subject “in another discourse.” There, he will “give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in terms of what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue and arms, and whatever else is the object of law” (TMS VII.iv.37, p. 342). Although this work was never finished, the material on “police” (what we might now term public policy), “revenue,” and “arms” would take up the bulk of the Wealth of Nations. We are left to extrapolate—from both the material on justice in the Moral Sentiments and from the two sets of surviving notes taken at Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence—what Smith might have written “in terms of what concerns justice.” It is clear, given his sentimentalist account of the foundations of justice in human sympathy, that Smith’s account of natural law must be, like Hutcheson’s before him, a sentimentalist one. Unlike the protoutilitarian systems of Hutcheson and Hume, however, Smith’s is a deontological conception of natural law built around a robust conception of individual rights. For Smith, of course, these rights cannot be mysteriously “built into” us by nature or nature’s god. Instead, they are simply the flip side of injuries, with injuries understood in terms of the sympathy-based account given earlier. “Justice is violated,” Smith says toward the beginning of his jurisprudence lectures, “whenever one is deprived of what he had a right to and could justly demand from others, or rather, when we do him an injury or hurt without a cause” (LJA 1.9, p. 7).42 Smith’s entire system of jurisprudence is thus structured around the question of “in how many ways a man may be injured.” Smith divides his lectures into three sections based on the idea that one may be injured as an individual (injured in one’s person, reputation, or estate), as “a member of a family” (denied one’s rights as a spouse, parent, master, or servant), or “as a citizen or member of a state” (denied one’s rights as a sovereign or a subject) (LJA 1.9, p. 7). In other words, an individual can feel warranted resentment toward those who hurt him either through the mediation of social or political systems (such as the family or the state) and in terms of his status within these institutions or without the mediation of any such institutions and solely in terms of his status as a human being. Although all of the rights that guard us against these various sorts of injuries are natural in the sense that they are independent of any particular codification of positive law, Smith uses the term


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“natural” in a more narrow sense to refer to only those rights that apply to individuals as individuals. “Adventitious” rights, by contrast, arise due to specific social and political institutions.43 As soon as we understand natural rights in this way, most of the items listed among liberalism’s traditional “rights of man”—rights to life and liberty, for example—strike Smith as obvious.44 Yet the third item in Locke’s famous triad of natural rights requires a bit more explanation, since it is unclear whether the right to property is properly called natural in the narrow sense of the term. Indeed, the right seems to involve both narrowly natural and adventitious features—that is, both elements independent of all historical contingencies and elements inseparable from particular social and political institutions. In order to clarify this ambiguity, Smith asks us to imagine, abstracting from any particular social context, a man who has the apple he has just picked taken away from him. “From the system I have already explained [in The Theory of Moral Sentiments],” Smith reminds his students, “we may conceive an injury was done when an impartial spectator would be of opinion he [the putative possessor of an object] was injured, would join with him in his concern and go along with him when he defended the subject [object?] in his possession against any violent attack, or used force to recover what had been thus wrongfully wrested out of his hands.” And surely this would be the case with our imagined, aggrieved apple-picker. “The cause of this sympathy or concurrence betwixt the spectator and possessor,” Smith explains, “is that he enters into his thoughts and concurs in his opinion that he may form a reasonable expectation of using the fruit in any manner he pleases.” While the expectation to enjoy the (here literal) fruits of our labor is judged proper, the desire to take those of another is not. The spectator sympathizes with the initial possessor’s feeling that his apple is his own, “but he can not enter into the designs of him who would take the goods from the first possessor” (LJA i.37, p. 17). In this way, Smith defends property as a reflective outgrowth of our sympathy with the reasonable expectations of our fellows.45 The adventitious rights that apply to an individual as a member of a family have little bearing on the issues at hand—and Smith’s views on this subject were distorted by the prejudices of his age far more so than were his views on other subjects. Yet a brief discussion of the adventitious rights that apply to individuals as members of states is worthwhile. Just as Smith earlier provided an alternative, sentimentalist justification of the Lockean right to property, here he provides a sentimentalist alternative to Locke’s contractarian account of the right of citizens to resist their sovereign.46 Smith follows Hume in seeing the social contract as a bizarre fiction and the idea that governments may derive their rightful authority from the consent (tacit or otherwise) of the governed as absurd. Instead, Smith maintains that the right to rule has a twofold root: first, in the habitual deference individuals naturally show toward traditional authorities, and, second, in the utility of having a single sovereign

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power to coercively enforce a particular regime of positive law. An alternative explanation must therefore be found as to whether and when resistance against these useful, authoritative governing bodies is justified. As might be expected, Smith’s answer lies in an impartial spectator’s sympathetic approval of the resentment felt by the subjects of a government that abuses its power, and her support for the efforts they take to bring a tyrant, or band of tyrants, to justice. “Who is there in reading Roman history who does not acknowledge that the conduct of Nero, Caligula, or Domitian was such as entirely took away all authority from them?” Smith asks rhetorically. All of us cannot but “enter into the designs of the people” and “go along with them in all their plots and conspiracies” to rid themselves of these emperors; we rejoice at the people’s successes and grieve when they fail. (LJA v.126, p. 320). The extreme “absurdity and impropriety” of a Caligula thus clearly justifies resistance (LJA v.127, p. 321). While the sovereign may sometimes be rightfully resisted, since there is no contract with the people that can be broken, there are no firm rules as to which particular abuses of governmental power justify such resistance. Unlike the other rules of justice, the general principles concerning rightful revolution can never be codified as part of a particular system of positive law.47 In the same passage in which he decries the “man of system” Smith thus warns that the right to resist one’s sovereign implies the grave responsibility to do so only when absolutely necessary. At times of constitutional crisis, “the highest effort of political wisdom” is required “to determine when a real patriot ought to support and endeavor to re-establish the authority of the old system, and when he ought to give way to the more daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation” (TMS VI.ii.2.12, pp. 231–32).

3. The Limited Role of Public Utility It should now be obvious that Smith’s rights-centered theory of justice is directly at odds with the later doctrines of classical utilitarianism—as well with the conservative protoutilitarianism of Hume’s theory of justice. That said, however, public utility of a sort does play an important role in Smith’s theory, for there is nothing more important to the public interest than that the rules of justice are rigorously enforced. “Society cannot subsist unless the laws of justice are tolerably observed,” Smith writes. “No social intercourse can take place among men who do not generally abstain from injuring one another.” It is here that Smith finds the inspiration for Hume’s rival theory of justice, for “the consideration of this necessity, it has been thought, was the ground upon which we approved of the enforcement of the laws of justice and the punishment of those who violated them” (TMS II.ii.3.6, p. 87). Hume’s mistake, Smith thinks, was to confuse cause and effect, mistakenly seeing the benefits that justice brings as the original source of our approval of justice.


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Although he insists that our approval of justice is “originally and essentially different” from our perception of justice’s utility, Smith nonetheless grants that our approval may be “enhanced and enlivened by the perception” (TMS IV.2.3, p. 188). Our commitment to justice stands in particular need of this “enlivenment” at those moments when our more immediate and uncorrected feelings of sympathy might lead us away from it, such as when justice requires that we do harm to a wrongdoer. This is not to say that the harm in question can be justified in terms of utility. “In all cases,” Smith insists, “the measure of the punishment to be inflicted on the delinquent is the concurrence of the impartial spectator with the resentment of the injured” (LJA ii.90, p. 104). Yet when an individual about to be justly punished becomes an object of compassion, magistrates “frequently have occasion to confirm our natural sense of the propriety and fitness of punishment by reflecting how necessary it is for preserving the order of society.” Smith explains that such magistrates: . . . call to their assistance the consideration of the general interest of society. They counterbalance the impulse of this weak and partial humanity by the dictates of a humanity that is more generous and comprehensive. They reflect that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and oppose to the emotions of compassion which they feel for a particular person, a more enlarged compassion which they feel for mankind. (TMS II.ii.3.8, pp. 88-89)48

In the vast majority of instances, consideration of public utility only serves to confirm our nonconsequentialist judgments of justice in general and of just punishment in particular. If it is claimed that the public good requires punishment beyond that which an impartial spectator can endorse, then this is an indication that the appeal to general utility is a false one. Under the false assumptions of mercantilist economics, for example, the British government once believed that the exportation of wool was such a great threat to the public that it should be punished by death. No judge or jury could be found, however, which would enforce the draconian sentence and the claim that it would serve the public interest to do so was ultimately proved false.49 Smith acknowledges, however, that there may be instances when our nonconsequentialist judgments of justice and the demands of the public interest genuinely conflict. Such conflict represents both a moral dilemma and a philosophical conundrum for Smith, one he continued to puzzle over throughout his career. In his lectures, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and in an early manuscript fragment of unknown relation to both, Smith thus considers the example of a sentinel who is put to death, under military law, for falling asleep at the watch.50 To be sure, such an irresponsible guardsman can be said to do real injury, and hence real injustice, to his fellows, but the death penalty strikes the impartial spectator as entirely out of proportion to the

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crime. And as Smith wrote in his early manuscript, “improper punishment, punishment that is either not due at all or that exceeds the demerit of the crime, is an injury to the criminal” (TMS, Appendix II. p. 390). Yet Smith knows that military discipline requires extremely strict punishment for any lapse in fulfilling one’s duties; any laxity would threaten “the security of thousands” (TMS, Appendix II, p. 389). Although we may ultimately approve of the punishment inflicted on the sentinel on grounds of necessity, however, “such a punishment when it is inflicted affects us in a very different manner from that of a cruel murderer or other atrocious criminal” (LJA ii.92, p. 105). The impartial spectator “looks upon the sentinel as an unfortunate victim who, indeed, must and ought to be devoted to the safety of numbers, but whom still, in his heart, he would be glad to save; and he is only sorry that the interest of the many should oppose it” (TMS II.ii.3.11, p. 91). Smith’s worries here are appropriate to any reasonable nonconsequentialist. Although he insists that our reasons for doing justice have little or nothing to do with the consequences that result, he nonetheless does not demand that justice be done if it should make the heavens fall. Although Smith speaks of the execution of our unfortunate sentinel as “just and proper” (TMS II. ii.3.11, p. 90), D.D. Raphael is probably right to clarify that “it may still be warranted as right and proper on the grounds of a degree of utility great enough to override the injustice, but unjust it remains.”51 Regardless, Raphael reasons, the case of the sentinel is, for Smith, the exception that proves the rule, if only “because our attitude is clearly different in the exceptional and in the normal instance.”52 Exceptions aside, it is clear that the primary concern in Smith’s theory of justice is to guard against injury to particular individuals. Any harm that he allows to a particular individual—with the punishment of criminals the paradigmatic example of such harm—is almost always justified, not by reference to an alleged sympathy for “the public interest” or “general utility” in the aggregate, but with reference to sympathy for other particular individuals. Smith writes: We are no more concerned for the destruction or loss of a single man because this man is a member or part of society, and because we should be concerned for the destruction of society, than we are concerned for the loss of a single guinea because this guinea is part of a thousand guineas and because we should be concerned for the loss of the whole sum. In neither case does our regard for the individuals arise from a regard for the multitude: but in both cases our regard for the multitude is compounded and made up of the particular regards which we feel for the different individuals of which it is composed . . . . When a single man is injured, or destroyed, we demand the punishment of the wrong that has been done to him, not so much from a concern for the general interest of society, as from a concern for that very man who has been injured. (TMS II.ii.3.10, pp. 89–90)


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This concern for individuals qua individuals is a natural outgrowth of Smith’s emphasis on sympathy. As has been observed since the time of Demosthenes, sympathy is strongest for concrete, individual others. Sympathy for particular individuals, in turn, leads us to reject the utilitarian aggregation of interests, under which the welfare of some is to be sacrificed whenever the result is the greater good of others. Smith argues that this feature of our sympathy withstands reflective scrutiny and comes to play a central role in our corrected, reflectively stable moral sentiments, particularly our mature sense of justice. If we are considering sacrificing the interests of one individual for the greater benefit of others, then we must sympathetically consider the resentment such an unfortunate must naturally feel toward his oppressors. To the extent that this resentment is deemed proper, Smith’s theory will demand that we oppose the social system that produced his suffering. It is the impartial spectator within—the imagined personification of our mature moral sentiments—who insists that we treat each of our fellows as ends in themselves and never merely as means. It is she who tells us that “one individual must never prefer himself so much even to any other individual as to hurt or injure that other in order to benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be much greater than the hurt or injury to the other” (TMS II.iii.5, p. 138). In this way, Smith writes that “every innocent man is . . . rendered holy, consecrated and hedged round against the approach of every other man; not to be wantonly trod upon, not even to be, in any respect, ignorantly and involuntarily violated without requiring some expiation, some atonement” (TMS II.iii.3.4, p. 107). It is an unfortunate fact of intellectual history that Hume took his sentimentalist ethics through a conservative and protoutilitarian detour when he came to formulate his theory of justice and that, inspired by Hume, Rawls believed an aggregate concept of general utility the only coherent means of reconciling our divided sympathies with conflicting individuals. Building from his more sophisticated understanding of sympathy and the moral sentiments, Smith demonstrates that sympathy demands equal consideration of each party to a conflict, and a judgment of the extent to which each is deserving of our sympathetic approval. Hume’s sentimentalist method of justifying our moral commitments thus leads us to reject Hume’s own theory of justice. Reflective sentimentalism can only justify a normative political theory along the lines of Smith’s liberal individualism, not of Hume’s protoutilitarian conservatism.

C HAPTER

5

Kant’s Abandonment of Sentimentalism

Hume’s influence on Kant’s critical metaphysics is well known; Kant famously credits “remembering David Hume” for interrupting his “dogmatic slumber” in the field (PFM 4:260). Less widely known, however, is that Hume and his fellow moral sentimentalists had an important influence on Kant’s ethics. Indeed, a letter of 1771—when Smith’s only major published work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments—reports that Adam Smith was Kant’s favorite philosopher at the time.1 Yet even when the influence of these British authors on Kant’s moral philosophy is acknowledged, they are often seen offering skeptical challenges that Kant must overcome. Kant’s goal, in this view, is to establish the reality of metaphysical knowledge and authoritative ethics by overcoming British doubts regarding both. Once we understand that the sentimentalists were far from the moral skeptics that they are so often believed to be, this popular understanding of their influence on Kant’s ethics must be wholly revised. It is also important to realize that Kant rejected sentimentalism only in the last two decades of his life. Earlier, in the mid-1760s, Kant had outlined an ethics which—while anticipating the ethics of the critical period in some important respects—was nonetheless firmly in the reflective sentimentalist camp. Kant’s rejection of sentimentalism in his so-called critical period not only involved the dismissal of a position espoused by some of Kant’s favorite ethicists, but also the abandonment of a position that Kant himself once held. It is tempting to explain Kant’s change in position by insisting that, as he aged, Kant became a cold-hearted opponent of emotion in general and sympathetic emotions in particular, a view that dates back at least as far as Schiller. Yet doing so involves misreading Kant’s later writings on the foundations of morals. The older Kant’s insistence that sympathy, as an inclination, cannot play a role in the determining grounds of morality is not, in itself, a moral objection to sympathetic inclinations; to believe otherwise is to ignore Kant’s distinction between foundational and normative questions in moral philosophy. Recent commentaries on Kant’s critical-period ethics have 112


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therefore moved away from a strict focus on Kant’s rationalist foundational theories to Kant’s writings on what might be called “impure ethics” or “practical anthropology”—the contingent features of human morality, including human emotions.2 The first section of this chapter will sketch the older Kant’s actual position on the exclusion of emotions from the foundations of human morality. I will argue that Kant’s exclusion of emotion from the determining grounds of morality becomes much more plausible once it is recognized not to rely on moral condemnation of kind-hearted sentiments as such. The second section of this chapter will then move away from the older Kant’s foundational metaethics to discuss his actual normative evaluation of sympathetic emotions. While Kant has many important moral reservations concerning the emotions in general and shared emotions in particular, he has no moral objection to sometimes acting from such emotions. To the contrary, he maintains that it is our duty to cultivate our sympathetic feelings. Yet Kant nonetheless emphasizes how the will must maintain mastery over our sympathetic inclinations—enlisting them in service to the will’s moral purposes, and intentionally cultivating them to better serve these purposes, but never allowing them to take control, to overwhelm one’s rational agency. Kant then argues that when sympathetic feelings are no longer directly useful for rational purposes, they ought to be abandoned without compunction, even if a friend is still suffering right before our eyes. In order to understand Kant’s insistence on this point, I argue in the third section of this chapter that we must turn to an important, but often overlooked, distinction between two types of emotional experience that Kant draws throughout his later work. Here, Kant distinguishes two ways in which feelings can overpower the will, either through what he calls Affecte (affects) or what he calls Leidenschaften (passions). The assumption in most of Kant’s writings on sympathetic feelings—and in virtually all the secondary literature on the subject—seems to be that, when such feelings overpower the will, they do so as what Kant calls affects, emotional agitations so strong as to momentarily disable reflection. Yet it is obvious that not all experiences of sympathy rise to the level of such reflection-disabling affects. Kant always acknowledged that sharing the feelings of others through sympathy is entirely compatible with reflection on these feelings. In his work of the 1790s, Kant defines “passions” as reflectively refined sentiments self-consciously incorporated into a maxim of action. Unlike affects, passions involve a conscious decision to subordinate the demands of reason to the demands of feeling. Yet the demands of passion are nonetheless pursued calmly and rationally, at least in the sense of purely instrumental, means-ends rationality. Regardless of whether the feeling in question is cruel or kind, Kant maintains that, since only reason has rightful authority over the power of choice, all passions are necessarily evil. The possibility of such passions, however, violates the simple conception of the emotions (often falsely attributed to Kant) that categorizes

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them as belonging entirely to the realm of natural causation. Passions here involve both inclination and agency, both sensuous feeling and willful choice. Of course, for the later Kant, the choice involved in a passion is an evil one, the choice to subordinate moral incentives to the incentives of feeling. At one stage in his pre-critical thinking, however, Kant described the decision to dedicate oneself to such a reflectively refined feeling as nothing less than the hallmark of true virtue. Kant’s criticisms from the mid-1760s of acting on our immediate, unreflective sympathetic feelings foreshadow the criticisms of sympathetic affects from the 1790s. Yet the younger Kant calls on us, not to abandon our sympathetic feelings when they are no longer useful, but to carry out a reflective progress of sentiments. The truly virtuous are not those who reject their sympathetic sense of fellow-feeling as soon as it ceases to be practically efficacious, but those who cultivate it, extend and refine it, such that they now feel a tie to all of humanity that would qualify as what Kant would later condemn as a passion. My ambition in this chapter is not to vindicate the Kant of the mid-1760s against his later self; to do so would be to refute Kant’s critical ethics as a systematic whole. Instead, I seek to determine why Kant felt the need to abandon the psychological holism of his sentimentalist period and insist on the autonomy of reason alone. I will argue that a full appreciation of the older Kant’s account of sympathy and its relationship to reflection can only serve to strengthen reflective sentimentalism’s plausibility. As with all great thinkers, the later Kant had no interest in the refutation of straw men. In his arguments against what he calls “passions,” Kant describes a refined form of sentiment that could easily find a place in a reflectively stable psyche. The choice between rationalism and sentimentalism is not a choice between reflective autonomy and the natural heteronomy of feeling, but between two rival conceptions of reflective autonomy. Opting for Kant’s earlier position does not preclude embracing this Enlightenment ideal, but merely precludes understanding it as the later Kant does.

I. The Critical-Period Position on the Foundations of Morals 1. The Concept of Moral Worth The critical Kant’s most famous statement on sympathetic feelings comes from the first section of his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (G 4:398). Here, Kant draws a distinction between two kinds of philanthropist: one motivated by sympathetic inclinations and another motivated by duty. Philanthropists of the former type are “so sympathetically attuned [teilnehmend] that . . . they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them.” 3 Kant maintains that their philanthropy, “however it may conform with duty and however


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amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.” A good deed performed from benevolent feelings “deserves praise and encouragement but not esteem, for the maxim lacks moral content, namely that of doing such actions not from inclination but from duty.” But suppose that a particular philanthropist suddenly found himself “overclouded by his own grief, which extinguished all sympathy [Teilnehmung] with the fate of others.” Or suppose that an individual has been born without much sympathy for others in the first place. Although fortune has robbed the former individual of his benevolent motives— and nature has not “properly fashioned” the latter for benevolence—both can tear themselves out of their “deadly insensibility” and do what is morally required of them “without inclination, simply from duty.” It is only philanthropy like theirs, done solely from duty, that has moral worth (G 4:398). Contrary to common misconceptions, Kant is not making a normative case against the sympathetic sentiments here or urging us to extirpate such soft feelings from our psyche.4 To the contrary, like Hutcheson before him, Kant repeatedly insists that our benevolent desires are not under our willful control. The characters described in the Groundwork who act not from sympathy but from duty have not willfully chosen to rid themselves of sympathy, but have been robbed of their sympathetic feelings by natural misfortune. If this is what is required to insure that our actions have moral worth, then not only would it be abhorrent to try to maximize the moral worth of our actions, it would also be impossible. The Groundwork is not a treatise on normative ethics, but instead on the foundations of morals. The concepts of moral worth and esteem are introduced in the first section of this treatise, not as ideas designed to play a direct role in moral deliberation, but as heuristics to better explicate the idea of a good will. Kant describes a lack of sympathetic feeling as a “subjective limitation and hindrance” to duty, albeit a hindrance that “far from concealing it,” rather brings the nature of duty “out by contrast,” making it “shine forth all the more brightly” (G 4:397). Although it is normatively undesirable, the emotional coldness of Kant’s morally worthy individuals is discussed here because it is epistemologically useful in allowing the good will to appear in its naked purity, unaided by the presence of sympathetic or otherwise benevolent emotions.

2. The Exclusion of Inclination from the Determining Grounds of Duty Rather than part of a normative condemnation of the sympathetic sentiments, Kant’s argument that actions motivated by such feelings lack moral worth is meant to establish that these feelings cannot play a part in what he calls the “determining ground” (Bestimmungsgrund) of our duty. Nancy Sherman interprets Kant’s claims here as twofold.5 First, sympathetic feelings need not play a role in one’s motive to morally right action. To the contrary, sympathy’s

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motivational force is unreliable, while the incentive of duty is always present. The morally worthy philanthropy that Kant describes illustrates how the incentive of duty is active even when sympathetic feelings fail us. Yet reflective sentimentalism has a ready response available to this first claim. Recall that, as Hume argues, when an individual’s benevolent motivations fail him, “a person may perform an action merely out of regard to its moral obligation.” Yet this need not require a moral law that can command independent of all inclination. Instead, as Hume explains, a person “may hate himself” for lacking the virtuous motivations that he approves in others. When he experiences this self-disapprobation, he “may perform the action without the motive . . . in order to acquire by practice that virtuous principle, or at least to disguise to himself as much as possible his want of it” (T 3.2.1.8). Second, Sherman argues that sympathy cannot provide a criterion that determines the content of our moral obligations, since the maxim of doing what sympathy directs lacks any specifically moral content. Yet Hume’s entire description of the “progress of sentiments” discussed throughout Chapter 2 can be understood as a response to the complaint that the immediate dictates of our sympathetic inclinations lack moral content. Hume takes pains to explain how our immature, narrow sense of sympathy can be expanded, and our biased moral sentiments made impartial, through an extended process of psychologically holistic reflective refinement. Such sentimentalist arguments, however, would not satisfy the critical-period Kant, because his objections go much deeper than the two that Sherman describes. While we can describe a form of reflectively refined sympathetic feeling capable of rising above Sherman’s objections, no such sentiment could satisfy Kant, simply because it is still a feeling. In the Groundwork and second Critique, Kant attributes the inability of sympathetic sentiments to ground morals, not to their specific deficiencies as one set of sentiments among many, but to their basic nature as sentiments. A sympathetic feeling is here described as an inclination (Neigung), later defined in the Anthropology as a “habitual sensuous appetite” (APV 7:231). Kant’s reputation as an opponent of emotion stems from his obdurate dismissal of the inclinations as possible determining grounds for morality. Although it is important to note that Kant never claims that everything we commonly call an emotion, affect, passion, or sentiment qualifies as an “inclination” in the relevant sense, Kant does have some very harsh words in his foundational works for inclination in general, and for sympathetic inclinations in particular, at times going so far as to suggest it would be best if we were rid of them entirely. Even a “feeling of compassion and tender sympathy [des Mitleids und der weichherzigen Teilnehmung],” Kant writes, “if it precedes consideration of what is duty and becomes the determining ground [Bestimmungsgrund] is itself burdensome to right-thinking persons, brings their considered maxims into confusion, and produces the wish to be freed from them and subject to lawgiving reason alone” (CPR 5:117–18; see also G 4:428).


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Kant understood that incorrect understandings of the foundations of morality may sometimes lead to mistakes in moral practice. He also knew that the sentimentalist conviction that sympathetic sentiments somehow play a foundational role in morals was a common one in the Enlightenment era. “In our times,” Kant complains, many hope “to have more influence on the mind through melting, tender feelings . . . which make the heart languid instead of strengthening it,” rather than through “a dry and earnest representation of duty, which is more suited to human imperfection and to progress in goodness” (CPR 5:157). Convinced as he was that the sentimentalist approach of his day was misguided, Kant felt a need to attack it quite adamantly, awakening in his readers a sense of the true, rational nature of duty.

3. The Innocence of the Inclinations and the True Source of Evil When Kant does ultimately turn to the normative evaluation of those inclinations that he insists can play no role in the foundations of morality, his verdict is hardly one of unqualified condemnation. “Considered in themselves,” Kant writes in the Religion of 1793, “natural inclinations are good, i.e., not reprehensible, and to want to extirpate them would not only be futile but blameworthy as well; we must rather only curb them” (RBR 6:58). This defense of the inclinations in general is presented in the introduction to a discussion of the source of evil in human behavior, as Kant comes to reject the Stoic position on the subject. “Those valiant men mistook their enemy,” Kant writes of the Stoics. True evil “is not to be sought in the natural inclinations . . . but is rather as it were an invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and hence is all the more dangerous” (6:57). Kant’s rejection of inclination as the source of evil helps clarify the reasons behind his earlier exclusion of inclination from the determining grounds of morality. Inclinations are things that happen to us, not things that we do. Only an agent’s free, willful activities are appropriate objects of moral evaluation. Moral worth consists not in our good inclinations but in our good will, which freely chooses to obey the promptings of benevolent inclinations when they are present in our souls and to perform the same actions from duty alone when such inclinations are unfortunately absent. Natural inclination cannot be a source of moral evil any more than it can be a source of moral worth, since “nothing is . . . morally (i.e. imputably) evil but that which is our own deed” (6:31). It has often been mistakenly believed that, by identifying freedom of the will with the unfettered moral legislation of practical reason, Kant has implicitly denied the possibility of real evil in the world. Insofar as we behave immorally, this can only be explained as the result of the natural force of inclination overpowering our rational agency. Under this view, immoral behavior is the result of natural causation, not choice, and does not differ in kind from other losses of agency due to unfortunate natural events like an epileptic seizure. Yet Kant’s

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position does not imply that there is no real evil in the world. For Kant, an immoral individual’s evil lies “not in his inclinations but in his perverted maxims, and hence in freedom itself.” More specifically, “evil consists in our will not to resist the inclinations when they invite transgression” (6:59, footnote). In order to make sense of this willful evil, Kant draws a distinction between Wille (the will in its morally legislative role as pure practical reason) and Willkür (the will in its executive role as the arbitrary power of free choice). “Willkür has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it,” Kant writes, “that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive except so far as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim” (6:24). Kant describes both sensible incentives and rational Wille as offering up incentives for action to the Willkür, which can then choose which incentives to incorporate into a maxim governing one’s behavior. As the autonomous legislation of one’s own reason, the moral law always maintains an authoritative claim to be so incorporated and to exclude any incentives that incline one to immoral action. If the moral law legislated by the Wille nevertheless fails to govern a person’s choice of maxims, the Willkür may rightly be said to be governed by inclination. Yet an inclination contrary to the moral law can only govern the Willkür because of its own choice in the matter, because incentives contrary to duty have been freely incorporated into the individual’s maxim. It is this choice, this incorporation, which is the true source of evil and not the inclination so incorporated. Kant’s objection to treating sympathetic inclinations as the determining ground of one’s moral choices is not a moral objection to sympathetic inclinations as such. It is instead an objection to the choice to incorporate the incentives provided by these inclinations into one’s maxims in lieu of the truly moral incentives provided by practical reason. Even if the choice to act on one’s sympathetic inclinations results in behavior in superficial conformity with the moral law, Kant believes the choice itself to be an evil one: For whenever incentives other than the law itself (e.g. ambition, self-love in general, yes, even a kindly instinct such as compassion [Mitleiden]) are necessary to determine the power of choice to lawful actions, it is purely accidental that these actions agree with the law, for the incentives might equally well incite its violation. The maxim, by the goodness of which all the moral worth of the person must be assessed, is therefore still contrary to law, and the human being, despite all his good actions, is nevertheless evil (6:31).

4. The Proper Place of Inclination in Human Moral Life Given the above understanding of the inclinations’ place in the foundations of good and evil, the question now arises of their proper place in human moral practice. Kant maintains that it could never be our obligation to feel a particular inclination at a particular moment. “Ought” famously implies “can,” after all,


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and if our inclinations are not under the direct control of our will, we cannot have an obligation to feel them at any particular time. The morally determined will may nonetheless shape the inclinations indirectly and may also command or otherwise produce some sort of emotion that is not really an inclination. What the critical Kant calls “moral feeling”—a “respect for the moral law” necessarily produced by duty in those finite creatures in which the autonomous will confronts sensuous inclinations (CPR 5:73)—is one such sort of non-inclinational sentiment. Of course, Kant repeatedly insists that even this moral feeling must not be treated as the determining grounds of morality. Yet he nonetheless notes that a “popular teacher” can “be content to rely” on this feeling of respect for the moral law as an incentive for moral behavior (MM 6: 376).6 Nor is the moral feeling proper, the only sentiment directly produced by duty, the sole feeling that plays an important role in moral life. While it may never be our obligation to produce inclinations on duty’s direct command, it certainly might be our duty to cultivate a psychological character of a certain sort. Here, in the service of duty, inclination must be brought up against inclination. An impulse that opposes the moral law can be weakened, not just through a stronger commitment to this law, but also, as Kant says in his lectures, “by another contrary feeling in collision with it” (LE 27:522). Kant argues that we must “resolve” ourselves to “effect a joyous frame of mind” when performing our duties. Joy in duty is the hallmark of the “aesthetic constitution, the temperament, so to speak of virtue” (RBR 6:23–25, fn).7 Nor is this inclinational profile a mere optional accoutrement to duty; it is a necessary element of the fully moral life. Kant writes that “what is not done with pleasure but merely as compulsory service has no inner worth for one who attends to his duty in this way” (MM 6:484). Surely, one would think, sympathetic inclinations are a key feature of what Kant calls the “aesthetic constitution of virtue,” the psychological profile that the moral law demands we cultivate in ourselves. When Kant actually discusses what duty requires of us with regard to sympathetic feeling, however, this picture is complicated considerably.

II. The Critical-Period Normative Evaluation of Sympathy 1. Duties of Sympathy as Duties of Love Kant’s most extensive published discussion of sympathy can be found in the “Doctrine of Virtue” in the Metaphysics of Morals. Here, duties related to sympathy find themselves classified in an elaborate moral taxonomy. Most broadly, they are ethical duties or duties of virtue: duties which, since they involve subjectively embraced ends as well as certain objective actions or omissions, cannot be coercively enforced. The category of ethical duties is

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then divided between duties to self and duties to others; duties to others are then divided in their turn between duties of love and duties of respect. The duties of respect toward others are negative, narrow, perfect duties that prohibit contemptuous attitudes toward others that are an insult to their humanity. The duties of love toward others, by contrast, are positive, wide, imperfect duties that somehow involve the promotion of others’ happiness as one’s end. The duties of sympathy (Teilnehmung) are all duties of love, alongside the duties of “beneficence” and “gratitude” (MM 6:452). The language of love and respect that Kant uses to classify our ethical duties toward others suggests that these duties are characterized by certain sentiments. Kant, however, denies this. “In this context,” he writes, “love is not to be understood as feeling (aesthetically) . . . since others cannot put one under obligation to have feelings. It must rather be thought as the maxim of benevolence (practical love) that results in beneficence” (6:449). Practical love, the sort of love involved in our ethical duties toward others, is neither an inclination nor some sort of non-inclinational feeling akin to the moral feeling. Instead, duties of love require certain maxims of action. It is a relatively simple matter to translate the emotionally resonant terms “beneficence” and “gratitude” into maxims that it is our duty to adopt—the former being the maxim of promoting the welfare of all and the latter the maxim of paying special attention to the welfare of those who have benefited us previously. It is less clear, however, how sympathy could be understood as a maxim rather than a feeling. Indeed, when Kant begins his discussion of the duties of sympathy, he does not describe them as maxims of practical sympathy that it is our duty to adopt. Instead, Kant places his discussion under the heading “Sympathetic Feeling [Teilnehmende Empfindung] Is Generally a Duty” (6:456), returning explicitly to the language of natural or “aesthetic” emotions rather than practical maxims. He then writes: Sympathetic joy [Mitfreude] and compassion [Mitleid] are sensible feelings of pleasure or displeasure . . . at another’s state of joy or sorrow (fellow-feeling, sympathetic feeling [Mitgefühl, teilnehmende Empfindung]). Nature has already implanted in human beings receptivity to these feelings. But to use this as a means to promoting active and rational benevolence is still a particular, though only a conditional, duty. It is called the duty of humanity (humanitas) because a human being is regarded here not merely as a rational being but as an animal endowed with reason (6:456).

This is the sympathy-as-inclination familiar from the foundational works. Only now, however, do we learn that moral agents have a duty to harness their sympathetic inclinations wherever possible, using them to further the beneficent cause of duty. Kant’s creative etymology explaining how “humanity” came to take on the secondary meaning of “sympathy” illustrates the nature


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of his practical-anthropological method. While it is practical reason that establishes a duty to promote the happiness of others, human beings contain both rational and sensuous natures. It is their unique obligation to cultivate their natural feelings, most notably sympathetic feelings, so as to better pursue the ends set by their rational agency. Later in this passage, Kant clarifies how exactly we are to perform this “indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate [mitleidige] natural (aesthetic) feelings within ourselves.” He writes that it is our duty . . . not to avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic necessities are to be found but rather to seek them out, and not to shun sickrooms or debtors’ prisons and so forth in order to avoid painful sympathy [Mitgefühl] which one may not be able to resist. For this is still one of the impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone would not accomplish. (MM 6:457)

The idea that “the representation of duty alone” might not be sufficient to motivate a truly moral person might be read as contradicting much of what was discussed in this chapter so far. Under Kant’s theory of evil, after all, someone who needs sympathetic inclinations in order to perform what duty requires would seem to qualify as evil. Surely the good person can rely on the motivational power of the moral law alone. Commentators have thus long puzzled over Kant’s position on this matter. Nancy Sherman identifies a number of different services that sympathetic impulses might be able to perform for morality, all already identified in the secondary literature and all of which probably play some role in Kant’s thinking.8 First and most obvious is what Sherman calls the “Faute de Mieux Claim,” which maintains that sympathy can sometimes motivate us to perform morally right actions when the purer motive of acting from duty fails us. As Kant writes in the Anthropology, it was “wisdom on nature’s part” to provide us with sympathetic inclinations so that they “could handle the reins provisionally, until reason has achieved the necessary strength” (APV 7:253). To be sure, at the moment that we require this fallback motivation we are sliding into evil. To choose to cultivate sympathetic inclinations as such a fallback, however, is not itself evil as such, as long as they are not currently necessary to insure one does one’s duty. Second, Sherman identifies the relatively uncontroversial “attitude claim”— the claim that true virtue, as discussed earlier, should be accompanied by the appropriate psychological profile or “aesthetic constitution” to count as such. Third is the similarly uncontroversial “aesthetic claim,” (aesthetic here in the contemporary sense, not Kant’s)—the claim that sympathy is an appropriate ornament to virtue, rendering it beautiful as well as sublime, and hence more appealing to humanity.

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More interesting, and hence also more problematic, is what Sherman calls the “perceptual claim,” versions of which appear throughout the secondary literature on the subject. This claim is based on the observation that, as Allen Wood puts it, “sympathy is a mode of perception of others’ needs as well as a motive of action.”9 Such perception is especially important given that the duties of love are both wide and imperfect; they can never specify exactly what can be done in order to help others pursue their happiness, nor when an action which would help in this pursuit is needed with particular urgency. Natural sympathetic inclinations, it is maintained, can alert us to when and where acting from our duties of love toward others would be appropriate, something that a wide and imperfect duty could never accomplish on its own.

2. Free and Unfree Sympathy While it is certainly true that immediate sympathetic inclinations may alert us to particular instances of morally relevant suffering, they just as often alert us to morally irrelevant or trivial forms of human woe that happen to be vividly present before us, even as we remain blind to the more important suffering obscured from our view. One suspects that a non-emotional perceptual capacity would probably do a better job in helping us perceive what forms of suffering it is our duty to relieve. Sure enough, shortly into what was surprisingly introduced as a discussion of sympathetic feelings and their relation to the maxims the adoption of which are duties of love, Kant extends his general position that duties of love involve practical maxims to duties of sympathy in particular. He notes that “humanity” (i.e., sympathy) . . . can be located either in the capacity [Vermögen] and the will to share in other’s feelings (humanitas practica) or merely in the receptivity, given by nature itself, to the feeling of joy and sadness in common with others. The first is free and is therefore called sympathetic [teilnehmend] (communio sentiendi liberalis); it is based on practical reason. The second is unfree (communio sentiendi illiberalis, servilis); it can be called communicable (since it is like receptivity to warmth or contagious diseases) and also being affected [Mitleidenschaft] since it spreads naturally among human beings living near one another. There is obligation only to the first.

In this way, Kant reasons that, despite our indirect duty to cultivate them, “compassion [Mitleid] (and hence also sympathetic joy [Mitfreude]) with others are not themselves duties.” Instead, they are obligatory only insofar as they aid in the cause of “active sympathy [Teilnehmung]” (MM 6:456–57). The more direct duties of sympathy do not involve the cultivation of sympathetic inclinations per se; they involve only a certain capacity of perspectival perception combined with the will to use it. Practical sympathy is thus free


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because it is the use of a human ability through an act of autonomous choice, while communicable Mitleidenschaft is, like a contagious illness, part of the deterministic, natural causal order. This distinction between free and unfree sympathy is explained further in Kant’s lectures on ethics. In the lectures of 1784–85 preserved by G. L. Collins, Kant explains that we cannot understand our moral concern for others as “mere compassion or sharing in the well-being of others [bloss ein Mitleiden, Teilnehmung an anderer Menschen Wohl], and to that extent love for them.” He explains that “such a feeling is not only characteristic of man, but also of animals as well,” and moral concern must “build upon the characteristic feature peculiar to the human race.” Specifically, it must rely on the ability “of men to impart their feelings and sensations to one another, as they do their information,” an ability that “demands unceasing cultivation” for moral purposes (LE 27:261–62). Similarly, in the lectures of 1793 Kant distinguishes rational communication of thoughts from the pathological communication of feelings, arguing that “of these two kinds of communication, the mutual disclosure of thoughts is the best.” We human beings, in order to share each other’s feelings properly “must have an idea of the feeling in advance, and must hence have employed reason, in order to have known it accurately before we share it, so that the feeling thereafter may be correct and not instinctual” (LE 27:677). Insofar as Kant insists that human beings, as opposed to animals, can form an idea of another’s feeling before sympathizing with it—and that this idea can either be correct or incorrect based on the soundness of an individual’s reasoning on the matter—his notion of free sympathy has more in common with Hume’s and Smith’s respective anatomies of human sympathy than with Rousseau’s wholly instinctual pitié. Yet the duties of sympathy that Kant describes do not involve the progressive cultivation of sentiments described by Hume and Smith. Practical sympathy, like practical love more generally, is a maxim rather than a sentiment, a maxim that one will use one’s capacities of multiperspectival perception and understanding in order to aid in the pursuit of others’ happiness. Thus distinguished, free and unfree sympathy go on to very different careers in Kant’s later work. In the third Critique Kant again distinguishes “humanity” as “sympathetic feeling [Teilnehmungsgefühl]” on the one hand “and on the other hand the capacity [Vermögen] for being able to communicate one’s inmost self universally,” devoting virtually all of his attention to the latter (CJ 5:355). To be sure, the capacity in question still involves feelings as the content of its communication. Indeed, the communication of feeling in this way is central to Kant’s mature aesthetic theory, built as it is around a “capacity for judging by means of which one can communicate even his feeling to everyone else” (CJ 5:297). What matters to Kant, however, is not the experience of the feelings that we share, but the communicative faculties, that allow us to choose to share them freely.

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As for unfree sympathy, it appears throughout Kant’s Anthropology as one among many members of the bestiary of psychological phenomena that catch Kant’s interest. The portrait Kant draws of this particular phenomenon is hardly flattering. At times, Kant merely treats unfree sympathy as a sort of tic of the imagination. “We suffer with another person by imagination,” he writes, “so that when we see someone losing his balance and almost falling, we involuntarily and vainly lean toward the opposite side, as if trying to set him right” (APV 7:238). At other times, however, unfree sympathy can be quite dangerous; Kant observes “the sight of a man in a convulsive or epileptic seizure induces similar convulsive movements in the spectator, just as another person’s yawning leads us to yawn with him” (7:179). Indeed, Kant’s concerns about the ill effects of infectious sympathy on mental health are sufficiently strong as to lead him to backtrack on our indirect duties to cultivate these sentiments. Although visiting the poor, sick, and otherwise suffering is obligatory for most of us, since “merely staring at someone who is raving sometimes brings on a seizure . . . through vivid sympathetic [sympathetisch] imagination” it is “not advisable for very high strung people to let their curiosity take them to the cells of these unfortunates” (7:203). The Anthropology also contrasts a strong, masculine capacity called “sensitivity” (Empfindsamkeit) with a feminine weakness called “sentimentality” (Empfindelei). Kant writes: Sensitivity . . . is a capacity [Vermögen] and strength by which we grant or refuse permission for the state of pleasure or displeasure to enter our mind, so that it implies a choice. On the other hand, sentimentality is a weakness by which we can be affected, even against our will, by sympathy [Teilnehmung] for another’s plight; others, so to speak, can play as they will on the organ of the sentimentalist. Sensitivity is virile; for the man who wants to spare his wife or children trouble or pain must have enough fine feeling to judge their sensibilities not by his own strength but by their weakness, and his delicacy of feeling is essential to his generosity. On the other hand, ineffectual sympathy [Teilnehmung] with others’ feelings, attuning our feelings sympathetically [sympathetisch] to theirs and thus letting ourselves be affected in a merely passive way, is silly and childish. (7:235–36)

To be sure, the distinction between free and unfree sympathy from the Metaphysics of Morals does not line up perfectly with this distinction between sensitivity and sentimentality in the Anthropology. Most importantly, sensitivity, unlike free sympathy, still counts as a feeling, albeit a feeling actively subjugated to allow the will to better pursue ends of its own, not those set by feeling itself. Perhaps it can then be said that sensitivity involves a combination of the free sympathy that is our direct duty with the sympathetic feelings that are our indirect duty to cultivate, such that they may be useful in helping us better achieve the ends set by our duties of love. The sensitive man thus


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displays a complete self-command, in which both his sensuous feelings and his free capacities serve the ends of reason. He obeys what Kant describes as virtue’s “positive command to a human being, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control and so to rule over himself” (MM 6:408).

3. Useful and Useless Sympathy If reason is in command, sympathetic feelings are cultivated only insofar as they may aid the rational will. When they are no longer useful to the pursuit of willed ends, sympathetic feelings are to be purged from the psyche mercilessly. Kant therefore praises Stoic practices of the sort described in section 16 of Epictetus’ Encheiridion, the very behavior that Hume condemns as displaying the worst features of Stoic coldness and selfishness. In Kant’s account, the Stoic sage who, when he found that it was impossible to aid a suffering friend in any way, “said to himself ‘What is it to me?’” was right to have “repudiated being affected [Mitleidenschaft]” (MM 6:457). Kant’s position is elaborated in his lectures of 1784–85: If I now observe . . . a man sitting in distress, and see that I have no way of altering it, and cannot come to his aid in any fashion, I may turn away coldly and say, with the Stoic: What is it to me? My wishes cannot help him . . . People think here that sympathy [Teilnehmung] for another’s plight, and goodness of heart, consists merely in feelings and wishes. Yet he who pays no heed at all to the wretchedness of others, where he can be of no help, and who is indifferent to all misfortune that cannot be altered, but takes trouble only where he can do something to be of help, is in fact a practical man. (LE 27:421–22)

Sympathetic feelings may be useful in alerting us to suffering that we can alleviate, creating the proper attitudes for such alleviation to occur and even motivating us to perform beneficent actions should our commitment to duty prove insufficient. Yet insofar as we sympathize with suffering that we can do nothing about, our feelings are useless. In fact, they are positively harmful, for “when another suffers and, although I cannot help him, I let myself be infected by his pain (through my imagination) then two of us suffer, though the trouble really (in nature) affects only one.” Kant argues that there can be no duty to feel such useless sympathy since “there cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world” (MM 6:457).10 Hume, remember, takes a directly opposite position on this matter. The Stoic of Hume’s essay embraces his sympathetic sentiments for others even when there is nothing he can do to help them. Such sentiments are approved of as virtuous, and, as both Hume and Kant agree, virtue is to be approved of even when circumstances have rendered it inefficacious.

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Commentators on Kant have long struggled to explain Kant’s adamant opposition to so much as feeling sympathetic sentiments when they are inefficacious.11 Perhaps Kant’s position here might simply be an application of his more general principle, found in the Anthropology, that “we must not brood over anything; what we cannot change we must drive from our mind” (APV 7:236). There would thus be no particular objection to the sympathetic sentiments in his analysis; just as we must not brood over an ineffectual feeling of sympathy, so too must we not brood over unrequited love, sadness at our own unavoidable misfortune, or any other negative feeling toward a feature of the world that we are unable to alter. Under this reading, Kant’s opposition to such brooding here might seem plausible, if still rather over-adamant.

4. Sympathy as an Insult to Humanity Kant’s objection to the sympathetic sentiments involves one last additional argument. Even when sympathetic sentiments prove useful in promoting beneficent action, Kant argues that beneficence motivated by such feelings is “an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence toward someone unworthy called soft-heartedness [Barmherzigkeit]; and this has no place in people’s relations with one another, since they are not to make a display of their worthiness to be happy” (MM 6: 457). Kant’s claim here might be interpreted in one of two basic ways. First, performing beneficence out of sympathy might be seen as expressing the sort of contemptuous attitude toward others that is prohibited by our duties of respect. More specifically, Kant might maintain that it is morally wrong to put others in the servile position, which may be required of those who depend on the sympathy of their superiors. It is for this reason that, in his 1784–85 lectures, Kant argues that immediate inclinations of sympathy are a poor substitute for considered principles of justice. “By this impulse,” he says, “men take pity on [erbarmen sich] another, and render back the benefits they have previously snatched away, though they are not aware of any injustice [Ungerechtigkeit]” (LE 27:416). A society built around the feeling of sympathy is, according to J. B. Schneewind, “a society requiring not only inequality but servility as well. If nothing is properly mine except what someone graciously gives me, I am forever dependent on how the donor feels toward me.”12 Yet such objections to a society built around the impulses of immediate sympathy could easily be made in the name of the reflectively refined moral sentiments that Hume and Smith describe. Reflective sentimentalists recognize our commitment to justice as an outgrowth of our sympathy for others. After our sympathetic sentiments undergo reflective self-correction, the sympathy that emerges for all those who suffer injustice poses no insult to those for whom it is felt. We do not see their suffering as mere pain to be soothed away when and if we happen to share it. Instead, under Hume’s


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account, we condemn injustice as a violation of rules that are vitally important to us all. And under Smith’s account, we condemn the sufferings of the victims of injustice as injustice because we sympathetically share the resentment that they feel toward their oppressors, endorsing such feelings as warranted and acknowledging those who feel them deserve better treatment. Although I have argued earlier in this book that Smith’s sentimentalist account of justice is superior to Hume’s, neither involves the sort of insult to those with whom we sympathize that Schneewind describes. A different reading of Kant’s remark, however, might see a world of excessive sympathy as an insult to the humanity, not of those who suffer, but of their softhearted benefactors. When sufferers make a “display of their worthiness to be happy” before those subject to overpowering sympathetic feelings, they are knowingly manipulating their would-be benefactors. By causally acting on his pathological impulses rather than appealing to his reason, such sufferers treat others as mere means, something that Kant famously insisted “has no place in people’s relations with one another.”13 Under this latter reading, Kant can be seen as emphasizing yet again how our will must maintain mastery over our sympathetic sentiments—enlisting them in service to the will’s moral purposes, but never allowing them to take control, to overwhelm our rational agency. Kant’s insistence that we should remain in control over our sympathetic emotions is neither intuitively implausible nor dependent on the specifics of his foundational metaethics. Even reflective sentimentalists will want to avoid the sort of overpowering shared feelings that might lead them to actions contrary to the ethical goals determined by their reflectively endorsed moral sentiments. Indeed, the reflective correction of our sympathetic feelings that sentimentalists advocate might accurately be said to involve movement from what Kant would call sentimentality to what he would call sensitivity, albeit sensitivity used in the pursuit of moral ends set by properly cultivated sympathetic sentiments themselves. Yet Kant seems to take the claim farther than we find intuitively plausible, showing a hostility to compassion that goes beyond a mere fear of momentary bursts of overpowering feeling and treats the sentiment as a more substantial threat to our rational self-control. In order to understand the source of this hostility, we must turn to Kant’s psychological theory of how inclinations can overcome the will.

III. The Critical-Period Theory of Affects and Passions 1. The Natural Power of Sudden Affects Kant describes two very different ways in which feelings can overpower the will, either through what he calls “affects” (Affekte) or through what he calls “passions” (Leidenschaften). The distinction between affects and passions

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appears repeatedly throughout Kant’s late writings.14 What we are ultimately to make of Kant’s claim that sympathetic feeling must never be allowed to take control of our actions will thus depend largely on whether the sympathetic emotion in question is an affect or a passion. Neither of these Kantian terms of art bears much of a relation to what we commonly call “affects” or “passions” in the English of the twenty-first century, in the German of the eighteenth, or in any Western language before or since. To the contrary, as was mentioned in chapter 1, the turbulent experiences of sudden emotion that Kant calls “affects” are more commonly termed passiones in the Latin Christian tradition, while the calm and reflective phenomenon that Kant calls “passion” is more commonly termed affectus or “affection.” Perhaps this is why a distinction so central to Kant’s rejection of reflective sentimentalism has been so widely misunderstood. Although Kant repeatedly uses the term “Mitleidenschaft” in the Metaphysics of Morals to describe the sort of overpowering compassion that he opposes, it appears that he generally imagines the feeling as a sort of affect.15 He classifies it as such explicitly on at least one occasion, in which “the principle of apathy—namely, that the sage must never be in a state of affect, not even in that of compassion [des Mitleids] with his best friend’s misfortune” is described as a “quite correct and sublime moral principle of the Stoic school” (APV 7:253). The apathy desired here is clearly not a lack of all feeling or inclination, but merely a lack of those feelings that rise to the level of affects; Stoic apathy is explicitly being redefined as “affectlessness” (CJ 5:272). An “affect” is defined in the Anthropology as “a feeling of pleasure or displeasure” in an agent’s “present state that does not let him rise to reflection (to rational consideration of whether he should give himself up to it or refuse it)” (APV 7:231). As further explained in the Metaphysics of Morals, affects thus represent a “weakness in the use of one’s understanding coupled with the strength of one’s emotion” that can “coexist with the best will.” In the third Critique, Kant complains that skillful rhetoricians can call forth the affects of their audience “to move people, like machines, to a judgment in important matters which must lose all weight for them in calm reflection” (CJ 5:328, fn.).16 Yet this is not to say that experiencing an overpowering affect is unethical per se. Affects are morally neither right nor wrong in themselves because they are not products of free agency. Affects, like inclinations, are things that happen to you, not things that you do. Kant considers affects more akin to bodily diseases than to moral vices. Although morally responsible individuals will strive to maintain their freedom from both affects and diseases alike, they are not to be condemned if they fall prey to either through no fault of their own. Overtaking an agent suddenly and violently, affect “even has one good thing about it: that this tempest quickly subsides.” Such emotional agitation is thus too brief to count as habitual as is required in Kant’s technical


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definition of an inclination. Perhaps, however, a settled tendency to be overcome by a particular affect—what Kant calls “a propensity to an affect (e.g., anger)”—might be sufficiently habitual to qualify as an inclination in this sense (MM 6:408). Regardless, Kant’s main point is that, because it is a natural phenomenon that incapacitates rational agency, “every affect is blind, either in the choice of its end, or, even if this is given by reason, in its implementation.” An affect is, by definition, a “movement of the mind that makes it incapable of engaging in free consideration of principles in order to determine itself in accordance with them” (CJ 5:272). Kant here performs a sort of immanent critique on the affects, describing them as essentially self-defeating. “Any affect, considered merely in itself, is unwise” he writes; “since it makes us incapable of pursuing its own end, we would be ill advised deliberately to let it spring up in us” (APV 7:253). There need be little opposition to Kant’s position from reflective sentimentalists. As our immature sympathies undergo the progress of sentiments that Hume and Smith describe, they must necessarily cease to be affects in Kant’s sense, so that we may calmly and effectively pursue the goals set by our reflectively stable moral sentiments.

2. The Moral Evil of Stable Passions At first glance, it might appear that, what an affect does in short-term bursts, a passion simply does in a more long-term way. “An affect works like water breaking through a dam,” Kant writes; “a passion, like a stream that burrows ever deeper in its bed . . . We should think of an affect as a drunken fit that we sleep off; of a passion, as a madness that broods over an idea which settles in ever more deeply” (APV 7:252–53). The same feeling may thus appear either as a brief affect or a settled passion; indignation, Kant says, appears in the form of anger when it is an affect, but as hatred or vindictiveness when it is a passion (CJ 5:272, footnote). Insofar as it has become a “lasting inclination” (MM 6:408), however, passion does not need to limit itself merely to the sensuous realm, leaving our rational will unaffected. To the contrary, a passion “takes its time and reflects, no matter how intense it is, in order to reach its end” (APV 7:252). As such, passions differ from affects, not only in their duration, but also in their basic nature. A passion is inseparable from the reason and the Willkür of an agent; it “always presupposes a maxim on the part of the subject, of acting in accordance with the end prescribed to him by the inclination” (APV 7:266). Passions “have, to this extent, an air of reason about them; that is, they aspire to the idea of a capacity combined with freedom, by which alone ends in general can be attained” (7:270). Kant’s conception of a passion thus puts the lie to the attribution to Kant of a view that sees all our emotions “as dimensions of our empirical or animal

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nature,” as “merely bodily sensations which move us to act without our rational assent or assessment.”17 Martha Nussbaum thus could not be farther from the truth when she holds that Kant treats “passions as if they derived from a prerational nature and were fundamentally impulsive and noncognitive in character.”18 While this may perhaps hold true of what Kant calls affects, it certainly does not hold true of what he calls passions. It is because they are necessarily produced in part by human reason and human choice that Kant feels free to claim that “passions are not, like affects, merely unfortunate dispositions of the mind that are pregnant with disaster; they are, without exception, evil as well” (APV 7:267). Kant is unwilling to see any moral benefit at all from the passions, and is unwilling “even to praise the passions as a provisional arrangement of Providence, which would have purposely put them into human nature until the human race had achieved the necessary degree of culture” (APV 7: 267). Like evil itself in the traditional Christian view, passions are ultimately the dark handiwork, not of nature or nature’s God, but only of a morally culpable humanity, acting through its power of choice or Willkür. Passions, according to Kant, are not a product of the natural causal order, but are fundamentally social in nature. To be sure, in the Anthropology, Kant speaks of the passions for freedom and for sex as “natural” passions, involving as they do inclinations necessarily present in the human animal, as opposed to the passions of “culture” that involve inclinations (such as those for honor, domination, and property) that arise only in civil society (APV 7:266). In the Religion, however, Kant gives a Rousseauist account of how even the innate inclinations for freedom and sex do not rise to the level of genuine passions in the state of nature, for there is little or no risk that their goals will go unmet (RBR 6:93). Furthermore, even if these “natural” passions are presocial in their etiology, they nonetheless remain social in their content, involving as they necessarily do the cooperation of other human beings for the achievement of their ends. In the Anthropology, Kant makes clear that “all passions are only appetites directed by human beings to other human beings, not to things” (APV 7:268).19 Specifically, in all of the passions that Kant describes at any length, there is a settled determination to manipulate other individuals into pursuing one’s own ends. Kant claims that passions necessarily involve a desire to wield power over others, immorally making use of them merely as a means. The slow calm with which one submits to a passion “permits reflection and allows the mind to form principles upon it and so, if inclination lights upon something contrary to the law, to brood upon it, to get it rooted deeply, and so to take up what is evil . . . into its maxim.” (MM 6:408). To be sure, if we reflectively brood in this way over an inclination whose end is contrary to morality, and this inclination’s end is then pursued willfully through a maxim of action, then our actions in pursuit of this end will certainly qualify as evil.


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As has already been seen, however, individuals can also brood over sympathetic inclinations whose ends are not merely morally permissible, but are often the same ends that our duties of love obligate us to pursue. Like the evil passions that Kant describes, sympathetic and other benevolent feelings are essentially social in nature, yet they involve, not the desire to subjugate others in pursuit of our private ends, but the adoption of the ends of others as our own. If sympathetic or benevolent inclinations can sometimes rise to the level of passions, as Kant’s repeated use of the term Mitleidenschaft suggests they may, it is difficult to see how passions might all qualify as evil without exception.

3. Morally Laudable Passions? Kant writes quite expressly in the Anthropology that passions are directed “by human beings to human beings, insofar as they are directed to ends that harmonize or conflict with one another—that is, insofar as they are loved or hated” (APV 7:270). Yet Kant limits his full analyses of particular passions to passions of hate—that is, passions in which the ends of human beings conflict, and one individual attempts to use another as a means to ends that are not his or her own. There are only passing references to what appear to be passions of love, passions in which the ends of human beings are in harmony. Kant gives, for example, a single mention of a “social inclination” that is a passionate form of the virtue of sociability. Far from a morally laudable virtue, however, the passion of sociability involves the morally blameworthy commitment to socialize in excess, the characteristic passion of what we might now call a “party monster” (7:277). Kant’s brief discussion of whether love in the sense of “being in love” (Verliebtsein) similarly qualifies as a passion is confused, confusing, and ambiguous.20 Yet Kant clearly commits himself to the existence of passions of love, which presumably must correspond to the feelings listed in his discussion of the duties of love: a passion of benevolence, a passion of gratitude, and, of course, a passion of sympathy or compassion. Yet if all passions, without exception, are evil, then these passions of love must count as evil as do the passions of hate. It is easy to see how all passions meet Kant’s formal definition of evil; they involve the choice of a maxim that denies the moral law the right to determine one’s behavior. For the passionate individual, the incentives of the moral law are systematically subjugated to the incentives of one’s governing passion. If the passions in question prescribe ends identical to those prescribed by the moral law, then one’s behavior may conform with duty, yet one’s maxim remain evil nonetheless. It is marked by what Kant calls “delusion” (Wahn), defined as “the inner practical illusion of mistaking a subjective element in the grounds of action for something objective” (APV 7:274).

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According to Kant, the passionate confusion of ends set by one’s subjective inclinations with ends set by the objective demands of reason is not objectionable as a sort of intellectual mistake, but instead as a threat to individual autonomy. In treating the demands of feeling rather than the autonomous moral legislation of the Wille as authoritative, the Willkür of the passionate agent chooses to execute the orders of sensuous nature. If others possess knowledge of how to manipulate the causal processes of nature in the proper ways, then they can gain control of the passionate individual. A passionate temperament, Kant argues, is necessarily “a slavish disposition by which others, when they have made themselves masters of it, have the power to use a man through his own inclinations” (7:271). What makes this form of slavery particularly frightening for Kant is that it is a willful slavery, a form to which those enslaved lend their consent. The sort of immanent critique possible with the affects is impossible here. Since it is self-defeating, an affect almost always “stirs up the resolution to be better.” By contrast, since a passion can calmly and rationally pursue the ends that it sets for the power of choice, it is “an enchantment that . . . refuses to be corrected” (APV 7:266). Of course, Kant insists that within the passionate individual reason “still does not give up with its summons to inner freedom,” but such a person cannot heed its call. The passionate individual is bound by chains “which he cannot break loose from because they have already grown together with his limbs, so to speak” (7:267). In passion, reason and inclination are joined as one. Yet they are joined in a highly objectionable way, inverting what Kant takes to be the hierarchy that autonomy requires; reason is enlisted to serve inclination’s ends, rather than vice versa. As Kant puts it in his lectures, “Passions, as such, are in general reprehensible; for since they run counter to that imperium in semetipsum [self-command] which is presupposed by the fulfillment of duty, they are also contrary to duty itself . . .” (LE 27:612). More than anything else, passions “do the greatest damage to freedom, because they are consistent with the calmest reflection . . . and can co-exist even with subtle reasoning” (APV 7:265). The later Kant thus sees all passions as evil by their very nature, because all are threats to individual autonomy. In his earlier years, however, Kant’s position on such passions was quite different.

IV. A Contrasting Precritical Position 1. The Precritical Kant’s Sentimentalist Moment It is impossible to pin down a single ethical stance as Kant’s “precritical position.” Not only are moral matters discussed only in passing in Kant’s early scientific and metaphysical treatises, but Kant’s positions on all


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subjects, ethics included, varied considerably from the 1740s through the 1770s. The precritical position on sympathy and the moral sentiments that will be the subject of this section should be understood only as a snapshot of Kant’s views at this particular moment in his intellectual development. It is the position of the early-to-mid-1760s, as best captured in the Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime, published in 1764 after being completed the previous year, and in the contemporaneous lectures on ethics preserved in J. G. Herder’s notes. While foreshadowing many of the elder Kant’s criticisms of the sympathetic sentiments, the position discussed here involves the endorsement of an extended, refined form of sympathy that the critical Kant would adamantly reject as what he came to classify as a “passion.”21 Kant summarized his sentimentalism with a supreme principle of morality quite different from his later categorical imperative: “The sole moral rule . . . is this,” Herder records Kant as proclaiming: “Act according to your moral feeling!” (LE 27:16). Kant first makes clear his commitment to moral sentimentalism in the Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, written in 1762 but published two years later. “It is only recently,” Kant here observes, “that people have come to realize that the faculty of representing the true is cognition [die Erkenntnis] while the faculty of experiencing the good is feeling [das Gefühl], and that the two faculties are, on no account, to be confused with each other” (INM 2:299). Yet Kant does not develop his point here at any length, except to note “Hutcheson and others have, under the name of moral sentiment [des moralischen Gefühls] provided us with a starting point from which to develop some excellent observations” (2:300). Kant then publicly held to this sentimentalist stance at least through the end of 1765.22 In the announcement of his program of lectures for the 1765–66 winter semester, Kant writes that “the judgment of moral rightness can be known, easily and accurately, by the human heart through what is called sentiment [Sentiment].”23 He continues, “The attempts of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, although incomplete and defective, have nonetheless penetrated furthest in the search for the fundamental principles of all morality.” Kant promises that, in his lectures, the moral theories of these British sentimentalists “will be given the precision and the completeness that they lack” (AL 2:311). Unfortunately, Herder’s notes—which date to some time between 1762 and 1764, when Herder was attending Kant’s lectures as a student in Königsberg—do not indicate precisely how Kant “completed” the work of the British sentimentalists in 1765–66. For the fullest statement of Kant’s sentimentalist moral position of the mid-1760s, we must rely primarily on the Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime, first published in 1764.

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2. Kant’s 1764 Evaluation of Sympathy Kant’s Observations turns in its second chapter from what we would today call aesthetics to what we would call moral psychology. Here, Kant argues that, like our responses to art, our responses to the moral attributes of others can be classified according to whether these attributes are sublime or beautiful. Sublime attributes, like the acts of moral worth later analyzed in the Groundwork, “stimulate esteem, but beautiful ones, love” (OBS 2:211, p. 51). Surprisingly, only a single moral attribute is described here as sublime and hence stimulating our esteem; this attribute alone qualifies as “true virtue” and consists of “subduing one’s passions [Leidenschaften] through principles.” Yet while “true virtue alone is sublime,” Kant acknowledges that “there are nevertheless good moral qualities that are amiable and beautiful, and, so far as they harmonize with virtue, will also be regarded as noble, although they cannot properly be included within the virtuous disposition” (2:215, p. 57). Among these beautiful qualities is “a certain tenderheartedness [Weichmüthigkeit], which is easily stirred into a warm feeling of compassion [ein warmes Gefühl des Mitleidens]” that “shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men, to which principles of virtue likewise lead” (2:216, p. 58). Although he acknowledges that “this good-natured passion” is “beautiful and amiable,” Kant nonetheless devotes the bulk of his discussion of compassion in the Observations to excoriating the sentiment as “weak” and “blind” (2:216, p. 58). A soul moved primarily by immediate inclinations of compassion is affected “in individual cases according to the appearance presented,” and “is very much subject to the variation of circumstances.” Since “the motive of the mind does not rest upon a universal principle, it easily takes on changed forms according to whether the objects offer one or the other aspect” (2:219, p. 63). The sight of a suffering child or “an unfortunate but upright lady” might bring us to tears, but news of countless hundreds killed in a distant battle might leave us cold. An unprincipled but compassionate prince will never harm a single helpless innocent whose suffering is vividly present before him, but will send countless other innocents, not present before him, to die in war (2:216, p. 59, footnote). Kant also gives the example of a man overcome by compassion who, rather than make good on his debts, gives a pauper the money that rightfully belongs to his creditor. Unrefined sympathy, in short, does not have the status of a virtue because “one cannot call that state of mind virtuous which is a source of actions as might be grounded in virtue itself but whose actual cause accords with virtue only accidentally, and which may often, by its very nature, conflict with general rules of virtue” (2:215–216, pp. 57–58). For the truly virtuous, Kant argues, immediate sympathetic inclinations are subordinated to general moral principles, and “the more general” these principles are “the more sublime and noble” one’s moral character becomes.


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Yet the Kant of 1764 is insistent that these moral principles are “not speculative rules, but the consciousness of a feeling that lies in every human breast and extends itself much further than over the particular grounds of compassion [des Mitleidens] and complaisance.” This moral feeling, obedience to which is the supreme moral imperative, is identified with “the feeling of the beauty and the dignity of human nature,” the feeling of its beauty “a ground of universal affection,” and the feeling of its dignity a ground “of universal esteem.” The picture is not one of inclinations subordinated to reason, but of immediate, unreliable sympathetic inclinations subordinated to extended, more universal feelings. “Only when one subordinates his own inclination to one so expanded,” Kant writes, “can our charitable impulses be used proportionately and bring about the noble bearing that is the beauty of virtue” (2:217, p. 60). In the lectures of this period, the need to subordinate immediate feelings of natural compassion to a broader, more principled feeling is given a Rousseauist spin. Unrefined compassion would be sufficient for morality in a savage state, for here “everyone looks after himself; few are in need, and in that case compassion is adequate.” In civil society, however, “the needy have multiplied,” our immediate feelings of compassion are weakened by over-use, and must be replaced by more universal feelings (LE 27:58). These universal, principled feelings are reflective outgrowths of our more immediate sympathetic feelings. “When universal affection toward the human species has become a principle within you to which you always subordinate your actions,” Kant writes, “then love toward the needy one still remains; but now, from a higher standpoint . . . Universal affection is a ground of your interest in his plight, but also of the justice by whose rule you must now forbear this action” (OBS 2:216, p. 58). In Humean terms, that which our sense of sympathy finds immediately agreeable must often be subordinated to a sense of those artificial virtues that are in the long-term interest of humanity as a whole. Yet it is important to remember that sympathy itself is the source of our concern for this long-term interest of humanity, and hence sympathy itself which is largely responsible for its own reflective correction. Of course, sympathy does not emerge at the end of this process of reflective self-correction as the same sort of beautiful sentiment it was originally. “As soon as this feeling has arisen to its proper universality,” Kant writes, “it has become sublime, but also colder,” what Hume would call a calm passion. Nor is this to be regretted, “for it is not possible that our heart should swell from fondness for every man’s interest and should swim in sadness at every stranger’s need; else the virtuous man, incessantly dissolving like Heraclitus in compassionate [mitleidigen] tears, nevertheless with all this good-heartedness would become nothing but a tender-hearted idler” (OBS 2:216, pp. 58–59). This concern that sympathy remain practical—and hence not overwhelm the sympathetic soul, producing many tears but no action—will later become central to Kant’s critical-period position on the subject. Here, however, it

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requires only a calming and broadening of our sympathetic feelings so as to insure that they never rise to the level of reflection-disabling affects, not their replacement by a maxim of practical action unconnected to emotion proper. Kant insists that the sympathetic sentiments that emerge at the end of the process of reflective self-correction remain genuinely emotional in nature. This need not necessarily be the case. As Kant observes in his lectures, “the ability to put ourselves in the position of another,” might not be imbued with feeling, but instead merely involve rational inquiry into another’s standpoint; Kant gives the example of projecting oneself into the view of “a follower of Crusius” on some philosophical point. This same perspectival understanding can also be used “in moral matters, when I project myself into another’s feelings, to ask what he will be thinking about it.” Such perspectival exploration “can be quite skillfully done, yet not moral, since I am not actually in his position.” By contrast, in the “case of true sympathy [Sympathie] . . . we really feel ourselves to be in his place” (LE 27:58). Kant told his classes of the mid-1760s that since this “moral sympathy [Sympathie] is imprinted on all,” each of us “has to put himself in the other’s place; and from this there follows living rectitude” (27:65). Thus, moral sympathy “is the basis of righteous love, and holds it to be an obligation” (27:66). While the later Kant maintains that sympathetic feelings might sometimes prove useful but only a willingness to use perspectival understanding is a moral duty, the earlier Kant maintains precisely the opposite: that perspectival understanding might sometimes prove useful, but only sympathetic feelings are truly moral. Only when we truly feel for others, Kant argues, do we develop a distinctively moral concern for their well-being. Moral individuals, Kant maintains in 1764, adopt such a sympathetic concern for others as what the later Kant would call a passion, subordinating their immediate inclinations to its demands and pursuing the goals that it sets for them both calmly and rationally.

3. Reason, Passion, and Self-Alienation Since at least as early as Hegel, the moral psychology on which Kant’s mature ethics depends has commonly been derided as the result of self-alienation; reason is improperly identified with one’s true self and emotion as a part of the natural causal order. The notion that Kant’s ethics relies on alienation from one’s own emotions is alive and well today.24 This presentation of Kant’s view is a simplistic caricature, for Kant never speaks of “emotions,” kindly or otherwise, but of inclinations and capacities, affects and passions, pathological feeling and practical love. While some of these are located in the sphere of natural causality, others are entirely a part of our autonomous agency, while still others involve complex interactions between these two realms.


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Any caricature, however, must have some basis in reality. In the case of his opposition to the passions, Kant’s view certainly seems to depend on something resembling the self-alienation that Hegel and his followers describe. To be sure, there is much to be said for not acting irrationally on our feelings, but what distinguishes a passion is that here we act rationally on our feelings, and freely choose to pursue the goals that they set before us. This seems like an attractive sort of harmony between reason and feeling, at least as long as we understand that feelings do not lie outside our true selves, but are an integral part of what makes each of us the unique human beings that we are. Unlike other forms of emotions, passions might therefore be able to withstand the strongest Kantian arguments for excluding emotion from the determining grounds of morality—the argument that moral worth can only be ascribed to our free actions, and not to our natural psychological endowments. Unlike his simpler inclinations, an agent’s passions are products of his activity, not merely of natural causality. Rationally pursued, and endorsed upon reflection, passions involve the formulation and adoption of genuine maxims of action. A person of passion is what Kant would describe as a person of “character,” in that . . . he binds himself to definite practical principles that he has prescribed to himself irrevocably by his own reason. Though it is true that these principles might occasionally be mistaken and imperfect, still the formal element of his volition in general—to act according to firm principles (not to fly off hither and yon, like a swarm of gnats)—has something precious and admirable in it. (APV 7:292)

Unlike one who acts in conformity with duty from immediate inclination, one who acts from passion is thus principled and reliable; the passionate person is “true to character,” so to speak. Of course, for the character in question to be a morally admirable one, the passion or passions at the center of one’s character must be directed toward morally attractive ends. The person of character who reliably acts from greed or ambition, after all, is no picture of the principled moral agent or political actor. This is why the passion in question must be one like sympathy or compassion, which provides a genuine interest in the welfare of others. Indeed, the insight that compassion is a passion of love, that it sets before us ends that are morally attractive because they necessarily involve pursuit of the happiness of others, might be the reason that, rather than purge this sentiment from our psyches the moment it ceases to be useful in the achievement of practical aims, we tend to brood over it, refine, and cultivate it, reflectively endorsing the ends it sets. To be sure, if one is convinced of the foundational claims of Kant’s mature metaethics, all passions are evil, regardless of whether they are benevolent or malicious. Yet in describing a form of sentiment to which he is able to attribute such evil, Kant has created a formidable opponent indeed. If individuals

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freely choose to commit themselves to pursuing those ends set by the sympathetic passions—if they pursue these ends rationally, and reflectively guide their sense of sympathy to correct, extend, and universalize itself appropriately—then it is difficult to imagine that the autonomy of these agents is being compromised. This suggests that individual autonomy can legitimately be understood in a psychologically holistic manner—that the reflective mind as a whole must legislate standards for itself as a whole. It is precisely this vision of the reflective autonomy of the whole self that Enlightenment sentimentalists like Hume, Smith, and the younger Kant defend. These rival conceptions of reflective autonomy are tied to rival conceptions of the self. While the later, rationalist Kant sees the true self as a rational will standing apart from emotion, sensation, imagination, and the other “lower” faculties of the human mind, reflective sentimentalists like the earlier Kant see the true self as the whole self—emotion, imagination, and the imaginative sharing of emotion through sympathy all included. While the later Kant could accuse his earlier self of rejecting the autonomy of reason for the heteronomy of feeling, the earlier Kant could equally accuse the latter of self-alienation, of bifurcating the self and identifying with one part only to the exclusion of the other.25 As Kant grew older, it seems that his sense of self changed. What was once seen as an appropriate balance of the emotional and rational elements of a single, integrated self came to be seen as the slavery of the self (i.e., reason) to natural forces (i.e., emotion).26 There may be no objective grounds for establishing which of these two conceptions of the self best corresponds to our true nature, but surely the view of the younger Kant is more intuitively attractive for those who value emotion as well as reason as integral to a well-balanced human mind.

C HAPTER

6

Herder’s Pluralist Sentimentalism

Johann Gottfried von Herder was largely ignored in the English-speaking world until rescued from obscurity by Isaiah Berlin. Even now, however, Herder has yet to be appreciated as a valuable contributor to one of the key intellectual movements of the Anglophone tradition: moral sentimentalism. This chapter will argue that, not only does Herder qualify as a reflective sentimentalist, but that he also makes a much-needed contribution to sentimentalism necessary to allow it to function in contemporary, pluralist societies. Herder’s is the first sentimentalist theory to combine a liberal commitment to the importance of each individual with an appreciation of the diversity among both individuals and groups. Rather than insisting on the universal authority of a single set of mature moral sentiments, Herder argues that the reflective refinement of our moral sentiments leads us to a conception of justice that can be shared by those with otherwise divergent values and worldviews. Although he has never been previously categorized as a sentimentalist, Herder has been understood through the lenses of a variety of rather different intellectual traditions: for political theorists, he is a nationalist or multiculturalist; for intellectual historians, he is a founding father of romanticism or historicism. All of these lenses bring out important features of Herder’s thought, but each can also prove obscuring. Political theorists who see Herder as essentially a nationalist, for example, tend to downplay his emphasis on the irreducible uniqueness of each individual within the nation, not to mention his insistence on the moral urgency of establishing transnational bonds of justice and peace. If Herder’s political thought is to be identified with a single political ideology, it is probably best to consider him a liberal, concerned as he was, first and foremost, with the freedom of individuals to live as they see fit.1 Insofar as Herder is an advocate for national self-determination, it is primarily as a means to further individual autonomy in a world where transnational empires seek to suppress the spontaneous feelings of loyalty nearly all of us feel for our particular cultures and homelands.2 139

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Commentators who view Herder as basically a historicist or mulitculturalist come closer to capturing the key insights of his work. It is critically important to Herder that so much of what we think, feel, and believe is a product of the history of the cultural traditions into which we are born. Berlin’s “pluralism” is an even better label for Herder’s position on this point, since the diversity that interests Herder is as much synchronic as it is diachronic, and as much a result of our individual idiosyncrasies as our cultural affiliations.3 Even those who see Herder as a pluralist, however, often fail to notice that his pluralism is part of a larger, more ambitious philosophical project. “What new fruitful developments must appear,” Herder writes, “once our entire philosophy has become anthropology” (S 32:61). Herder here wishes to turn philosophy into anthropology in the broad, eighteenth-century German sense (as the term was used by Christian Thomasius, Wolff, and Kant) to mean the empirical study of humanity, encompassing most of what we now know as the humanities and social sciences, with a particular emphasis on psychology. “You are already a philosopher,” he enjoins the intellectuals of his day. “Oh, be a human being, and think for human beings, that they may act and be happy” (G 1:118, F 15). This echo of Hume’s famous injunction “Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man” (EHU 1.6) is surely intentional. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Hume and Smith were favorites of Kant, Herder, and their Königsberg circle. Like the British sentimentalists that he and Kant read so avidly, Herder not only insisted on the centrality of empirical psychology to moral philosophy, but also believed this empirical study to demonstrate that moral reflection must be the work of the mind as a whole. To be sure, classifying Herder as a moral sentimentalist is complicated by the fact that he never composed a systematic ethics. Nor is this merely attributable to the intentional lack of systematic order in Herder’s works—his downright hostility toward philosophical systemization, which he associated with dry and distorting rationalism. Herder never wrote extensively on the subject of ethics per se, and it would do violence to Herder’s thought to try to wrest a complete moral and political theory from scattered comments made throughout Herder’s writings on language, religion, history, and psychology. Insofar as a sentimentalist ethics can be seen throughout these writings, moreover, it is clearly not a free-standing sentimentalism in the manner of Hume, but a theological sentimentalism in the manner of Hutcheson or Butler. The intentions of our divine designer are always at work in Herder’s account of human history and psychology, and true Christianity represents the perfection of our moral sentiments. Yet despite its lack of systematic clarity or completeness, and despite its reliance on religious foundations, Herder’s particular version of sentimentalism contributes something new and important to the sentimentalist movement by virtue of its unprecedented pluralism.


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It is often thought that Herder’s pluralism made him a moral relativist, that he believed the tremendous space between different worldviews and modes of living made normative judgments across such chasms impossible. Yet Herder actually argues that the recognition of human diversity can only serve to improve the accuracy and enhance the authority of our moral convictions. He gives a distinctively sentimentalist account of how we must feel our way into the position of individuals radically different from ourselves in order to render adequate judgment about their modes of existence. Through this empathetic inquiry, Herder constructs an ideal of humanity (Humanität) that can be shared by all human beings despite their otherwise conflicting values. Humanity, in turn, is associated with substantive norms of fairness and reciprocity (Billigkeit), which Herder believes can serve as a shared basis for just relations between those of different ethical and cultural commitments. In this way, Herder illustrates how a sentimentalist approach to moral philosophy, combined with an empathetic understanding of the great range of human diversity, can lead to a set of commitments akin to today’s liberal multiculturalism. This chapter begins with an analysis of the challenges that human diversity poses for sentimentalist ethics. While the wide variety of moral evaluations that human beings have made in different times and places might be grounds for moral skepticism, a rationalist can always argue that diversity in moral judgments is attributable to the imperfection of human reason. Sentimentalism, however, relies on the claim that all human beings share a psychology from which, with sufficient reflection, the same moral sentiments will develop. Hume and Smith thus seek to explain away rather than to understand the full scope of human diversity. Herder, however, realizes that Hume’s attempt to defend the uniformity of human sentiment can only serve to deform both our understanding and our moral judgment of others. I argue in the second section of this chapter that Herder’s account of human diversity, like Hume’s account of our moral development, involves a progress of sentiments arising from the faculty of sympathy. Unlike Hume’s unilinear progress, however, Herder’s progress of sentiments branches out in myriad directions, as reflective human beings cultivate their characters differently in different environments. The result is a world in which morally incompatible cultural traditions arise in different times and places. In the third section of this chapter, I describe how Herder believes we can nonetheless “feel our way into” worldviews and values very different from our own, achieving empathetic understanding of the full range of human diversity. Yet to understand all is not to approve of all. To the contrary, as is discussed in the fourth and final section of this chapter, a full, empathetic understanding of human history and culture shows that, while all traditions include ideals of Humanität and Billigkeit, most fail to live up to these universally shared standards. Nevertheless, Herder hopes that the overlapping consensus on the authority of these basic principles can be a basis for just relations among all nations and cultures.

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I. Sentimentalism and the Problem of Diversity 1. Psychological Uniformity and Cultural Diversity There is an old argument that sentimentalism cannot provide, as Thomas Reid put it, a “fixed standard of virtue.” Hume and Smith, of course, were well aware that our sympathetic sentiments are both biased and variable; it is for this reason that an extensive process of reflective correction is necessary. After reflective correction, however, our moral sentiments may no longer be determined by the vicissitudes of our immediate inclinations, but they are still ultimately determined by human psychology, both our own and that of those around us. Reid is correct to complain that, if moral standards should not be variable, it is difficult to see how they can be grounded on a set of psychological factors “which in different men is different from constitution.”4 Hume’s response is to argue from that the relevant psychological processes do not in fact vary between individuals. This is not to say that Hume believed all individuals to have exactly the same moral sentiments. Yet he did believe that every individual is sufficiently psychologically similar that an adequate progress of sentiments should lead us all to genuine virtue. Yet while reason is necessarily the same in all rational agents, the same is not true of emotion. Although the invariability of correct moral standards might follow directly from the proposition that these standards are the product of reason, further evidence is required once these standards are seen as the product of the mind as a whole. Hume admits in a letter to Hutcheson that “if morality were determined by reason that is the same to all rational beings, but nothing but experience can assure us that the sentiments are the same.”5 In keeping with his general philosophical method, Hume’s conviction here is the product of empirical inquiry. Historical and cross-cultural comparisons abound throughout Hume’s philosophy, and his monumental History of England can be understood as an extension of this line of research. In all contexts, Hume discovers the same basic human nature at work. As Hume famously claims in the first Enquiry: It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same in its principles and operations . . . Mankind is so much the same, in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior. (EHU 8.1.7)

What Hume sought from history was not the concrete particularities that so fascinate historians today, but instead general truths concerning the


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unchanging principles of human psychology. Later historians routinely castigate Hume for this sin of “uniformitarianism,” which seems to reflect a basic failure to observe the obvious diversity of human worldviews and modes of living across time and place.6 Nor is this merely a problem of proper historical methodology; Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that Hume’s ethical system as a whole cannot stand because the human psychology that “he took to be universal was to a significant degree local and particular.”7 Commentators such as Frederick Watkins have attributed Hume’s alleged historical uniformitarianism to simple ignorance, to Hume’s “living in a period when the detailed historical and anthropological information available to Western scholars was still largely confined to the experience of the Western world itself.”8 Yet Watkins radically underestimates the empirical evidence of human diversity available to Enlightenment-era Europeans. Even if we ignore the myriad descriptions of non-European peoples available in the travel accounts that were so popular at the time, we must remember that intellectuals of the eighteenth century were on far more intimate terms with the classics of their own cultural tradition than we are today, classics that described a Greco-Roman world very different from their own. No eighteenth-century philosopher would deny that Europe clearly underwent a series of radical transformations since ancient times. Far from the simple uniformitarian he has wrongly been accused of being, Hume was an avid scholar of historical change, which he approached with a sense of delight and wonder. “Those who consider the periods and revolutions of human kind, as represented in history,” he writes, “are entertained with a spectacle full of pleasure and variety, and see, with surprise, the manners, customs and opinions of the same species susceptible of such prodigious changes in different periods of time” (“Of Eloquence,” in EMPL, p. 97). Although Hume retains his conviction in the basic uniformity of human psychology, he acknowledges that “we must not . . . expect, that this uniformity . . . should be carried to such a length, as that all men, in the same circumstances, will always act in precisely the same manner, without making any allowance for the diversity of characters, prejudices, and opinions” (EHU 8.1.10). Even though Hume believes that all human beings are basically alike in their psychological framework, he explicitly insists that this does not imply that they will all act like eighteenth-century Britons. “The Rhine flows north, the Rhone south,” Hume writes, “yet both spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated, in their opposite directions, by the same principles of gravity” (EPM, “A Dialogue,” 26). So, too, can the same human nature lead to different modes of living in different circumstances. Following his usual procedure, Hume performs an “anatomy” of the various forces “which cause such a diversity, and at the same time maintain such a uniformity in human life” (T 2.3.1.9). Although Hume sometimes makes statements that are shockingly racist to readers today,9 both he and Smith

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attribute nearly all observable human variety not to biological differences between groups—or even to the effects of climate or our physical environment—but to “the great force of custom and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy, and form it into a fixed and established character” (EHU 8.1.11). And as he does with so many other features of the human mind, Hume attributes the influence of what we now call “culture” primarily to the faculty of sympathy. When groups of people are living together in isolation from others, the same faculty which makes us enter deeply into each other’s sentiments here “causes like passions and inclinations to run, as it were, by contagion through the whole club or knot of companions.” Over time, united by language and government, the populations of whole nations “acquire a resemblance in their manners, and have a common or national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual (“Of National Characters,” in EMPL, pp. 202–03). Since the effects of culture are always imposed upon the same basic human nature, it is always possible for acute observers to trace back a belief or practice to psychological sources that they themselves possess. The ability to see psychological similarities underlying cultural differences is, for Hume, characteristic of refined taste; it is an indispensable skill for the adequate moral and aesthetic judgment of the works or deeds of those whose customs differ from our own. Hume castigates the “person influenced by prejudice” who, when considering the creations of distant times and places, “makes no allowance for their peculiar views and prejudices but, full of the manners of his own age and country, rashly condemns what seemed admirable in the eyes of those for whom alone the discourse was calculated” (“Of the Standard of Taste” in EMPL, p. 239). In his condemnation of such ethnocentrism, Hume foreshadows ideas that would be developed much more fully by Herder.

2. The Rejection of Value Pluralism There is, however, one all-important way in which Herder will have to break from Hume and Smith. On the whole, Hume and Smith believe that the effect of what we now call cultural differences on our ethics is a negative one, serving to block the development of sentiments that would unite all of humanity behind a single set of moral commitments. While those advanced in their moral progress may “escape the contagion” of custom, “the multitude will certainly be seized by the common affection, and be governed by it in all their actions.” Smith observes that the customs of the vulgar multitude are then “capable of establishing, as lawful and blameless, particular actions which shock the plainest principles of right and wrong” (TMS V.2.14, p. 209). Unlike refined moral sentiments, unrefined customs necessarily differ from one another. The vulgar of one time and place will therefore find itself in moral disagreement with the vulgar of others, leading to the development of


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sects and factions, which only serve to block sympathy outside their boundaries. “And nothing but nature and reason, or, at least, what bears them a strong resemblance,” Hume writes “can force its way through all obstacles, and unite the most rival nations” (“Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in EMPL, p. 112). This force, which bears a strong resemblance to reason, can be identified as the calm passions, described in the Treatise, which lead us to extend and correct our faculty of sympathy reflectively in order to develop impartial moral sentiments. Hume generally explains the failure to live up to his moral standards as a failure to undergo a full reflective correction of one’s moral sentiments. In certain cultural contexts, this failure may be both understandable and forgivable. We must be careful not to condemn too rashly those whose moral or aesthetic standards are different from our own and must sympathetically consider their own point of view in order to judge them adequately. None of this, however, implies a genuine plurality of acceptable human values. We may be able to comprehend, for example, why “uncultivated nations, who have not, as yet, had full experience of the advantages attending beneficence, justice, and the social virtues” (EPM 7.15) treat courage as the greatest— indeed, sometimes the only—virtue. This understanding, Hume acknowledges, may even lead us to consider such primitives blameless when committing sheer brutality under the false appearance of bravery. Yet Hume sees nothing other than moral progress when this outmoded ethic of courage alone is destroyed by a further progress of sentiments. Homer’s “want of humanity and decency” shocks our more refined consciences. “And whatever indulgence we may give to the writer on account of his prejudices,” Hume insists, “we cannot prevail on ourselves to enter into his sentiments, or bear an affection to characters, which we plainly discover to be blamable” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” in EMPL, p. 246). Hume addresses the issue of conflicting moral commitments in different times and places most fully in “A Dialogue” included with the second Enquiry. Here, Hume’s two interlocutors puzzle out how the ancient Greeks could have endorsed such abhorrent practices as pederasty and suicide. Hume attributes ancient pederasty to an insufficient refinement of the moral sentiments and the distorting effects of custom (EPM, “A Dialogue,” p. 28), but he also has a number of other ways to explain ancient values and practices without acknowledging a plurality of legitimate but conflicting ethical worldviews.10 Hume argues, for example, that the same practice may be useful in one historical context but useless or harmful in another. Thus, what appears to be a conflict of values might thus instead be recognition of these “different utilities” (EPM, “A Dialogue,” p. 42). Alternately, when two admitted virtues must be balanced with one another, there may be a range of acceptable compromises, which may vary by custom across time and place. Finally, we must humbly acknowledge that another culture may be in the right while we

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are in the wrong, it might be our own moral conviction that could not bear its own survey with a fuller progress of sentiments. Hume coyly hints that such may be the case with his era’s abhorrence of suicide (EPM, “A Dialogue,” p. 34–35), a possibility explored with greater audacity in his unpublished essay on the topic (“Of Suicide,” in EMPL, pp. 577–89). In no case do we discover a genuine conflict of fully refined and reflectively corrected moral sentiments. If ever such a conflict could not be explained away through the sort of arguments provided in “A Dialogue,” it would pose a genuine threat to Hume’s universalistic sentimentalism. Like Hume, Smith also believes that the same moral principles may prescribe different practices and behaviors in different circumstances. Across such diverse contexts, what behavior is warranted and proper will vary as surely as does what is demanded by public utility. Indeed, it is in his defense of property rights as grounded in our sympathy with proper resentment that Smith introduces his famous “four stages” of human history—those of hunting, shepherding, agriculture, and commerce. “It is easy to see,” Smith asserts, “that in these several ages of society, the laws and regulations with regard to property must be very different” (LJA i.33, p. 16). In the largely hunting-stage society of the native Canadians, for example, one’s limited possessions were all easily transportable. In such a context, it is quite proper to maintain that one has to retain an item on one’s person in order to expect to make use of it; Smith recounts the tale of a native woman who left her wampum necklace on a tree and whose chief argued that she had no claim in strict justice to have it returned to her when another took off with it.11 Some form of property rights will thus necessarily be acknowledged under any social circumstances, but the form that these rights take, Smith argues, is a matter of historical contingency. In all such cases, however, what is at work is the application of uniform principles in radically different contexts, rather than any genuine conflict between equally valid moral principles.12 Despite their shared rejection of value pluralism, when Smith parted from Hume in his anatomy of sympathy, he discovered powerful resources for promoting cross-cultural understanding that would have a profound influence on Herder. When Smith replaces Hume’s notion of sympathy as emotional contagion with a notion of sympathy as projective empathy, he explicitly states that this projective empathy cannot consist in merely imagining what I would do—with all my particular idiosyncrasies—if I were placed in the situation of another. Smith’s emphasis on this point was influenced by Hutcheson, who warned that “in managing our public sense of the state of others, we must beware of one common mistake, viz. apprehending every person to be miserable in those circumstances which we imagine would make ourselves miserable” (ENC 1.6.4, p. 120). As a result, Smith insists that when imaginatively entering into the situation of another, I must “consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with


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you, but I change persons and characters.” It is in this way that we can sympathize with those whose experiences are unlike anything that could ever happen to ourselves, given the particular facts of our characters and identities. A man, for example, can successfully sympathize with a woman in childbirth, “though it is impossible that he should conceive himself as suffering her pains in his own proper person and character” (TMS VII.iii.1.4, p. 317). Yet Smith never adequately explains how it is that we can come to share imaginatively in the emotional experiences of even those most unlike ourselves. Indeed, given his belief in the basic uniformity of human psychology, Smith assumes that no one’s experience of the world could be all that radically different from our own. As we come to recognize the full diversity of human cultures and worldviews, however, we come to recognize the need for a fuller account of how projective empathy is possible across the great chasms of difference that separate us from our fellows. “How can you expect that I should identify myself with the men of all places and times,” Smith’s critic Theodore Jouffroy complained in 1840, “and draw from feelings so various and mutable?”13 It is this challenge that Herder’s pluralist sentimentalism was designed to meet.

II. From Sympathy to Diversity 1. Instinctual and Reflective Sympathy Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language begins with a metaphor for sympathy adapted from Hume, that of sympathetic souls as “strings equally wound up” (T 3.3.1.7). Upon experiencing any sort of strong emotion, Herder observes, both animals and human beings instinctually cry out loud. “The struck string performs its natural duty,” Herder writes. “It sounds! It calls to a similarly feeling echo.” Even as Herder evokes Hume’s analysis of sympathy, however, he is also evoking Rousseau’s pitié, for the instinctual cry and sympathetic emotional echo “does not come from volition and slow deliberation at all” (G 1:697–98, F 65–66). No idea of another’s emotion, as is demanded by Hume’s anatomy of sympathy, is required, but only the “mere law of nature” (G 1:707, F 74). Nonetheless, since it successfully communicates emotion from one creature to another, Herder describes the cry of an animal in pain as a sort of language. “Hence there is a language of feeling [Empfindung],” Herder concludes “which is an immediate law of nature” (G 1:698, F 66). Like Hume, Herder believes sympathy is dependent on similarity, so that all creatures will feel the greatest sympathy for their own kind. The greater the degree of difference between any two creatures, the less they will be able to sympathize with one another instinctually. In this way, their particular set of natural cries is the “language-of-a-people [Völkersprache] for each species among itself” (G 1:699, F 67).

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Despite our later development of “artificial language,” our own version of natural language still erupts among human beings in “the most violent moments of feeling” (G 1:698–99, F 66–67). Although we may speak different artificial languages, all human beings can communicate their sentiments to all other human beings. “Who is there who, faced with a shaking, whining tortured person,” Herder asks, “is not touched to his heart by this “Ah!”? Who is such a feelingless barbarian?” He argues that “the bond of this natural language” is so strong that we can only resist it with the most painful effort (G 1:706, F 72–73). Even when artificial language and culture have led human beings to mistreat one another, the natural language of feeling often breaks through, reminding us of the susceptibility to suffering that we share with all our fellows. Herder observes, “Europeans everywhere—despite their cultivation [Bildung] and miscultivation—have been strongly moved by the primitive moans of savages” (G 1:706, F 73). At its most basic, Herder’s liberalism and anti-imperialism—his opposition to the remarkable cruelty of the empires of his day—is an appeal to the instinctual sympathy we all share, not only with every other human being, but also with all other animals. Human sympathy, however, is never wholly identical to that felt by other creatures. To a certain extent, the difference between human and animal sympathy is merely one of degree. “Among all living creatures, man was chosen by nature to possess these [sympathetic] emotions to the greatest extent,” Herder writes. “The texture of his fibers is so fine . . . his nervous system so diffused throughout every part of his vibrating body that . . . he can put himself in the place of almost every creature and share its feelings” (S 13:156, B 269). Yet the difference between human and animal sympathy is also one in kind. Human beings, Herder insists, are unique in their ability to reflect critically on themselves and their instincts, choosing which of these instincts to obey and which to suppress. With self-reflection, Herder observes, a human being becomes autonomous. No more “in the hands of nature, he becomes his own end and goal of refinement” (6 1:717, F 82). The difference between human beings and animals cannot be reduced to a single faculty that human beings possess and animals do not; self-consciousness involves the ability of the human mind as a whole to reflect upon itself as a whole, a process that leaves none of it unchanged. Herder’s preferred term for “the whole organization of all human forces; the whole domestic economy of his feeling and cognizing, of his cognizing and willing, nature” (G 1:717, F 82–83) is Besonnenheit (G 1:719, F 84), which might best be translated as “reflective awareness.”14 In his discussions of Besonnenheit, Herder takes the psychological holism of the British sentimentalists a step forward. Although Hume and Smith challenged the alleged independence of reason and passion—Hume, remember, insists that the two are “uncompounded and inseparable” (T 3.2.2.14)— they never fully freed themselves from the basic Enlightenment-era concept


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that the human mind is best described as a collection of essentially independent faculties.15 Herder, however, broke completely with the faculty-based paradigm, insisting, “the thought processes of our mind are undivided entities, producing in their totality the diverse effects or manifestations which we treat as separate faculties” (S 13:116, B 259). If we sometimes speak of human reason as a faculty separate from the rest of the faculties of the human mind, it is only “because our weak mind was unable to consider them all at once.” (G 1:717–18, F 83). For Herder, any attempt to cordon off the faculties of the mind from one another, let alone to exclude one or more of them from the government of the human psyche, will ultimately prove disastrous. “Would the head think if your heart did not beat?” Herder asks. “But on the other hand, if you mean to heed every insistent knocking and welling of your heart . . . and follow it blindly, where can you [not] end up?” Herder advocates the rule of reflectively corrected or “purified” sentiments over human behavior on this basis. “Let the stream of your life beat freshly in your breast,” he writes, “but let it also be purified up into the subtle marrow of your understanding” (S 8:200–2001, F 214–15). These purified moral sentiments are often identified with Christian love. Love, for Herder, is . . . the noblest cognition, as it is the noblest feeling. To love the great Creator in oneself, to love one’s way into others [in andere hinein zu lieben], and then to follow this sure pull—that is moral feeling [moralisches Gefühl], that is conscience. It stands opposed to empty speculation, but not to cognition [Erkennen], for true cognition is loving, is feeling in a human way. (S 8:200, F 214)

Since the greatest moral sentiments unite both the truest cognition and the finest feeling, Herder feels no need to investigate the foundations of ethics in any great detail, dismissing as “empty quarrels” the debates over “where the principle of our morality lies” (S 8:200, F 214). Despite his claim to have sidestepped the question, however, Herder has clearly placed himself in the sentimentalist camp. Indeed, his insistence on psychological holism better reflects the sentimentalists’ emphasis on achieving an equilibrium of the cognitive, affective, and imaginative elements in the human mind than does Hume’s own misleading rhetoric about the subservience of reason to passion. The psychological holism of Herder’s concept of Besonnenheit has important implications for his anatomy of human sympathy. Reflective awareness allows a creature to “separate off, stop, and pay attention to a single wave” in the “ocean of sensations which floods the soul,” all while being “conscious of its own attentiveness” (G 1:722, F 87). The sensation so self-consciously isolated can then be labeled with a name, a process that Herder identifies with the invention of artificial (that is, human) language. The natural language of feeling can communicate emotion from one creature to another on an instinctual level, but the same reflective awareness that gives human beings

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consciousness of their own emotions also allows them to artificially communicate them to others through the medium of language. This allows for the formation of a uniquely human form of sympathy that would be impossible for nonreflective animals—one that can operate through the medium of ideas, as Hume described, or even the imaginative reconstruction of another’s experience, as Smith described. Although Herder might be interpreted as suggesting that human beings share instinctual sympathy with animals, we now see that such an interpretation is not entirely correct. Our reflective scrutiny of our instincts necessarily changes them; it is not that the unconscious processes of instinctual sympathy simply becomes conscious, but rather that its occurrence within a self-conscious soul alters its very operation. “Not every action of the soul is immediately a consequence of consciousness [Besinnung],” Herder explains, “but every one is a consequence of reflective awareness [Besonnenheit]. None of them, in the form in which they occur in a human being, could express themselves if the human being were not a human being” (G 1:774, F 131). Nonreflective sympathy is nonhuman sympathy and, insofar as Rousseau insisted that humanity’s natural pitié is entirely instinctual, he “made human beings into animals” (G 1:711, F 77).

2. The Development of Diversity Human beings are, according to Herder, the most diverse of all earthly creatures. “All the animal species are perhaps less different among themselves,” he writes, “than human being from human being” (S 8:207, F 217). And what holds true of each human individual also holds true of each human group. “Like individual human beings,” Herder writes, “similarly families and peoples are different from each other, and still more so” (S 8:210, F 219). Commentators today often forget that the diversity among groups, for Herder, develops in a world in which individuals are already irreducibly unique. It is important not to confuse Herder with later, romantic nationalists who—by understanding each nation as a natural, organic unity—combine radical nationalism with radical anti-individualism.16 While the diversity of individuals begins naturally as a product of human biology, the diversity of groups is almost entirely an artificial product of human reflective awareness, as different populations self-consciously react in different ways to their various social and physical environments. Herder’s cultural etiology of group diversity is thus directly tied to his rejection of biological racism—racism embraced in his day by almost all European thinkers, including both Hume and Kant.17 Herder insists, in opposition to this racist consensus, that “notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of human beings throughout the whole of our Earth” (G 6:251, C 163). The study of human difference, he argues,


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belongs “not so properly to the systematic study of natural history, as to the physico-geographical history of humanity” (G 6:256, C 166). In order to trace this history of difference, Herder begins by observing, with Hume, that we will have strongest sympathetic bonds to those tied to us by kinship or other forms of resemblance. “Everything that is still similar with my nature, that can be assimilated to it, I covet, strive for, make my own,” Herder writes. “Beyond that, kind nature has armed me with feelinglessness, coldness and blindness; this can even become contempt and disgust” (S 5:510, F 297). In a world of scarce resources, we will all struggle to acquire what we can for those with whom we have the strongest ties of love and sympathy. Competition between family groups breeds mutual enmity, and with it “complete division and separation . . . No [shared] familial customs, no remembrance of a single origin, and least of all language” (G 1:796–97, F 152–53). The language of one’s group soon becomes its most precious possession—“characteristic word of the race, bond of the family, [and] tool of instruction” (G 1:797, F 153). With different languages and different patterns of education, human beings in different social groups will be formed into different sorts of creatures. Custom, for Herder, is not a distorting force that leads human beings away from proper ethical standards; it is a necessary feature of any truly human mode of life. “The essence of humanity, reason, and its organ, tradition,” he observes, “have been inherited through a series of successive generations” (G 6:667, C 464). The virtually untranslatable German notion of Bildung—the cultivation or formation of the soul—is the process by which we become who we are. The emphasis on holistic self-formation is common to much German thought of the time; Herder’s distinctive contribution is to see that each people develops its own unique mode of Bildung, one that guides its members toward a unique mode of living. As different local traditions of Bildung develop over generations, they diverge more and more from those of their neighbors. Thus, there cannot be a single standard that determines whether an individual is cultured or gebildet. Instead, as Herder writes: A chain of culture may be drawn, flying off in extremely divergent curves. In each it designates increasing and decreasing greatness, and maximums of every kind. Many of these exclude or limit one another . . . so that were we to reason from one perfection of any nation concerning another, we should form very treacherous conclusions. (G 6:650, C 453)

Herder’s work represents a first step toward the pluralization of the previously singular term “culture.” Although Herder himself continued to use Kultur in the grammatical singular, the later conception of “multiculturalism” accurately captures an important aspect of his thought.18 “Is there a people on earth totally uncultured?” he asks. “And how contracted must the

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scheme of Providence be, if every individual of the human species were to be formed to what we call culture?” (G 6:12, C v). Yet Herder’s ideas, as Isaiah Berlin repeatedly emphasizes, represent much more than a pluralization of such traditional German concepts as Kultur and Bildung; they represent nothing less than a rejection of the monistic conception of human flourishing that had predominated in Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle.19 “Human nature is no container of an absolute, independent, unchangeable happiness as the philosopher defines it,” Herder insists. Human nature is not a rigid structure but “a flexible clay, in the most different situations, needs and pressure, forming itself differently.” In this way, “the very image of happiness changes with each condition and region” (S 5:509). The particular set of customs and cultural traditions into which we are born, and hence the particular process of Bildung we undergo, determines which of our potentialities are actualized. While nature may have given human beings the potential to be a part of any given culture, however, each of us is placed in only one such culture with only “a part of the manifoldness in a circle about us, available to us” (S 5:509–10, F 297).

3. The Implications of Diversity Herder’s revolutionary doctrine of cultural pluralism could not help but have profound implications for our understanding of ethics and politics. On the level of political policy, it is an obvious ground for opposition to European colonialism and imperialism. “It has been for centuries the object of united Europe to erect herself into a despot,” Herder observes, “compelling all the nations of the Earth to be happy in her way” (G 6:335, C 224). Herder argues that each group that shares its own unique cultural standards of human flourishing should be allowed to govern itself according to those very standards—an idea that greatly contributed to the rise of ethno-cultural nationalism as the dominant political movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that still has profound implications for our understanding of international relations today. Herder was one of the first to insist that “the roses for the wreath of freedom must be picked by a people’s own hands,” an idea still at the heart of the arguments against the forcible exportation of liberal democracy. “With the yoke of badly imported freedom from abroad,” Herder observes, “a foreign people would be incommoded in the worst possible way” (G 7: 735, F 413). Yet while today’s liberals and anti-imperialists might happily support Herder’s politics, they must be wary of his pluralism’s power to undermine any set of normative commitments—moral, political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Herder himself was well aware of the potentially corrosive effect of value pluralism; he addresses this issue most directly in his provocative essay of 1766 known as “On the Change of Taste.” The title given to this work by


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Herder’s editors can be misleading, for Herder’s subject is not mere aesthetic taste, but all of human judgment. “As soon as I find something true or beautiful,” Herder observes, “then nothing is more natural than the expectation that every human being will have the same sentiment [Empfindung], the same opinion, with me. Otherwise, of course, there would be no basic rule of truth and no firm basis for taste.” Yet Herder knows that, in different times and places, most human beings do not find the same things to be true, good, or beautiful. He expects that most of his fellows will find this discovery shocking. “A good, honest man who only knows the world from the market-place, from the coffeehouse, and at most out of the Hamburg Correspondent,” Herder writes, “is amazed when he comes upon a story and discovers that manner of thought and taste change with climate, with regions of the earth, and with countries” (G 1:149, F 247). After nature, by placing the individual in a particular cultural circle, allowed him to develop only a limited subset of the potential with which she endowed us, she then “reined in the human view so that after a small period of habituation this circle became a horizon for him. Not to look beyond it, hardly to suspect beyond it!” (S 5:509–10, F 297). For many of us, the worldview of our particular inherited culture is the only one we understand. If we encounter another culture whose worldview is sharply at odds with our own, we do not see it as one of many possible expressions of the manifoldness of human nature, but instead dismiss it as wrong, barbaric, and inhuman. Nature had good reason to set up these ethnocentric blinders, Herder argues, for once I look beyond them I may come to doubt my own convictions as nothing more than groundless local prejudices (see G 1:149, F 247). The relativists and skeptics who have appeared throughout the Western philosophical tradition (a group in which Herder mistakenly classifies Hume) have long used the diversity of tastes, judgments, and worldviews as grounds for rejecting any particular commitments or beliefs (see G 1:150–51, F 248). Herder wants to reject their view, but finds it difficult to do so while at the same time maintaining his cultural pluralism. “Is not truth, fairness, moral goodness the same at all times?” he asks. “Yes,” he answers himself, “and yet one observes that propositions for which at certain times each person would have sacrificed his last drop of blood at other times get damned to the fire by precisely the same nation . . . This skepticism should almost put us off trusting our own taste and sentiment [Empfindung]” (G 1:160, F 256). Herder, who always avoided creating a systematic philosophical ethics, chooses not to address this problem head-on. “I do not believe that I am writing this page for doubters,” he demurs, “so I shall let all the aforementioned men [the philosophical skeptics] rest in peace.” Herder coyly insists that he is simply an empirical historian rather than a moral philosopher. “I merely want to gather historical examples of how far the diversity of human beings can extend, to bring it into categories, and then

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to try to explain it,” he writes (G 1:151, F 249). This anthropological project produced Herder’s masterworks: the methodological essay Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Formation [Bildung] of Humanity of 1774; and the magisterial, if uncompleted, application of this methodology in the four volumes of the Ideas towards the Philosophy of the History of Humanity published between 1784 and 1791. Yet the insistence that his project is merely an empirical one is disingenuous. Through his anthropological inquiry into the development of diversity, Herder is able to identify a sentiment of fairness or reciprocity that is capable of being reflectively endorsed by all the radically different branches of the human family.

III. From Diversity to Empathetic Understanding 1. Einfühlung through Analogy The diversity that Herder observes among human beings is indeed considerable, but it has been overestimated by commentators nonetheless.20 At times, Herder actually sounds as uniformitarian as Hume. In an unpublished draft of Yet Another Philosophy of History, for example, Herder wrote that “the human heart has always remained the same in its inclinations, just as the mind has in abilities, and whatever sorts of angelic or devilish forms people have sometimes wished to imagine in it, has always been only human” (F 268). Like Hume, Herder never rejects the notion of a single human nature; he only insists that this nature is, under the influence of Bildung, far more malleable than most of his contemporaries supposed. “Human nature,” Herder writes, has “such flexibility and mutability as to be able to form out [ausbilden] for itself in the most diverse situations . . . the most diverse ideals of its actions into what is called virtue and the most diverse ideals of its sensations into what is called happiness” (F 270). In this way, “the history of humanity is ultimately a theater of transformations” (G 6:253. C 164). It is understandable that we might be led to reject the unity of human nature, however, because “time has changed everything so much that one often needs a magic mirror in order to recognize the same creature beneath such diverse forms” (G 1:159, F 255). Fortunately, for Herder, human feeling and sympathy provide precisely such a “magic mirror.” Herder’s account of the relevant form of sympathy bears a greater resemblance to Smith’s than to Hume’s. Herder argues that we imaginatively place our selves into the place of others, “feeling our way into” their experience of the world. “The sensing [empfindende] human being feels his way into everything [fühlt sich in Alles],” he writes, “feels everything out of himself, and imprints it with his image, his impress” (S 8:170, F 188). As with Smith, this is a matter of imaginative projection of the self into the position of the other, “for it is only through


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ourselves that we can, so to speak, feel into others [hinein fühlen]” (S 8:200, F 214). Herder is widely credited with the coinage of the word Einfühlung, later translated into English as “empathy,” to name this process of selfprojection.21 The study of human beings is, for Herder, not primarily an exercise in reason but an exercise in imaginative Einfühlung, the sort of empathetic insight that would be developed by later German thinkers such as Max Weber as “understanding” (Verstehen)—the key to all adequate social inquiry.22 Not only is Herder rightly celebrated as one of the first theorists of this mode of empathetic understanding; he has also been recognized for centuries as one of its greatest practitioners. “You possess the gift,” Moses Medelssohn wrote Herder in 1780, “to feel yourself, whenever you wish, into the situation and mentality of your fellow beings.”23 Even Kant, in his otherwise hostile review of the Ideas, was forced to complement Herder’s empathetic abilities, albeit backhandedly. Kant writes of his one-time student: His approach does not entail . . . a logical precision in the definition of concepts or careful distinctions and consistency in the use of principles, but rather a cursory and comprehensive vision and a ready facility for discovering analogies, together with a bold imagination in putting these analogies to use. This is combined with an aptitude for arousing sympathy for his subject . . . by means of feelings and sentiments [durch Gefühle und Empfindungen einzunehmen].” (Kant, RH, 8:45, p. 201)

While Kant dismisses Herder’s empathetic method for its lack of rational rigor, Herder replies, “I am not ashamed of myself . . . I run after images, after analogies . . . because I do not know any other game for my thinking powers” (S 8:171). The idea of analogy is key here, for we cannot understand others except by analogy with ourselves. Through the use of analogy, what is foreign and baffling is explained through its similarities to what is known and familiar. When I find that I cannot put myself in another’s situation to sympathize with him in the manner that Smith describes, I must consider how his situation might in certain respects resemble my own. By carefully mapping parallels between these two different situations, I can come to feel what it would be like to be someone radically unlike myself and I can come to sympathize with even those whose experiences and worldviews were once inaccessible. As an example of this analogical method, consider the dominant trope from Yet Another Philosophy of History: the analogy between the various periods of a single individual’s life and the various periods of humanity’s history. The parallelism of ontogeny and phylogeny is not original to Herder. Typically, eighteenth century authors used the growth of an individual to describe what they saw as the unilinear progress of history from the darkness and ignorance of the past to the enlightened maturity of the present. In

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the preface to the Ideas, Herder regrets that his use of this common trope in his earlier essay had so often been misinterpreted along these conventional lines. “It had never entered into my mind, by employing the few figurative expressions, the childhood, infancy, adulthood and old age of our species,” he writes, “to point out a highway, on which the history of culture . . . could be traced with certainty” (G 6:11, C v). Given the susceptibility of this analogy to a misinterpretation so directly opposed to his own intended, pluralist meaning, why did Herder choose to compare phylogeny to ontogeny? Surely Herder’s biographer Robert Clark is incorrect to claim that the dominant trope of Herder’s greatest essay is intended to be read entirely ironically, that Herder means only to mock his fellow Enlightenment-era Europeans who saw the peoples of all other times and places as mere children.24 “My analogy taken from human ages in life is no child’s play,” Herder insists (S 5:488, F 281). Neither sharing his contemporaries’ condescending attitude toward earlier times nor merely intending to parody it, Herder meant his use of the common analogy between the growth of an individual and the course of human history to allow his reader to empathize with the peoples of times past by evoking memories of the reader’s own past. The changes in human beings over the course of history are great indeed, but so too are those over the course of a single human life; Herder hopes that we can feel our way through the human transformations we have not experienced personally by drawing parallels to those we have. Readers of Herder’s essay are meant to see the dawn of history (which Herder incorrectly identifies with the Hebrew patriarchy of Genesis) as analogous to our own wide-eyed infancy; Egypt as analogous to our own obedient childhood; Phoenecia as our own adventurous adolescence; Greece as the flower of our own youth; and Rome as our own stern adulthood. These “ages” of humanity are not meant to be compared in terms of their maturity; Herder insists that they represent modes of living “which I indeed in no way mean to compare . . . for I do not like comparing at all!” (S 5:494, F 285). Instead, Herder urges his readers to see that, just as what allowed for happiness and fulfillment in our own lives changed over time, so too did what allowed for human flourishing over the course of history. “The boy’s coat is certainly too short for the giant! And the school-jail disgusting for the youth with a fiancée,” Herder observes. “But behold! Your formal gown is in turn too long for the former, and do you not see, if you know a bit of the Egyptian spirit, how your [Enlightenment-era virtues] would in turn made the boy into a miserable old man of a boy?” (S 5:490, F 283). Yet while the needs and values of different times and places are highly dissimilar, all are products of a single human nature that we share, a fact that Herder hopes his analogical, empathetic method will help his readers realize on an emotional as well as a merely rational level. He writes:


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We all believe that we still now have parental and household and human drives as the Oriental had them; that we can have faithfulness and diligence in art as the Egyptian possessed them; Phoenecian activeness, Greek love of freedom, Roman strength of soul—who does not think that he feels a disposition for all that, if only time, opportunity . . . And behold! My reader, we are precisely there. (S 5:502, F 292)

2. Sentimental Education in the Humanities Insofar as Herder wants to evoke, and not merely describe, the pluralist empathy he so values, he is, as Hume would put it, more of a “painter” than an “anatomist.” Herder’s writings on history, anthropology, language, and literature were never meant as mere intellectual exercises; all were meant to spur the reader toward an empathetic understanding of the whole range of human cultures and worldviews. If an author’s work is to lead to my moral improvement, Herder insists, it must speak to “my heart, not the understanding” (G 1:116, F 13). And Herder believes that scholars speak to the human heart more directly with work in the “humanities,” defined in his 1779 essay on the subject as “those studies and exercises which form in us the feeling of humaneness [Menschlichkeit]” (S 9:304). Of all his studies in the humanities, which he pursued with contagious enthusiasm, Herder was perhaps most enthralled by his study of history. “Since we read everything with a spirit of participating concern,” he explains “the history of humankind is for us humans the most appropriate, the most important, and the most pleasing subject” (S 32:85, M 69). Of all the historians of his age, Herder’s favorite was Hume. What Herder looked for in history was not the meticulous attention to documented details so valued by academic historians today—criteria according to which Hume would hardly emerge as a great historian—but insight into the inner workings of past ages. “If Voltaire has some merit as a historian,” Herder remarks, “then it is in the viewpoint of his often telling remarks about the spirit of events. But the greatest man in this regard, in my opinion, is the historian of Britain, Hume” (G 1:158, F 255). Yet if Hume was, for Herder, the greatest historian of the eighteenth century, he was also the most problematic. Hume [is] certainly one of the greatest minds of our time, whom I always read with reverence,” Herder writes, “but . . . as much as there is that I want to learn from him, among this much the least is—history.” Instead, Herder reads Hume’s account of history to learn “what Hume thinks about it, how the state of things appeared to him, how his judgment flows from his representation, how he imagines the occurrences that have happened and the people, how he situates them, but not necessarily how they happened, how they were” (F 265–66).

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This evaluation of Hume is easy to misinterpret. For Herder, the problem is not that Hume tries to combine the tasks of the philosopher and the historian when the two ought to be separated. To the contrary, Herder maintains that “when philosophy is led by history and history is enlivened by philosophy, then it becomes doubly entertaining and useful” (G 1:159, F 255). The problem is the manner of their combination—one might say that Hume’s history is led by philosophy and his philosophy is enlivened by history, exactly the opposite of what Herder recommends. In other words, Hume first developed a philosophical theory of human nature, one based primarily on introspection. He then turned to history for further evidence of his theory’s timeless truth and telling examples to illustrate it. The results are often brilliant, but they inevitably distort our understanding of the past. This distortion is characteristic of most of the historians of Herder’s era. They may be men of real insight into their own psychology and that of those around them, but when they “model all centuries after the one form of their time . . . Hume! Voltaire! Robertson! . . . What are you in the light of truth?” (S 5:508, F 296). Indeed, Herder complains that this has always been the fatal flaw of the historian. “Almost every one of them from Herodotus to Hume has his favorite time, his favorite people, his favorite ethics in accordance with which he models everything else” (F 296). The proper historian must not approach his subject with a preexisting theory of human nature, but with an imaginative and emotional openness to the difference of the past. Herder urges his readers to “go into the age, the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything [fühle dich in alles hinein]—only now are you on the way toward understanding . . .” (S 5:503, F 292). Since the true history is no matter of dry scholarship, “we cannot cut ourselves off from human feeling [Menschengefühl] when we write or read history,” (G 7:733, F 411). The challenge for empathetic historians is to activate those latent elements of their own psyche that were more fully developed by the different modes of Bildung adopted in the past. Those who engage in this empathetic endeavor successfully will discover how these foreign modes of soul-formation allowed for an astonishing range of cultures that were nonetheless built from common human material. In this way, Herder is convinced, history can be a tool for the development of crosscultural tolerance. With sufficient study of the past, “we will learn to see the value of ages that we now despise—the feeling of universal humanity and bliss will stir” (S 5:567, F 342). Much of what Herder says concerning the study of human history applies, mutatis mutandis, to the study of contemporary human cultures. The popular travel accounts of Herder’s day, early predecessors of today’s cultural anthropology, were generally written with the underlying assumption that those in other climes were decidedly inferior to Europeans, but nonetheless fascinating in their primitive diversity. The typical travel writer wants to


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collect exotic specimens of humanity without ever empathetically entering into the worldview of others, and Herder complains that works “authored in this presumptuous, covetous conceit are indeed written in a European manner but certainly not humanely” (G 7:688, F 385). In contrast to these exoticizing accounts, Herder writes, “faithful travel descriptions lead to the recognition of the humanity in the human being much more surely than do systems.” They “expand our horizon and multiply our sensitivity for every situation of our brothers” (G 7:701–702, F 397). Herder praises the travelers who authored such works as possessing the same empathetic abilities as his ideal historian; together, they are nothing less than “representatives and guardian angels of humanity” (G 7: 689, F 386). Such authors do more moral good for their readers than any overheated painters of virtue or dry anatomists of the moral sentiments. “Without losing a word about this,” Herder observes, “they preach sympathy [Mitgefühl], tolerance, forgiveness, praise, compassion [Bedauren], many-sided culture of the mind, satisfaction, wisdom” (G 7:701-702, F 397). Creative fiction, too, can play an important role in refining the moral sentiments. Unlike later romantics who advocated self-expression for its own sake, Herder always valued creative literature for primarily moral purposes. Herder believed the edifying effects of literature to come, not primarily through the direct preaching of ethical precepts, but instead through enhancement of our sympathetic understanding of others. “In every period and language, poetry embodied the imperfections and the perfections of a nation,” Herder writes; “poetry was a mirror of a nation’s sentiments, the expression of its highest aspirations” (S18:137, Bu 143). Even millennia after the disappearance of classical Greece, for example, “each person who took delight in its writings thereby entered its realm and sympathetically shared in [nahm Teil an] them” (F 378). And just as much of the moral value of creative literature stems from its ability to help us empathetically understand the culture that produced it, no work of literature can be correctly interpreted without an empathetic understanding of its cultural context. The task of the scholar of literature is thus fundamentally the same cultivation of empathetic understanding characteristic of the successful historian or cultural anthropologist. “He is the greatest philologist of the Orient,” Herder insists, “who understands . . . the character of the native language like an Easterner” (G 1:559, F 50). Since analogy to the self is the general means by which we may achieve empathetic understanding of those different from ourselves, understanding the language and literature of distant times and places is a matter of relating these foreign linguistic practices to our own. “Our mind clandestinely compares all tongues with our mother tongue,” Herder observes, (G 1:26–27, M 32–33). A sure sign of the successful empathetic understanding of another culture is the ability to translate that culture’s literature. Successful translation

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requires, not a word-for-word correspondence to the original, but a recreation of the original process of poetic creation; the goal is to transfer the spirit as much as the meaning of the text. The greater the cultural distance between a translator and the author he is translating, the greater the challenge. What is needed in the case of the earliest or most foreign works of literature is “a translator who is at once philosopher, poet and philologist”; such a scholar, Herder predicts, “shall be the morning star in a new epoch of our literature!” (G 1:293, M 187). Finally, it would be impossible to conclude an analysis of Herder’s ideal of humanistic scholarship without some discussion of the study of religion. Herder was no disinterested, secular scholar of comparative religion; he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1765 and remained an active clergyman for the rest of his life. Empathetic understanding may help us better connect with all our fellow human beings, but, for Herder, the ancient Hebrews were of particular interest, since he believed them to be the recipient of divine revelation. Such was Herder’s prayer in a recently discovered unpublished manuscript: “God of the Orient, you speak and your servant listens! But transform also my spirit, so that I may hear you at the place and in the language in which you spoke!” (A 89–90). Through the miracle of Einfühlung, Herder’s spirit was transformed in exactly the manner he so desired. “I am a Jew when I read the Bible,” he claimed (S X:143). The role of the Christian minister is essentially that of the literary translator, communicating the ideas of foreign times and places. It is no coincidence that, for Herder, Martin Luther was the model of both the most perfect Christian minister and of the most successful translator of Scripture.

IV. From Empathetic Understanding to Justice 1. The Rejection of Relativism Under the mistaken notion that to understand all is to approve of all, it has commonly been thought that Herder is a relativist, one who maintains that all values are valid for their respective times and places.25 To be sure, Herder was scornful of the abuse heaped on foreign cultures by those of his contemporaries who believed anything that fell short of eighteenth-century European standards was to be condemned. “Authoritative decrees of praise and blame which we heap onto the whole world from a . . . favorite people,” he declares, “what is your legitimacy!” (S 5:507, F 295). Far from disabling our normative judgments of distant others, however, our empathetic understanding of human difference is intended to improve our judgments of them, robbing these judgments of prejudice and presumption. “It is completely necessary that one be able to leave one’s own time and one’s


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own people in order to judge about remote times and peoples,” Herder explains (G 1:613, F 62).26 The problem with eighteenth-century historians such as Voltaire and Hume is not that they are making moral judgments about those whose values are different from their own; it is that their moral judgments are poor ones. As before he accused Hume of moral skepticism or relativism, Herder now accuses Hume of moral presumption, of naïve faith in unilinear ethical progress and the moral superiority of the present over the past (see S 5:524, F 307–08); both equally represent failures of moral judgment. Indeed, the improvement of our moral judgments is sometimes presented as the very point of Herder’s study of history and culture. “History’s highest interest, its value,” Herder writes, “rests on this human sentiment [Menschenempfindung], the rule of right and wrong” (G 7:733, F 411). The best historians and anthropologists are driven by moral passion; Herder here singles out Bartolomé De Las Casas, author of the 1552 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indian Nation. Herder notes that, in his passionate denunciation of Spanish cruelty, De Las Casas has been accused “of exaggeration and a heated imagination; but no one has convicted him of lying.” Herder himself praises this “heated imagination” as “a noble fire of sympathy [edles Feuer des Mitgefühls] with the unfortunate” (G 7:689, F 387). If he had believed that civilized Europeans are necessarily superior to primitive, aboriginal peoples, De Las Casas’ moral-historical masterwork would have been impossible, but it would have been equally so if the author were a relativist incapable of denouncing cruelty on the part of either the European conqueror or the aboriginal conquered. Throughout the human history presented in the Ideas, Herder is no more willing to refrain from moral judgment of his subjects than was De Las Casas. Herder strives for a balanced appraisal of all he encounters, convinced that humanity is never “capable of pure perfection in a single present condition,” that “shortcoming and virtue always dwell together in one human hut” (S 5: 507–08, F 295). We must judge others only after achieving full empathetic understanding of their position, yet judge them we must, and judge them according to moral standards to which all human beings can be held accountable. In this respect, even Berlin doesn’t move far enough from the false notion that Herder is a moral relativist, at least not when he argues that Herder looks “upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.”27 This particular version of value pluralism cannot be Herder’s view, for Herder claims that, even if there is not a timeless hierarchy within which all human cultures and values can be ranked, there is an absolute standard against which they can all be judged. He calls this standard Humanität, or “humanity.”

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2. The Ideal of Humanität Herder’s notion of Humanität has long puzzled commentators. “It never even seems to have occurred to Herder that an exact definition of Humanität was needed,” A. Gillies observes; indeed, its “seductive vagueness” may have been part of the concept’s deep appeal for the anti-systematic Herder.28 Although Barnard observes, “here and there Herder makes the attempt” to define this central term in his philosophy, it “never quite seems to come off.” Herder cannot capture the relevant notion in a mere definition because “it expressed for him the summum bonum of this world; it enshrined all that was pure, lovely and of good report.”29 Given the difficulty of stating what, precisely, Humanität means for Herder, it is perhaps better to begin with what it does not mean. Humanität is not Menschheit, not “humanity” in the sense of all human beings considered as a group. Rather, it is a normative ideal, which is held to be authoritative for every member of this set. Nor is Humanität to be identified with Menschlichkeit, “humanity” in the sense of humaneness or sympathetic kindness. Herder makes it clear that his Letters on the Advancement of Humanität are not “letters on the advancement of such Menschlichkeit” (G 7:147, A 105–06). That said, humaneness is still both an essential element of Humanität and one of the primary means of its advancement. “Compassionate fellow-feeling [erbarmendenes Mitgefühl] for the suffering of others,” after all, leads “to the taking part in the imperfections of their nature, with the accompanying effort to cope with those imperfections, or to assist in overcoming them.” In this way humane Menschlichkeit and “compassionate fellow-feeling [bedaurendenes Mitgefühl ] . . . bring about Humanität and companionship” (G 7:149, A 107). It is no surprise that while Humanität includes humaneness, it includes much else as well. Herder wishes to include in the concept everything positive that can be said “about the noble constitution of man for reason and freedom, finer senses and impulses, the most delicate and most robust health, the realization of the purpose of the world and the control over it.” Humanität is the name for man’s “destiny”; it is “that which expresses the essence of himself as a human being” (S 13:154, B 267). Such talk of humanity’s “essence” as its “destiny” suggests that Herder understands Humanität as the end set for human beings by their natural potential, hearkening back to Shaftesbury and to the teleological, perfectionist ethics of the ancients. Humanity, according to this ancient conception, is a bundle of potentialities that, by their very nature, authoritatively demand actualization; to fail to realize our distinctly human potential is to defeat the purposes of nature and, in theological interpretations, its divine creator. “Were the question to be whether the human being could become, and should become, more than human, a super-, an other-man [ein Über-, ein Aussermensch] beyond the


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realm of the species,” Herder admits, “every line written in response would be in vain” (G 7:125, A 99). If we can never be more than what we, in light of our potential, essentially already are, we still must always be careful not to fall below the normative standards inscribed in our nature. Although every human being has the potential to achieve Humanität, Herder insists, “the effort to attain this quality is a task which must be carried on incessantly, or we will sink back . . . to raw animality, to brutality [Brutalität]” (G 7: 148, A 106). Herder sees the struggle to actualize human potential wherever he looks in human history. “The essential feature of our life is never enjoyment but always progression” (G 1:773, F 131). Of course, our progress toward Humanität is not consistent in all times and places; it can be “turned out of its way for centuries, and lain as if dormant beneath its ashes” (G 6:667, C 465). Nonetheless, “in all states, in all societies, man has had nothing in view, and could aim at nothing else, but Humanität, whatever may have been the idea he formed of it” (G 6:631, C 439). This last qualification is key, for while Herder believes that all nations and cultures pursue the ideal of Humanität, he also believes that “each bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others” (G 6:649, C 452). Humanität is a product of natural human potential but, as Herder observes, human nature is highly malleable and the particular forms the expression of our potential takes will be determined by the unique form of Bildung we receive in our particular cultural context. Yet in all their diversity, Herder insists, we “everywhere find human beings possessing and exercising the right of forming themselves to a kind of Humanität, as soon as they have discerned it” (G 6: 632–633, C 440). Judging another time and place according to its own standards is thus simultaneously judging it according to universal human standards. Take the example of the aesthetic evaluation of a literary text. It has widely been recognized by commentators that Herder, in his literary criticism, is largely an internal critic of the works under consideration. Yet an author’s self-imposed standards, regardless of their cultural particularities, are at the same time expressions of universal, if underdetermined, human standards. For any given writer of the past, Herder believes, “the bond of language, of one way of thinking, of the passions, of content tied him to humanity . . . Since he was a human being, he composed for human beings” (G 7: 494, E 119). It is therefore possible to reinterpret Humanität, not as a metaphysical conception of human perfection dependent on a traditional conception of natural teleology, but instead as the product of the empathetic understanding of diverse human cultures and their history. As we come to comprehend the standards by which various human groups evaluate themselves, we come to see many underlying similarities across these practices, similarities that can be attributed to the common humanity of all. Similarity, as much as difference,

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enlivens the study of history and anthropology for Herder; we are always “delighted when in the history of our species the echo of all ages and nations reverberates nothing from the noblest mind but human goodness and human truth [Menschengüte und Menschenwahrheit]” (G 6:652, C 454). No metaphysical account of human teleology like Aristotle’s, Shaftesbury’s, or Herder’s own is needed to observe this empirically verifiable unity amidst difference. As with the study of all aspects of human culture, the study of world religion reveals a similar commitment to Humanität underlying all the myriad differences. History shows that religion has been one of the primary forces responsible for the advancement of Humanität and humaneness alike; “religion gave shape to the duties of wedded life, of parents toward children, of children toward parents, of the native toward the stranger, and gradually extended this compassion [Erbarmen] also to the enemy” (G 7:150, F 108). Yet although Herder believes that all human religions reflect a common commitment to Humanität, as a Lutheran minister, he is convinced that true Christianity is the purest expression of this commitment. “The religion of Christ, he insists, “was this Humanität. It was nothing but this, but it was also this in the widest sense, in the purest source, and in the most effective application” (G 7:130, A 103). Surprisingly for an anti-imperialist, Herder was a strong supporter of Christian missionary activity, but only on the condition that missionaries work to spread the true religion of Christ and Humanität. The usual sort of missionary work that tries to rob non-Christian nations of their traditional history, culture, and religion—as the imperialist evangelizing of Herder’s era so often did—is, for Herder, contrary to true Christianity.30 “Christianity was not supposed to destroy national religions, but rather to purify them, to improve them,” Herder explains. “Every nation loves God in its very own way and serves the neighbor in the way that most pleases God” (S 24:44, Bu 103). Universal Christianity, in Herder’s understanding, is thus fully compatible with all the forms of diversity and pluralism he endorses. “Every nation blossoms like a tree from its own roots,” he explains. “Christianity, that is, the true conviction about God and Humanität, is nothing but the pure dew of heaven for all nations that, moreover, does not change any tree’s character or type of fruit and that does not strip any human beings of their own nature” (S 24:47, Bu 105). Indeed, universal Christianity is, for Herder, compatible with full religious pluralism. In a truly Christian world governed by Christ’s ideal of Humanität, “every religion would strive, according to and within its own context, to be the better, no, the best of its kind without measuring and comparing itself to others” (S 24:48, Bu 106). Many of the best Christians in Herder’s imagined Christian utopia would not be recognized as Christians by orthodox adherents to the faith either in Herder’s day or in our own.


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3. Billigkeit and Justice The actualization of natural human potential that Herder calls Humanität necessarily has substantive moral content; like the ancients, Herder believed that the perfection of the individual necessitates the moral treatment of others. “No human being can live for himself alone, much as he might wish to do so,” Herder writes. “The capacities which he attains, the virtues or vices which he acts out, to a lesser or greater degree will bring pain or joy to others” (G 7:124, A 100). The other-directed moral content of Humanität is generally referred to by the term Billigkeit, perhaps best translated as reasonableness or reciprocity, which Herder identifies with Jesus’ injunction to “do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). As is well known, virtually every known human culture has produced some version of this “golden rule.” “The law of reciprocity [Billigkeit],” Herder observes, “is foreign to no nation” (G 7:739–40, F 417). Support of the golden rule by an overlapping consensus of ethical systems across time and place is a matter of historical and anthropological knowledge rather than metaphysical speculation. Herder’s Billigkeit is analogous to the conception of reasonableness developed in the later work of John Rawls. Like Rawls’s reasonableness, it is a moral commitment to fairness or reciprocity, which can be shared across otherwise divergent comprehensive worldviews.31 “There lies in the human species an infinite variety of sentiments [Empfindungen], thoughts and efforts towards the unity of a true, effective purely moral character that belongs to the whole species,” Herder insists. “An infinite variety striving for a unity that lies in all, that advances all. Its name is . . . understanding, reasonableness [Billigkeit], goodness, feeling of humanity” (G 7:750, F 423–24). Unlike Rawls’s reasonableness, however, Herder’s Billigkeit cannot easily be confused with “reason” or “rationality” (Vernunft). That said, as Rawls so often pairs the rational with the reasonable, so too does Herder pair Vernunft and Billigkeit. At one point, Herder even goes so far to define Humanität as “reason and reasonableness [Vernunft und Billigkeit] in all conditions, and in all occupations of human beings” (G 6:651, C 453). Given the earlier-described holism of Herder’s philosophy of mind, of course, Herder’s identification of reason and Billigkeit cannot be understood in a purely rationalist manner. If reason is not an independent faculty, but is instead identified with Besonnenheit or human reflective awareness, then Billigkeit is better understood as a product of our reflectively corrected sentiments rather than the command of an impossibly pure reason. Herder cites sympathy in particular as capable of spurring us to Billigkeit, and capable of being reflectively endorsed as a guide for human conduct. Nonetheless, Herder asserts in the Ideas that “man’s sympathy [Mitgefühl] . . . could easily prove an uncertain and unreliable guide for so restricted and complex a creature in matters that are more remote and less familiar to him.”

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It is for this reason that a providential nature provided us with “a safer guiding rule, that of Billigkeit and truth” (S 13:160, B 270). If the golden rule of Billigkeit is to be found adhered to in every human culture, these passages suggest, it is not because of our shared faculty of human sympathy, but because nature granted us all a separate sense of fairness or reciprocity as an independent and essential element of our common Humanität. Yet Herder also has passages indicating that the sense of Billigkeit ultimately derives from what Hume would call extensive sympathy for humankind, what Herder calls the “sensus humanitatis, sense and sympathy [Sinn und Mitgefühl] for all of humanity” (G 7:742, F 420). Herder’s rather un-Kantian proposal for the achievement of perpetual peace in Letter 119 of the Letters for the Advancement of Humanität, for example, lists, not the rules of cosmopolitan justice, but the “sentiments” or “dispositions of peace” (Friedensgesinnungen), which must be cultivated by people of all nations. Among these are a horror of war, reduced respect for heroic glory, a horror at false statecraft, a purified sense of patriotism, and a feeling of fairness or reciprocity [Gefühl der Billigkeit] toward other nations. Herder describes the last of these as follows: Every nation must gradually come to feel it as unpleasant when another nation gets disparaged and abused; there must gradually awaken a common feeling so that every nation feels itself into the position of every other [jede sich an die Stelle jeder andern fühle] . . . Under whatever pretext someone steps over the border in order to cut off the hair of his neighbor as a slave [or] in order to force his own gods upon him . . . he will find in the heart of every nation an enemy who looks into his own breast and says: “What if that happened to me?” If this feeling grows, then there will arise imperceptibly an alliance of all civilized [gebildeten] nations against every individual presumptuous power. (G 7:725, F 406–07)

If a universal sense of Billigkeit is indeed something that can be discovered as an authoritative—if often flouted—norm in every historical period and cultural tradition, then it must have its origins in some universal feature of human beings. Although Herder sometimes claims that this notion of reciprocity is an independent gift of nature, he also explains that it could be an outgrowth of sympathy extended to encompass every victim of oppression, whatever his or her culture or homeland. Once this sensus humanitatus is widely extended, Herder is convinced, peace and justice will be possible, because “every lively feeling of injustice [Gefühl des Unrechts], accompanied by intelligence and strength, becomes an emancipating power” (G 6:635, C 441). In this way, Herder explains how those with otherwise conflicting moral views can come to share a commitment to a single conception of justice. The overlapping consensus supporting this commitment is the product, not of a


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single faculty of the human mind, but of a reflective progress of sentiments involving the mind as a whole. This progress relies more on the universal human capacity for imaginatively feeling one’s way into the perspective of those radically unlike oneself—coming to share their feelings across boundaries of difference—than it does on the common human capacity to reason. Herder thus allows the sentimentalist account of moral and political reflection familiar from Hume and Smith to function successfully in a world characterized by a remarkable diversity of cultures and worldviews. If it depended on an untenable assumption of human similarity, sentimentalist reflection might function reasonably well in small, isolated, and relatively homogenous societies, but it would prove particularly inappropriate to the diverse and globally connected democracies of today. It is thus Herder’s distinctively pluralist version of reflective sentimentalism that is most appropriately applied to questions of interest in political science, political theory, and political practice today.

C HAPTER

7

Sentimentalism Today

The seventh and final part of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments begins by observing that there are two questions to be considered when examining the principles of morals. “First, wherein does virtue consist? . . . And, secondly, by what power or faculty of the mind is it that this character, whatever it be, is recommended to us?” (TMS VII.1.2, p. 265). Reflective sentimentalism offers an answer to the second of these questions, arguing that true virtue is recommended to us by the mind as a whole. Smith maintains that this second question, taken in isolation, “though of the greatest importance in speculation, is of none in practice” (TMS VII.iii.intro.3, p. 315). Yet Smith underestimates the practical importance of his own sentimentalist theory. To be sure, this theory cannot suggest specific public policies that would never be suggested by moral rationalists. Reflective sentimentalism has no distinctive position on the proper level of progressivity in our tax system or on the proper balance between the claims of individual liberty and those of collective security. But sentimentalism does have a distinctive position on how we reflect morally on these difficult political issues and on why the convictions that emerge at the end of a proper process of reflection wield genuine normative authority. Such a theory cannot help but impact practice. Widespread acceptance of reflective sentimentalism would necessarily influence how we conduct the public deliberation through which we reflect on political questions together. It would also affect how we educate our children to become both competent citizens and morally reflective individuals. Yet pointing out the practical implications of sentimentalism should not be taken to detract from the importance of what Smith calls “speculation.” Although sentimentalism does have some important implications for political practice, it also has important implications for the philosophical study of society and politics—with “philosophy” understood in the eighteenth-century sense to include not only the normative evaluation that is today the work of philosophers and political theorists, but also the empirical scholarship that is now undertaken under the rubric of social science. Before moving on to discuss 168


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the implications of reflective sentimentalism for political practice, this conclusion will first discuss its potential implications for both empirical social science and normative theory, as well as the proper relationship between the two. My discussion of the many potential applications of reflective sentimentalism today should be understood as a series of suggestions for future lines of research. This book has been a work in the interpretive reclamation and theoretical defense of Enlightenment-era sentimentalism. A full treatment of its application to current practical, philosophical, or social-scientific issues will have to wait for a future occasion. That said, it seems useful to conclude this work by at least sketching the contours that this future research might take.

I. Sentimentalism and Social Science 1. The Social Psychology and Neuroscience of Empathy The empirical research of the Enlightenment sentimentalists can largely be classified as what we would today call social psychology—the study of how psychological phenomena are shaped in human social interactions. Enlightenment sentimentalists placed particular emphasis on the power of individuals to share each others’ emotions imaginatively through the faculty that they called “sympathy.” More recent social psychologists have extensively studied this faculty under the newer name “empathy.” Despite this shift in terminology, empathy researchers often credit the Enlightenment sentimentalists as their intellectual forebears.1 A more sustained engagement with the work of Hume, Smith, Herder, and their fellows would provide contemporary social and political psychologists with a considerable store of plausible and interesting hypotheses ready for testing with methodologies more sophisticated than those used in the eighteenth century. Even though few psychologists have explicitly sought to test hypotheses put forward by Enlightenment sentimentalists, many have ended up doing so unknowingly. For example, repeated studies have confirmed that sympathy or empathy is easiest—and hence most likely to be found—when there is either real or perceived similarity between two individuals.2 Social psychologists have also found that situations in which subjects have conflicting interests with the potential objects of their empathy are associated with a reduced level of shared emotion. In situations of competition, subjects’ feelings are instead largely determined by the counterempathetic effects that Hume attributed to the “principle of comparison.”3 Yet when empathy succeeds in leading us to share the feelings of others, there is considerable experimental evidence that it can lead to both altruistic motivation and helping behavior.4 The most dramatic recent findings on empathy can be found, not in the field of experimental social psychology, but in the newer field of neuroscience.

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Recent studies on both humans and other primates have shown that a subset of the motor neurons that fire when we perform a particular action also fire when we observe someone else performing the same action. These so-called “mirror neurons” may be the anatomical basis of many of our experiences of empathy. Neuroscientists believe that the automatic internal representation of the facial and bodily movements of others that mirror neurons provide are then unconsciously translated into an experiential reflection of their emotions in the limbic system.5 On the neurological level, it really does appear that, as Hume observed, our minds are “mirrors to one another” (T 2.2.6.21). The discovery of mirror neurons might be taken to support Rousseau’s account of instinctual pitié and his claim that sympathy is both prior and opposed to all reflection. Unlike Rousseau, however, no current psychologists or neuroscientists suggest that the automatic processes that we share with other animals are the direct source of all human experiences of empathy. As with many psychological phenomena, empathy is probably best understood through a dualprocess model: an automatic, unconscious “low road” deep in the mammalian brain and a reflective “high road” that is uniquely human.6 Indeed, Martin Hoffman has identified no less than five different modes of empathy. Unconscious mimicry of the sort produced by mirror neurons, classical conditioning, and direct association between observer and observed all take the automatic, unreflective low road. Idea-mediated association of the sort described by Hume and imaginative perspective-taking of the sort described by Smith both take the conscious, cognitively demanding high road. According to Hoffman’s theory, the rival “anatomies” of sympathy offered by Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Herder, and their contemporaries are not mutually exclusive. Any or all of them can be at work in any given experience of empathy; this functional redundancy only serves to increase the likelihood that we will come to share any given emotion experienced by another.7 In this way, just as greater attention to the Enlightenment-era sentimentalists could enrich social science today, so too could today’s social science increase our understanding of these eighteenth-century authors and the disagreements among them. Further empirical work along the lines suggested by Hoffman may help demonstrate the degree to which these authors’ seemingly conflicting theories of sympathy may each come close to describing what can be verified through twenty-first century experimental methods.

2. Descriptive Moral Psychology Although social-scientific moral psychology underwent a renaissance beginning in the 1970s, empathy and the emotions initially played a surprisingly marginal role in the field. At this time, empirical research on moral reflection and its development was built around a classificatory scheme designed by Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg advanced a model of six stages of moral


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development, with each higher stage involving more sophisticated reasoning as judged by moral-philosophic criteria. While granting that his work relied on the validity of certain principles of philosophical ethics, Kohlberg nonetheless maintained that no one could rightly reject these uncontroversial principles. Yet only those committed to a particularly Kantian form of Enlightenment rationalism would believe, as do Stage 6 subjects under Kohlberg’s scheme, that “universal moral principles have a rational foundation” that establishes “that persons are ends in themselves and must be treated as such.”8 It can therefore be an amusing exercise for moral and political philosophers to guess where on his scale of development Kohlberg would place their favorite canonical authors.9 The Enlightenment sentimentalists seem to have many of the characteristics of a Stage 3 subject, “an individual in relationships with other individuals . . . aware of shared feelings, agreements, and expectations . . . An individual in this stage reasons by putting him/herself in the other person’s shoes.”10 In addition to describing Enlightenment sentimentalists, Kohlberg’s portrait of the Stage 3 moral reasoner also describes, as Carol Gilligan first observed, the sort of sentimentality stereotypically associated with women.11 Rather than rejecting this stereotype, Gilligan argued that it pointed to two modes of moral judgment—a masculine mode based on abstract rules, and a feminine mode based on care or sympathy for concrete individuals. Feminist advocates of an “ethics of care” have frequently noted the affinity between their distinctive moral “voice” and that of the Enlightenment sentimentalists and deserve considerable credit for reintroducing sentimentalism into contemporary scholarly discourse.12 Of course, all of the Enlightenment sentimentalists discussed in this book were male, but Gilligan has always identified the different voices of her study as “characterized not by gender but theme.”13 Their association with gender is an empirical observation—an observation we now have very good empirical grounds for doubting.14 Feminist theorists and moral psychologists have also come to reject a second key feature of Gilligan’s theory: the contrast between justice or fairness on the one hand and sympathy or care on the other. Like the Enlightenment sentimentalists before them, many now argue that our emotional ties to each other play an integral role in our reflective commitment to both morality in general and justice in particular. Hoffman’s empathy-centered theory of moral development—the most comprehensive, gender-neutral, sentimentalist rival to Kohlberg’s rationalist paradigm currently available—places shared feelings of unfairness at the heart of our commitment to justice.15 Efforts by others are also underway to integrate the extensive literature on empathy into the previously separate literature on the psychological development of moral principles such as justice.16 Yet although empirical moral psychologists are now more likely to take inspiration from Hume than from Kant, current moral-psychological theories

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often bear little resemblance to the reflective sentimentalism described in this book. This may be attributable to the dominance of dual-process psychological models under which emotions are confined exclusively to the automatic, unreflective low road. Rather than treating emotion as an integral part of conscious reflection, this dominant model instead sees emotion as a source (among others) of the unconscious heuristics by which we make most of our decisions unreflectively.17 Although many social scientists (most notably behavioral economists) emphasize the ways in which heuristics and biases can lead to irrational behavior, all acknowledge the adaptive advantages of relying on such short-cuts. Without them, practical decision-making would be impossibly difficult, relying as it would on our limited powers of conscious reflection, powers still associated almost exclusively with the faculty of reason. In keeping with the dual-process model of decision-making in general, recent studies of moral judgment often use a dual-process model of moral evaluation, with a quick, unconscious, and emotional low road that the majority of us use most of the time and a slow, reflective, and rational high road that is traveled far less frequently. Jonathan Haidt argues that most moral reasoning is merely rationalization in the negative sense, offering after-thefact justifications of our immediate, unreflective emotional reactions.18 Marc Hauser has gone even further and speculates that our moral emotions might themselves be after-the-fact responses to evaluations so automatic and immediate as to avoid affective valence, evaluations based on the unconscious operations of an inborn moral sense along roughly the lines advocated by Hutcheson.19 While Haidt and Hauser both draw on elements of Enlightenment sentimentalism, both depart from it by focusing on automatic rather than reflective forms of moral evaluation and do little to undermine the rationalist claim that conscious moral reflection is a matter of reason alone.20 Even if it is true, as Haidt and Hauser claim, that most of our moral judgments are automatic and unconscious most of the time, it nonetheless remains true that conscious reflection is capable of leading us to revise or reject these unconscious evaluations. There is no reason why the empirical study of moral psychology should limit itself to the unconscious heuristics that can serve as short-cuts around the difficult work of moral reflection rather than address the processes involved in moral reflection itself. Future empirical research might help support the theory that moral sentiments are not relegated to the low road of unreflective judgment and that the high road of self-conscious reflection is far from the exclusive property of pure reason.

3. Political Science and Political Psychology With the emergence of political psychology as a subfield of political science, the methods of social psychologists and neuroscientists are now increasingly being used to study the formation of our political convictions. Work on the


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relationship between subjects’ political opinions and the degree to which they sympathize or empathize with others is now underway in psychology and political science departments alike. Perhaps the most widely replicated finding is that empathy with members of stigmatized out-groups—or even just a tendency to readily empathize with others in general—is highly correlated with tolerance for members of such out-groups and support for public policies that advance their interests.21 As political scientists continue to draw further insight from the work of both Enlightenment sentimentalists and the latter-day psychologists who continue their descriptive project, further evidence on the precise relationship between sympathy or empathy and the formation of citizens’ political opinions is likely to emerge. Unlike the Enlightenment sentimentalists, however, most political scientists still think of political reflection as an entirely rational affair. Under the dominant paradigm of emotions as sources of unconscious heuristics, even those political scientists who emphasize the importance of emotion in human decision-making have done so in ways that leave the rationalist account of reflection largely untouched. Perhaps the most influential recent view of the role of emotions in determining political behavior has been the “affective intelligence theory” developed by George E. Marcus and his colleagues.22 Although its name may suggest otherwise, affective intelligence theory does not actually attribute any significant role to emotion, imagination, or other nonrational elements of the human mind in political reflection per se. Instead, it argues that the important work of emotions is to determine when reflection is needed. In normal circumstances, the theory claims, our usual emotions serve to reinforce our unreflective habits of thought and action. When external stimuli spark negative emotions such as anxiety, however, we are prodded to begin the difficult work of political reflection and deliberation. Without this emotional spur, the needed political work would never commence. Since affective intelligence theory focuses on the largely unconscious processes that instigate political reflection rather than re-describing the role of the various faculties of the mind during the reflective process itself, Marcus describes his perspective as “fundamentally complementary to and commensurate with rational choice approaches.”23 This is not to say that recent empirical research in political psychology cannot help overcome the rationalist account of moral and political reflection. Consider recent findings on the relationship between levels of political sophistication and levels of emotion in political contexts. The rationalist theory of reflective autonomy, combined with a sufficiently elitist view of who is likely to achieve such autonomy, might lead one to embrace the common belief that the masses are more likely to be swayed by emotional appeals than are political sophisticates.24 There is increasing evidence, however, that the opposite may be the case. Ted Brader has found higher levels of emotional impact among political sophisticates watching political advertisements than

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among political novices, as well as a greater probability that sophisticates will change their political opinions on the basis of this emotion.25 Similarly, Darren Schreiber and his colleagues found greater activation in the areas of the brain associated with empathy in the fMRI scans of political sophisticates viewing the faces of politicians than they did in the scans of novices.26 Of course, there are many ways to explain these results without adopting the theory of reflective sentimentalism. Schreiber explicitly sees his findings as supporting the dual-process model under which empathy and the emotions function automatically and unconsciously. He argues that political sophisticates can rely on automatic processing to a greater degree than do nonsophisticates, just as riding a bicycle is an automatic process for experts but a conscious one for beginners. Brader, in turn, explains his findings by noting that political matters are simply more important in the lives of political sophisticates than in those of novices. Emotions automatically invoked by stimuli deeply relevant to one’s life may then, in keeping with affective intelligence theory, spark rational reflection that leads one to change one’s behavior without these emotion playing any significant role in reflection itself.27 As research on this subject progresses, however, it would not be surprising if the most parsimonious explanation for the high levels of emotion and empathy among political sophisticates turned out to be the sentimentalist claim that reflectively refined moral sentiments are at the heart of all sophisticated moral and political thinking.28

II. Sentimentalism and Normative Theory 1. Reflective Sentimentalism: Between Facts and Norms Moral and political philosophers have long been interested in what constitutes proper ethical reflection, as well as why the convictions we reach through proper reflection wield genuine normative authority. Insofar as it proposes an empirically informed answer to these questions, reflective sentimentalism represents an obvious substantive contribution to normative theory. Some, however, have doubted that normative theory could benefit from being empirically informed in this way. Many who reject the value of empirical inquiry for normative philosophy have taken their inspiration from Kant, who, as we saw in chapter 5, held a position of roughly this sort. Ironically, however, many others who do so have taken inspiration from a misinterpretation of Hume, from the mistaken belief that “Hume’s law” draws a sharp boundary between “is” and “ought.” Closer attention to Hume’s work and that of his fellow sentimentalists cures us of this confusion. Enlightenment sentimentalism’s greatest potential contribution to scholarship today is thus


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a matter of neither empirical social science nor normative philosophy alone, but rather a matter of the proper relationship between the two. In this respect, as in so many others, Enlightenment sentimentalism is very different from most Anglo-American ethics of the past century, carried out in the shadow of G. E. Moore’s attack on the alleged “naturalistic fallacy.”29 When twentieth-century metaethicists, such as the so-called “emotivists,” drew inspiration from Hume, they generally looked to him for guidance in their a priori analysis of moral concepts—a task that was never of much interest to Hume himself.30 In recent years, however, the conception of philosophy in general—and moral philosophy in particular—as wholly removed from empirical inquiry has come under increasing attack. Current proponents of “experimental philosophy” (or “X-Phi” for short) explicitly defend this movement as a restoration rather than a revolution, as an attempt in the spirit of Hume to reintroduce “the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (T Title Page).31 Unsurprisingly, taking empirics seriously often leads moral philosophers toward sentimentalist conclusions; concurrent with the rise of “X-Phi” there has been a recent resurgence of empirically informed moral philosophy in a roughly sentimentalist mode.32 My own project can be seen as an attempt to help bring this empirically informed sentimentalist revival to normative political theory, where it has yet to have the same impact it has had in moral philosophy, and to apply it to questions of political justice.33 There is one important difference, however, between how many moral philosophers make use of empirical evidence today and how it was used by the reflective sentimentalists described in this book. Rather than returning to the constructive moral use of empirical psychology, recent experimental philosophers are more likely to return to its destructive use, as exemplified by such “genealogical” debunkers of morality as Mandeville, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, explicitly doubts that empirical research could “establish any positive claim that a belief is justified.” It might, however, “establish negative conclusions about when or how moral beliefs are not justified . . . If the process that produced a belief is not reliable in the circumstances, and if the believer ought to know this, then the believer is not justified in forming or holding the belief without inferential confirmation.”34 If we accept a dual-process model in which emotions play a role only in unreliable and unconscious (albeit efficient) heuristic processing, then one obvious way to debunk some or all of our moral commitments is to show that they stem from this undependable low road. Moral philosophers have been particularly intrigued by recent empirical research suggesting that some of our moral commitments may have a primarily rational basis and that others may have a primarily emotional basis. The hypothesis that our characteristically deontological conclusions are typically the product of the emotional low road, and that our characteristically consequentialist conclusions are not,

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has been supported by both fMRI studies35 and studies of patients with selective brain damage.36 Parallel findings have also been found in judgments about free will and determinism, in which compatabilist judgments are more likely to be produced in emotional contexts and incompatibilist judgments in unemotional contexts.37 On the assumption that judgments that result from automatic emotions are less reliable than those that stem from conscious reason, these studies have been interpreted to lend support to consequentialism over deontology and incompatibilism over compatiblism.38 As has already been observed by others, a moral sentimentalist will necessarily reject such arguments.39 Yet we must be careful to recognize why. The reflective sentimentalist does not maintain (with a falsely caricatured Hume) that since reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, the dictates of passion are always to be privileged over the dictates of reason. To the contrary, reflective sentimentalists begin by questioning the theoretical assumptions behind these empirical findings, rejecting as they do the dual-process model under which emotion is consigned to the automatic, unreliable low road of heuristic-based decision-making. Independent of this, they also question the normative premise behind such reasoning: the idea that convictions stemming from emotions (automatic or otherwise) are necessarily suspect. But rather than embracing all of our sentimental convictions, reflective sentimentalists insist that these sentiments be subjected to the rigors of psychologically holistic reflection. Such reflection must be informed by all available empirical information about the nature and origins of our convictions, but this information may just as easily help us to embrace our convictions as it may lead us to reject them. Before the difficult work of sentimentalist reflection commences, it is therefore impossible to say on the basis of the relevant empirical data alone what the outcome will be. After all, the sentimentalists of the Enlightenment differed among themselves about these questions—Smith defended a form of liberal deontology while Hume defended a sort of protoutilitarian conservative consequentialism—and we can only imagine how these disagreements would have been affected if they had access to today’s scientific research. We can be sure, however, that no reflective sentimentalist would ever reject deontology or compatibilism (or their opposites) on the basis of evidence that they stem from the emotional side of our nature, but only on the basis that a mind committed to these views could never bear the test of its own holistic survey.

2. The Sentimentalist Method of Normative Theory Understanding the nature of moral and political reflection is only a small part of the work of normative theory. Normative political theorists must also carry out this process of reflection themselves and suggest answers to the difficult


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ethical questions that face any political community. If the sentimentalist account of this process is correct, then the reflective work of political theorists must draw on the mind as a whole. Although reflective sentimentalism can be classified along a number of other theories that emphasize the importance of emotions in political philosophy, none of these theories has yet to succeed in transforming mainstream political theory itself from a dispassionate to an impassioned reflective practice. Of course, anatomizing our moral sentiments—and the place of passion, imagination, and sympathy in their formation—need not itself be an emotional endeavor. Hume, for one, always thought of himself as a dispassionate man doing dispassionate work, even as he defended the thesis that justice and other moral conceptions could never be the product of reason alone. Yet while anatomizing proper moral sentiments may not be passionate work, painting these sentiments—goading others onward in the progress of sentiments necessary for achieving reflective equilibrium—must be. Shaftesbury and Herder were precisely such painters of proper moral sentiments, and their works take on a markedly poetic and passionate tone. While Hume and (to a lesser extent) Smith mostly describe their readers’ moral sentiments, Shaftesbury and Herder were primarily concerned with shaping them. Both of these modes of sentimentalist writing can provide viable models for reflective sentimentalist political theory today. While Hume’s approach suggests that political theorists should take greater notice of the descriptions of actual human sentiments developed by social scientists, Herder’s approach suggests that they should also pay greater attention to the invocations of these sentiments in literature, history, religion, and the arts. Herder’s sentimentalist theorizing is an essentially humanistic enterprise, calling on all the powers of the human mind to establish empathetic understanding across otherwise insurmountable barriers of difference. This understanding then provides the insight necessary to take the morally appropriate stance on difficult political issues. Herder’s condemnation of European imperialism and his insistence on cultural diversity is not the product of mere logical argument, but rests on an understanding of human difference built from his extensive studies of comparative literature, world history, comparative religion, and all the other fields of humanistic scholarship—fields that require imaginative insight and emotional sensitivity as much as they require sound reasoning. In an age in which philosophy is often associated with applied logic—the more formal the better—Herder and Shaftesbury remind us that another mode of theorizing is available that is capable of producing convincing moral and political arguments. Although it has not been the goal of this book to make impassioned normative arguments in Herder’s style, a defense of reflective sentimentalism should make a humanistic and psychologically holistic form of political argumentation more attractive among political theorists and political actors alike.

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III. Sentimentalism and Political Practice 1. Reflective Sentimentalism and Democratic Deliberation The suggestion that moral and political arguments should rely on emotion and imagination as much as they do on reason is likely to be greeted with real suspicion among both theorists and practitioners of democratic politics. The widespread belief that emotional decision-making is antithetical to democratic self-governance is entirely understandable if we accept the rationalist theory of reflective autonomy.40 Under this theory, rational arguments ask for our fellows’ free reflective consent. By contrast, an appeal to the emotions is essentially manipulative, seeking as it does to win others’ compliance outside the reflective process. When citizens assent to a proposed policy on the basis of rational arguments, the collective self-legislation that results can be understood as the authoritative product of the individual self-legislation of each. In this way, the principles to which we assent through rational reflection are expressions of our autonomy. When citizens assent to a proposed policy on the basis of appeals to their emotions or imagination, however, the consensus that results has been heteronomously produced through psychological processes outside of—and opposed to—the essentially rational process of autonomous self-legislation. A consensus grounded on appeals to emotion is thus no more an expression of individual reflective autonomy than a consensus grounded on force or fraud. Recent critics of Jürgen Habermas have identified an argument along these lines in Habermas’s theory concerning which forms of speech are permissible, and which impermissible, within proper public deliberation. Borrowing the terminology of J. L. Austin, Habermas famously insists, “all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” when addressing one another in public deliberation, avoiding all “perlocutionary effects.”41 Habermas’s critic Danielle Allen interprets this to mean that speakers must avoid “all those maneuvers by which a speaker engages with the emotions and subjective states of her listener. In conventional parlance, this means avoiding rhetoric, which has a bad name precisely because it engages not only with reason but also with emotions.”42 Whether Habermas actually excludes emotion from his preferred mode of deliberation is an interpretive question far too complicated to address here. At least in recent works, Habermas admits that “without empathetic sensitivity of each person to everyone else, no solution deserving universal consent will result from the deliberation” and that a “mature capacity for moral judgment” thus depends on the “integration of cognitive operations and emotional dispositions and attitudes.”43 Despite these recent concessions to the importance of emotion in public deliberation, however, Habermas’s political theory clearly relies far more heavily on citizens’ reason than on their


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emotional and imaginative faculties.44 If this tendency has been muted in Habermas’s own recent work, it is still noticeable in the work of many “deliberative” or “discursive” democratic theorists whose accounts of proper public deliberation have been influenced by him.45 Of course, not all deliberative democrats share this emphasis on the importance of pure reason to public deliberation. Some are willing to concede a role to the nonrational faculties of the human mind in interpersonal political deliberation analogous to the role that Marcus gives them in sparking intrapersonal political reflection. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, for example, have recently argued for “the legitimacy of modes of persuasion in politics that combine reason and passion.” Yet they consider such modes essentially “nondeliberative” means of spurring deliberation on hitherto neglected topics.46 Others are even willing to allow some affectivity into the deliberative process itself, but only if the particular emotional appeals in question help us more readily accept the principles that would have proven acceptable to all on the basis of reason alone.47 Habermas’s more adamant critics, however, insist that emotion and imagination deserve as central a role in public deliberation as reason, and refuse to give rhetoric a subordinate place to rational argumentation. Allen, for example, rejects Habermas’s claim that perlocution necessarily involves deception or concealed manipulation of others, defending the art of rhetoric through an analysis of Aristotle’s work on the subject and through an account of rhetoric’s central place in advancing justice during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.48 Yet as long as autonomous reflection is seen as essentially rational, rhetorical appeals to others’ emotions are going to be seen as suspect in a way that logical appeals to others’ reason are not. One cannot overcome the rationalist fear that emotional appeals in public deliberation are threats to citizens’ reflective autonomy simply by noting that rhetoric has a long and honorable history in the service of worthy political causes. At best, this establishes that public deliberation may sometimes have to sacrifice the individual reflective autonomy of imperfectly rational citizens in order to pursue the cause of social justice more effectively. If rhetoric is to be seen as enhancing, rather than diminishing, the reflective autonomy of citizens in public deliberation, one must instead argue, with the Enlightenment sentimentalists, that emotion and imagination are essential elements of autonomous reflection itself. The sentimentalist conception of reflective autonomy thus makes a vital contribution to recent attempts to reclaim the ancient rhetorical tradition as a model for political deliberation today, a contribution that recent defenders of rhetoric have yet to appreciate fully.49 To be sure, the emotions and imagination are still subject to manipulation by eloquent demagogues. It is important to realize, however, that reason is equally susceptible to manipulation through clever sophistry. Just as rationalists must hope that the truth finds defenders of sufficient sagacity to show the logical flaws in any sophistries used against

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it, so too must sentimentalists hope that the good finds defenders of sufficient sensitivity and eloquence to show the shallowness of their opponent’s rhetoric. Neither rationalist nor sentimentalist argumentation is incapable of being abused for nefarious purposes, and—once we accept an understanding of autonomy as self-legislation by the mind as a whole— neither is inherently more manipulative than the other. Just as the only appropriate response to a rational argument in defense of falsehood is a better argument, so too is the only appropriate response to rhetoric in defense of injustice better rhetoric. This superior rhetoric will spark our sympathy with those suffering from injustice, suffering that the unjust rhetoric of their oppressors was meant to obscure.

2. Reflective Sentimentalism, Civic Education, and Citizenship Once we have found the appropriate means of respecting individual reflective autonomy in our collective public deliberations, we must then ask how we can ensure that citizens will become competent, reflectively autonomous participants in this deliberation. Insofar as sentimentalism has a distinctive position on the nature of reflective autonomy and the proper means of respecting this autonomy in public deliberation, so too will it have a distinctive position on the proper means by which children can develop their reflective capacities. Specifically, sentimentalism argues that these reflective capacities can only be developed through the education of the whole person—emotion and imagination included.50 As with most theories of civic education, the sentimentalist theory agrees that the first school of citizenship is the family. It is in the family that children first develop their emotional and imaginative as well as rational capacities, most importantly the capacity to sympathize with the feelings of others. Social psychologists have found significant evidence that close and secure family relationships are associated with a heightened capacity for sympathy or empathy.51 It is for this reason that a sentimentalist theory of civic education must begin with a sentimentalist theory of the family, only then moving to a sentimentalist theory of formal education. Once a child enters school, a sentimentalist theory of civic education would pay as much attention to the subtle psychological effects of the classroom environment as it does to the explicit content of the curriculum. Extensive research has demonstrated that the best way to increase empathy among people with diverse backgrounds is to put them in close contact with one another on a daily basis in ways that drive home their underlying similarities. In order to prevent the development of what Hume identified as the sympathydestroying “principle of comparison,” this diverse group should be encouraged to cooperate in pursuit of common goals rather than compete for scarce resources.52 A diverse yet cooperative student body may then do as much or


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more to help students in their progress of moral sentiments than could any formal curriculum in civic or moral education. This is not to imply, however, that a sentimentalist educational theory would remain silent on curricular matters. To the contrary, sentimentalism is likely to join in the emerging consensus among educational theorists that a rigorous liberal arts education can be a powerful means for developing the capacities necessary for autonomous reflection. Reflective sentimentalists, however, offer a distinctive defense of the liberal arts by focusing on their power to lead students through the progress of sentiments, which they see as central to proper moral and political reflection, most notably by cultivating what Martha Nussbaum has called “the narrative imagination.”53 The task of a sentimentalist education in the humanities is not merely to help develop the rational faculties, but also the empathetic, interpretive abilities that are the key to a Herderian understanding of history, literature, and religion. When faced with the full spectrum of human diversity, the imagination may find it difficult to bridge barriers of difference, but with sufficient effort Herder is convinced that an empathetic understanding of any of our fellow human beings is always possible. A proper education in the liberal arts will thus necessarily involve cultivating students’ entire minds in order to give them the powers necessary to understand even those most different from themselves. In this way, students will be prepared for citizenly moral and political reflection on issues arising from human differences and disagreements. A sentimentalist educator is thus neither a neutral provider of mere information nor an ideological indoctrinator, but rather a catalyst for the reflective and autonomous progress of sentiments necessary for mature moral judgment. Implicit in a sentimentalist education is an ideal of citizenship that stems directly from the sentimentalist understanding of reflective autonomy. In recent decades, liberal-democratic political theorists have come to recognize that their preferred system of government is not neutral on the subject of what constitutes human excellence, but instead advances an ideal of autonomy and demands that citizens develop the reflective capacities necessary to approach this ideal.54 An understanding of what reflective autonomy actually involves—the psychological capacities it requires us to develop, the faculties of the mind upon which it relies—will thus necessarily shape both our theoretical understanding of these liberal-democratic ideals and our practical quest to actualize them. The liberal ideal of autonomy is perhaps the most important legacy of the Enlightenment. Yet despite their agreement on the fundamental value of reflective autonomy, the great moral and political thinkers of the Enlightenment were divided as to precisely what such autonomy requires. The dominant tradition of Enlightenment thought identifies reflective autonomy with the authoritative legislation of reason alone, while the sentimentalist countertradition sees authoritative self-legislation as the work of the mind as

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a whole. The goal of this book has been to reclaim this latter, often neglected stream of eighteenth-century moral and political thought and to defend it against some of the criticisms to which it is liable. Enlightenment sentimentalism offers a powerful alternative to Enlightenment rationalism that can only serve to enrich political philosophy, political science, and political practice today.

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Introduction 1. For the most influential account of reflective equilibrium in recent political theory, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971/1999, especially pp. 40–46. 2. It is important to note that this political metaphor took a religious detour when, in pre-Enlightenment moral philosophy, God was seen as the authoritative legislator of moral standards. The Enlightenment notion of reflective moral autonomy developed more as a reaction to this theistic conception of moral legislation than as a direct application of political ideas to moral philosophy. For a thorough history, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 3. Moral-philosophical reflective sentimentalism in this sense must be distinguished from the concurrent movement of literary sentimentalism, associated with such emotionally overwrought eighteenth-century works as Rousseau’s The New Heloise, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, and J. W. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The relationship between moral-philosophical and literary sentimentalism in the Enlightenment era was a complex one, and largely beyond the scope of this current project. For now, suffice it to say that it was literary, not moral-philosophical, sentimentalism that gave the term “sentimentalist” the unfortunately mawkish connotations that it carries today. My attempt to save this word from its negative connotations is a deliberate act of linguistic reappropriation. 4. Although both Enlightenments share a commitment to the ideal of reflective autonomy, the terminology here is my own, and was not used in the eighteenth century. My name for this shared ideal intentionally combines terms from the two Enlightenments. On the one hand, it was the sentimentalists who spoke most often of “reflection” and of humans as “reflective” beings; rationalists of course preferred to speak of humans as “rational” beings. On the other hand, it was the rationalists who most often spoke of “autonomy.” Yet the sentimentalists clearly saw the reflection they describe as autonomous, while the rationalists clearly saw the autonomy they describe as reflective, even as each avoided the other’s terminology.

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Notes to Pages 4–8

5. For a recent work that attributes a number of the virtues I ascribe to the sentimentalist Enlightenment to the “British Enlightenment,” see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. 6. Rawls, Political Liberalism. Revised Paperback Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993/1996, p. xl. Similar descriptions of the “Enlightenment project” as inherently rationalist can be found in the works of many major recent moral and political philosophers from across the ideological spectrum: from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault on the radical left to Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, and Ernst Cassirer in the liberal center to Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre on the right, with countless more examples possible. I am grateful to Dennis C. Rasmussen for sharing his as-yet unpublished manuscript on the topic of contemporary anti-Enlightenment thought. 7. See, for example, the caricature of eighteenth-century philosophy throughout Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: Public Affairs, 2007 and George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18thCentury Brain. New York: Viking, 2008. Cheryl Hall similarly attacks “liberal rationalism” and its “Enlightenment-based privileging of reason” throughout The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. New York: Routledge, 2005 (see especially pp. 5–6). It is also worth noting that Hume is an object of criticism rather than an inspiration for Michael Walzer in Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004 (see especially pp. 115–16). Instead of the Enlightenment sentimentalists, the current reclamation of emotion in normative political theory generally takes inspiration from the ancients, particularly Aristotle. See, for example, Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle and Gender. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 and Marlene K. Sokolon, Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. For a broad spectrum of recent work on the subject, see Rebecca Kingston and Leonard Ferry, eds., Bringing the Passions Back In: The Emotions in Political Philosophy. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. 8. MacIntyre famously argued that if “Hume’s law” is interpreted to mean “that no set of nonmoral premises can entail a moral conclusion . . . then the first breach of Hume’s law was committed by Hume; that is, the development of Hume’s moral theory does not square with what he is taken to assert about ‘is’ and ‘ought.’” Alasdair MacIntyre, “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,’” in V. C. Campbell, ed. Modern Studies in Philosophy: Hume. New York: Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 240–64, p. 242. 9. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Edited by Barbara Herman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 98–100. Rawls, of course, is a self-proclaimed Kantian, and offers his interpretation of Hume only to reject Hume’s theories in favor of Kant’s. Elsewhere, I have examined the possibility that Rawls protests too much on this point, and that his theory of justice owes as much to Hume and Smith as it does to Kant; see Michael L. Frazer, “John Rawls: Between Two Enlightenments.” Political Theory, 35:6, December 2007, pp. 756–80. (Much

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of the discussion of the respective natures of the rationalist and sentimentalist Enlightenments in this introduction appeared in an earlier form in this article.) 10. These two forms of reflective stability are introduced in Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity. With responses by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams. Edited by Onora O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 55 ff. That my interpretation of them differs in important ways from Korsgaard’s will be made clear in chapters 1 and 2. 11. Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 451. 12. Ibid., p. 433. There is a strong proto-Darwinian strain throughout Enlightenment sentimentalism. Although it will not be a major theme of this book, this protoDarwinism would be a fruitful focus of future research, both for purposes of informing contemporary moral philosophy and (given that Darwin himself was an avid reader of Hume) for purposes of an intellectual genealogy of Darwinism. A Darwinian approach to understanding the moral sentiments may prove extremely fruitful for philosophers and scientists alike.

Chapter 1 1. See Sharon R. Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), which acknowledges this problem directly (pp. 13–14), but focuses on Hume nonetheless. 2. Sheldon Wolin, “Hume and Conservatism,” in Donald W. Livingston and James T. King, eds., Hume: A Re-Evaluation. New York: Fordham University Press, 1976, pp. 239–56, p. 253. 3. Hutcheson added an explicit discussion of how “under this name [of benevolence] are included very different dispositions of the soul” in later editions of his Inquiry; see IBV 2.3.1, p. 231. 4. Hume may have been one of the first Anglophone philosophers to use “emotions” to refer to psychological forces rather than to movements in a physical sense. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Also see the terminological appendix in Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, pp. 481–86. Another invaluable resource is, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary. (The OED is available online, continually updated, at dictionary.oed.com.) 5. The analogous words in many languages are based on the ideas of either “suffering with” or “feeling with”; an elegant and exhaustive discussion of these terms can be found in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper Collins, 1984, pp. 19–20. See also Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 301–04 and Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 29–30. 6. “Pity,” comes from the from the Latin pietas, which late in the medieval era came to mean compassion in the narrow sense of shared suffering, while also retaining its original meaning of “piety.” Today, the word has come to take on subtle

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Notes to Pages 18–25 connotations of condescension, but it had no such connotations in the early modern era, either in English or in any of the Romance languages. For the classic defense of this focus on suffering, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education (1762). Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 221. “Empathy,” however, was a term as yet unavailable to Hume and Smith. It was coined by social psychologists in the twentieth century from the Greek (empathos) as a rough translation of the German term Einfühlung and today means something like sympathy in the broad sense. Einfühlung, in turn, has its origins in J. G. Herder’s conception of “feeling one’s way into” the perspective of another; a discussion of Herder on this topic can be found in chapter 6 of the present work. Shaftesbury defends his unusual interpretation of the Latin phrase in a long footnote at SC 3.1, p. 65. Hutcheson explains his at SM 2.1.5, p. 119. Among the more vociferous neo-Stoics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries available in English are Antoine Le Grand (see Man Without Passion; or, the Wise Stoick, according to the sentiments of Seneca. Translated Anonymously, London, 1675) and Guillaume Du Vair (see Moral Philosophy of the Stoics. Translated by T. J[ames], London, 1598). For more on the Stoic revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Schneewind, 1998, pp. 170–75. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Edited with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994, I.vi.46, p. 32. See, for example, IBV 2.2.8, p. 111 and SC 2:2, p. 59. See IBV 2: Introduction, p. 86; ENC 1:1:3, pp. 24–27; and SMP 1.3, Vol. I, pp. 38–52. For an attempt to reframe Butler’s psychological argument as a conceptual argument, which then rightly concludes that, understood as such, it is powerfully suggestive but not quite successful, see John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 441–46. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) 2.1.2. Edited with an Introduction by Peter H. Nidditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 104–5. For an almost identical argument by Hume, see T 3.1.2.6. See Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco, 2006. See also Hauser, Liane Young, and Fiery Cushman, “Reviving Rawls’s Linguistic Analogy: Operative Principles and the Causal Structure of Moral Actions,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed. Moral Psychology. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, vol. 2, pp. 107–44. Ron Mallon, “Reviving Rawls’s Linguistic Analogy Inside and Out,” in SinnottArmstrong, ed., 2008, vol. 2, pp. 145–56, p. 154. See also Jesse J. Prinz, “Resisting the Linguistic Analogy: A Commentary on Hauser, Young and Cushman,” in Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 157–70 and Nathan A. Fox and Melanie Killen, “Morality, Culture and the Brain: What Changes and What Stays the Same,” in Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 313–16. For a further discussion of these debates, see chapter 7 of this book. For Hutcheson’s explanation of these two meanings of “obligation,” see ENC 2.1, p. 146 and SMP 2.3.6, vol. I, p. 264.


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20. For a summary of these debates, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780. Volume 2: Shaftesbury to Hume. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, especially pp. 154–237. For a recent defense of the rationalist reading of Shaftesbury, see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought” 1640–1740. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 176–206, especially pp. 184– 90. For an argument that Shaftesbury is attempting to maintain both rationalist and sentimentalist positions simultaneously, see Michael B. Gill “Shaftesbury’s Two Accounts of the Reason to be Virtuous,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 38:4 (October 2000), pp. 529–48. 21. Letter 13, September 17, 1739, To Francis Hutcheson, in L I:33. 22. Sharon Krause thus argues that it is a virtue of the roughly Humean approach to sentimentalist judgment which she develops that “one can imagine” this account being embraced by a religious believer (Civil Passions, op. cit., p. 131). Yet there is no need to imagine such a believer when history provides us with concrete examples in the persons of Butler and Hutcheson. 23. Letter 19, January 10, 1743, To Francis Hutcheson, in L I:47. 24. For another argument along these lines, see Michael B. Gill, “A Philosopher in his Closet: Reflexivity and Justification in Hume’s Moral Theory,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 26:2 (1996), 231–56. 25. Korsgaard, 1996, p. 55, 62. According to Baier, Hume’s Treatise is essentially a long search “for mental operations that can bear their own survey, sorting those that can . . . from those that get into ‘manifest contradictions’ or self-destructive conflict when turned on themselves,” (Annette C. Baier, Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 97). 26. For Hutcheson’s account of the formation of government through a social contract, see PMIC3.5.1–2, pp. 240–41 and SMP 3.5, vol. 2, pp. 225–40. 27. For further arguments by Shaftesbury against the social contract as a foundation for justice, see MPR 2:4, pp. 175–77. 28. Letter 19, January 10, 1743, To Francis Hutcheson, in L I:47. 29. Peter Strawson re-introduces the idea of resentment as an emotion directed only at causes of suffering to which we attribute agency in his seminal article “Freedom and Resentment.” (In Gary Watson, ed., Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 59–80).

Chapter 2 1. John Stuart Mill, for example, described Hume as “the profoundest negative thinker on record,” and denied that Hume had any positive views of comparable significance. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham.” London and Westminster Review. August 1838. Reprinted in Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Edited with an Introduction by Mary Warnock. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 52–87, p. 55. For a more recent defense of Mill’s position, see Francis Snare, Morals, Motivation and Convention: Hume’s Influential Doctrines. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 34. 2. David Miller, for example, argues that the mistaken view that Hume utterly subjects reason to the whims of passion comes from “concentrating too much on the

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Notes to Pages 40–42 negative side of Hume’s theory of morals, just as one can distort Hume’s epistemology by looking only at his attack on rationalism [in that field as well]” (David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 40). The repeated division of Hume’s treatment of any given subject into a negative and a positive phase is also a theme developed in Barry Stroud, Hume. New York: Routledge, 1977. See Frederick G. Whelan, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 68, 73. That Hume is far from the moral skeptic he was once commonly believed to be is now a subject of widespread agreement in the secondary literature, thanks in large part to the influence of David Fate Norton in David Hume: Common Sense Moralist, Skeptical Metaphysician. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Hume’s better readers have always rejected the notion that the author is a moral as well as a metaphysical skeptic; the review of Hume’s newly published Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by William Rose in the January 1752 issue of the Monthly Review observes that this work of moral philosophy is “free from that skeptical turn which appears in his other pieces” (Quoted in Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 226). Many commentators have wondered whether Hume abandoned his earlier account of sympathy by the time of the Enquiries and the Essays. Absent evidence to the contrary, however, there is no reason to doubt Hume’s own claim that he considered the Treatise a failure only in style, not in substance (See “My Own Life,” in EMPL, p. xxv). The absence of a full psychological analysis of sympathy in Hume’s later writings would thus seem to stem from the desire to avoid relatively difficult subjects in works intended for a popular audience. For an account of the development of Hume’s ethics, which argues that while Hume’s own opinions on the subject underwent little or no change he came to believe that certain subjects are best left undiscussed in a work of moral philosophy, see Kate Abramson, Hume’s Peculiar Sentiments: The Evolution of Hume’s Moral Philosophy. PhD diss., Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1997. This is but one of the many instances that Hume describes of the great effect of general principles on our beliefs and sentiments. These effects are introduced at T 2.1.6.8; Hume’s application of this idea to sympathy with unfelt passions is at T 2.2.7.5. The effect of general principles on our moral sentiments will later play a central role in Hume’s theory of justice and will be discussed in the next chapter. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). In The Basic Political Writings. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Introduced by Peter Gay. Indianaplois, Ind.: Hackett, 1987, p. 53. Robert Gordon has recently criticized Hume, in contrast to Rousseau, for the introduction of a cognitive element into his anatomy of sympathy. Gordon argues that Hume’s theory “would make it hard to explain the well-known fact that even infants pick up the emotions of others by contagion” (Robert M. Gordon, “Sympathy, Simulation and the Impartial Spectator,” Ethics 105:4 [July 1995], pp. 727–42, p. 728). Philip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.


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10. The important consequences of this feature of sympathy are further discussed in the second Enquiry, even as the detailed explanation of its psychological origins is absent. Hume here writes that “It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others . . . It is not probable that these principles can be resolved into principles more simple and universal, whatever attempts may have been made to that purpose. But if it were possible, it belongs not to the present subject . . .” (EPM 5.2.17, fn. 19). This might mean that Hume came to believe that sympathy probably cannot be explained through the operation of more basic psychological principles, and would then imply a rejection of the explanation provided in the Treatise. Alternately, however, it can also be read merely as an insistence that such issues can be wholly bracketed for purposes of the ethical investigations of the second Enquiry, which need concern itself only with the consequences of sympathy, not with its most basic causes. Given Hume’s insistence that the Treatise was only a failure in style, not in substance, this latter interpretation is the more plausible. 11. For one much-cited twentieth-century sociological account of homophily, see P.F Lazarsfeld and R.K. Merton, “Friendship as Social Process: A Substantive and Methodological Analysis,” in Morroe Berger, Theodore Abel and Charles H. Page, eds., Freedom and Control in Modern Society. New York: Van Nostrand, 1954. 12. “Popular sedition, party zeal, a devoted obedience to factious leaders,” Hume writes; “these are some of the most visible, though less laudable effects of this social sympathy in human nature” (EPM 5.2.35). The relationship between sympathy and faction is one of the major themes of Herdt, 1997. 13. See Páll S.Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966, pp. 116–17. 14. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “Hume and the Bauhaus Theory of Ethics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1995), pp. 280–98, p. 485. 15. Hume argues here that our tendency to confuse self-interested sentiments with moral ones is part of a larger tendency to seek impartial justifications for our idiosyncratic feelings. “Independent of the opinion of iniquity,” he writes, “any harm or uneasiness has a natural tendency to excite our hatred, and that afterwards we seek for reasons upon which we may justify and establish the passion” (T 2.2.4.9). 16. See, for example, Mercer, 1972, p. 60. 17. See Rachel Cohon, “The Common Point of View in Hume’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997), pp. 827–50, p. 831. 18. Hume uses the phrase “progress of the sentiments” twice in the Treatise, at 1.3.13.17 and 3.2.2.25. The idea of such a progress is the main theme of Baier’s study of that work (Baier, 1991), which takes its title from this phrase. 19. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754/1987, p. 54. 20. Specifically Rousseau writes, “reason is later forced to reestablish [the rules of natural right] on other foundations when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature” (1754/1987, p. 35). In the political theory for civilized societies, which Rousseau most famously develops in The Social Contract, pitié and other such sympathetic sentiments are thus essentially absent. It is for this reason that, despite his extensive discussions of pitié in both Emile and the

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Notes to Pages 48–57 Discourse on Inequality, I cannot consider Rousseau part of the reflective sentimentalist movement being analyzed in this book, and use his views on the subject only for purposes of contrast with those of the authors being analyzed. If we accept Rousseau’s account of pitié as the best available account of what we would call sympathy or compassion, we cannot help but reject such sentiments as possible foundations for our moral and political commitments. For two recent commentators who do exactly this, see Clifford Orwin, “Rousseau and the Discovery of Political Compassion,” in Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov, eds., The Legacy of Rousseau. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 296–20 and Richard Boyd, “Pity’s Pathologies Portrayed: Rousseau and the Limits of Democratic Compassion,” Political Theory 32:4 (August 2004), pp. 519–46. Hume—like many in the eighteenth century, not a particular fan of Shakespeare— was certain that Milton was the superior. I, for one, could not disagree more. See Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “On Why Hume’s ‘General Point of View’ Isn’t Ideal—And Shouldn’t Be,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 11 (1994), pp. 202–28, especially p. 213. See Christine M. Korsgaard, “The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics,” Hume Studies 25 (1999), pp. 3–41, pp. 24–25. The need for a broad consensus behind its vision of justice is, however, common to many political theories—conservative, liberal, or otherwise. A discussion of the extensive secondary literature on Hume’s conservatism will therefore be reserved for where it properly belongs, in chapter 3’s discussion of Hume’s political philosophy. Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 61–62. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903/1979, p. 163. For one prominent contemporary philosopher’s arguments along the lines sketched here that, despite widespread belief to the contrary, “Hume is a better advisor than Kant about how we intellectuals can hasten the coming of the Enlightenment utopia for which both men yearned” (p. 128), see Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993. New York: Basic Books, 1993, pp. 111–34. James Buchan goes so far as to argue that “in attributing the capacity for feeling to unenfranchised fractions of society—girls, married women, country people, African servants, children, domestic and wild animals” the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment “created the urgent political programs of the modern era” (James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 302–03). For one particularly important recent reading of Hume along these lines by a political theorist, see Russell Hardin, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Letter 13, September 17, 1739, To Francis Hutcheson, in L Vol. I, p. 32. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 1714/1729. With a Commentary by F. B. Kaye. 2 Vols. Indianaplois, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1988, p. 3.


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31. For more on the universality of anthropomorphism, see NHR 3.2. Interestingly, the example of anthropomorphism that Hume provides is the Aristotelian attribution of “sympathies” to physical objects to explain their attraction to one another. 32. Korsgaard, 1996, p. 55. 33. For an argument along roughly these lines, see Gill, 1996. 34. My position here bears some similarity to the view developed in Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 35. Korsgaard acknowledges that intrafaculty and interfaculty stability—the moral sentiments’ successful direct reflexivity and the attainment of successful, holistic reflective equilibrium—are mutually reinforcing. “One of the reasons that the moral sense approves of itself,” she writes, “is that morality contributes to our happiness, and the moral sense approves of anything that contributes to people’s happiness” (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 65). Similarly, one of the reasons the corrected moral sentiments can be part of a reflectively stable psyche is because they are able to approve of themselves. 36. There is clearly some relationship between Hume’s position here and contemporary accounts of cognitive dissonance and other uncomfortable forms of internal mental disharmony; this relationship is discussed in Loeb, 2002, pp. 10–11. For the classical psychological work on this subject, see Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957. For the state of cognitive dissonance theory today, see Eddie Harmon Jones and Judson Mills, eds., Cognitive Dissonance: Progress in a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1999. 37. Hume’s insistence that the ancients provide the “best models” (EPM App. 4.11) of moral philosophy, the only field of inquiry “in which they are not surpassed by the moderns” (EPM A Dialogue 18) has been the inspiration for a particularly rich stream of the recent literature on Hume’s ethics, one which interprets Hume’s work in light of the ancients’ influence. For a few examples, among many others, see Donald Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume. Newark: Delaware University Press, 1990; Marie A. Martin, “Hume on Human Excellence,” Hume Studies 18:2 (1992), pp. 383–400; Martin, “Hume as Classical Moralist,” International Philosophical Quarterly 34:3 (1994), pp. 323–34; and Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. 38. For a recent defense of this now increasingly discredited view, see Scott Yenor, “Humanity and Happiness: Philosophic Treatment of Happiness in a NonTeleological World,” Interpretation 31:3 (2004), pp. 301–24. For an earlier example, see Robert J. Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 117–19. 39. See Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 63–100; as well as Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 97–100, 138–41. 40. Hume is loosely paraphrasing a passage in section 16 of the “Manual of Epictetus,” or Encheiridion, by Arrian. The original, in the Loeb translation by W. A. Oldfather, reads:

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Notes to Pages 61–67 When you see someone weeping in sorrow, either because a child has gone on a journey, or because he has lost his property, beware that you be not carried away by the impression that the man is in the midst of external ills, but straightaway keep before you this thought: “It is not what happened that distresses this man (for it does not distress another) but his judgment about it.” Do not, however, hesitate to sympathize with him as far as words go, and, if occasion offers, even to groan with him; but be careful not to groan also in the center of your being.

From The Discourses, Fragments and Encheiridion. With an English translation by W. A. Oldfather. Vol. II of Epictetus in the Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928, pp. 495–96. 41. It is no coincidence that, later in this essay series, Hume’s Sceptic urges those who need to strengthen the influence of philosophical considerations in their daily lives have recourse to “entertaining moralists,” paying particular attention to “the sublimity of Shaftesbury,” among others (EMPL 179). 42. The one possible exception here is the school of Hume’s otherworldly Platonist, the speaker in the shortest and least-developed of Hume’s four essays on the schools of ancient philosophy. For more on Hume’s four essays as a kind of Ciceronian dialogue, see John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Essays on Happiness,” Hume Studies 15 (1989), pp. 307–24.

Chapter 3 1. Bertrand Russell, “Reply to Criticisms,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1971, p. 727. 2. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. by J. M. Robertson, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969, 10:80, p. 4. 3. The classic statement on the relationship of Hume’s broader philosophy and his political conservatism is Wolin, 1976. Since Wolin, the secondary literature on this subject has taken on truly unmanageable proportions. For two monographs that paint Hume as a conservative who adopts a highly complacent attitude with regard to existing institutions, see Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984 and Snare, 1991. For a thoroughly liberal and reformist Hume, see John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. For two more balanced monographs on the subject, see Miller, 1981 and Whelan, 1985. 4. The distinction between what Hume used to call artificial and natural virtues is implicit throughout the second Enquiry’s discussion of justice (which makes few if any substantive changes to that in the Treatise) and is made again explicitly in the essay “Of the Original Contract” (see EMPL, pp. 479–80) even as the original terminology is no longer used. There is thus no reason to believe that Hume ever abandoned the distinction between natural and artificial virtues, even if he did abandon his initial, admittedly misleading terminology. 5. In this blurring of the line between the natural and the artificial in this way, Hume stands starkly at odds with Rousseau. For Rousseau, the transformation that rids


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us of our natural pitié requires us to turn elsewhere for principles to govern civilized, political life. Hume’s sympathy, however, will play an important role throughout his political philosophy. See Annette Baier, “Hume’s Account of Social Artifice—Its Origins and Originality,” Ethics 98 (1988), pp. 757–78, p. 757. John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” in Collected Papers. Edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 20–47, p. 36. Originally published in Philosophical Review 67 (1955), pp. 3–32. The two paradigmatic examples of practices that Rawls describes in this article are punishment and promising; both of these are elements of Hume’s theory of justice and Rawls explicitly presents his views as in line with Hume’s (see footnotes, p. 20 and p. 32). Interestingly, in this early article Rawls is defending utilitarianism, the polemical object of his later work. Strictly speaking, however, this does not contradict Rawls’s later theory of justice, as his criticisms of utilitarianism there are not those refuted here. See T 3.2.2.5–6. As an eighteenth-century lowland Scot, Hume had a classic example of such clannishness still alive and well to his north. For a landmark study of such “amoral familism” in a twentieth-century setting, see Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. New York: Free Press, 1958. For three arguments to this effect see Páll S. Árdal, “Some Implications of the Virtue of Reasonableness in Hume’s Treatise,” in Donald W. Livingston and James T. King, eds., Hume: A Re-Evaluation. New York: Fordham University Press, 1976, pp. 91–108; James King, “Hume’s Classical Theory of Justice,” Hume Studies 7 (1981), pp. 32–54 and Jacqueline Taylor, “Justice and the Foundations of Social Morality in Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies 24 (1998), pp. 5–30. For one example of this mistaken interpretation of Hume, see John Plamenatz, Man and Society. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1963, I.310. For a solid refutation of Plamenatz, see Frederick G. Whelan, “Time, Revolution and Prescriptive Right in Hume’s Theory of Government,” Utilitas 7 (1995), pp. 97–119, pp. 104–05. See Jonathan Harrison, Hume’s Theory of Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, especially pp. 28–43. The Essays are the best source for Hume’s political ideals. For Hume’s commitment to an ideal of economic egalitarianism, see “Of Commerce,” where Hume writes “no one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature” (EMPL, p. 265). It is worth noting that everything that has been said here concerning justice may also be said of its kindred artificial virtues; Hume makes mention in this context “of allegiance, of the laws of nations, of modesty, and of good-manners.” He observes that while “all these are mere human contrivances for the interest of society” and “the inventors of them had chiefly in view their own interest, but we carry our approbation of them into the most distant countries and ages, and much beyond our own interest.” Since “the good of society where our own interest is not concerned, or that of our friends, pleases only by sympathy, it follows that sympathy is the source of the esteem which we pay to all the artificial virtues” (T 3.3.1.9). See, for example, T 3.3.1.12, 3.2.8.7, and 3.3.6.1. Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981,

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16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes to Pages 74–81 p. 35. Haakonssen goes on to speculate that Hume may have recognized this problem, as it is “the most obvious reason Hume could have had for leaving the technical concept of sympathy behind when he came to write the second Enquiry, and instead bring in the broad concept of fellow-feeling which ‘solves’ the problem precisely in that it does not require the concreteness of object which the sympathy of the Treatise does.” Sayre-McCord, 1995, pp. 492–93. It is important to note, however, that the specific considerations raised by the sensible knave with regard to the social practice of justice do not commit him to the more general views about the instrumental rationality (or irrationality) of cooperation made by later formulators of either the free rider problem or the prisoner’s dilemma. See Richard Tuck, Free Riding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008, especially pp. 122–27. See David Lewis, Convention. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1969/2002. Although Lewis explicitly draws on Hume in this work, Hume’s own use of the term “convention” to describe the rules of justice should simply be read to mean that these rules are conventional (i.e., artificial but highly common), not that they are solutions to coordination problems; this is also how I have been using the term throughout this chapter. See Stroud, 1977, p. 210. See David Gauthier, “David Hume, Contractarian,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979), pp. 3–38. Gauthier acknowledges that the sensible knave poses a problem to his Hume akin to that which the Fool poses to Hobbes (p. 26) and puzzles over this difficulty further in “Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave,” Hume Studies 18 (1992), pp. 401–28. In her reply to this latter article, Annette Baier rightly points out that Hume can and does rely on his theory of moral sentiments in his reply to the sensible knave, philosophical resources unavailable to Hobbes; see Annette C. Baier, “Artificial Virtues and Equally Sensible Non-Knaves: A Response to Gauthier,” Hume Studies 18 (1992), pp. 429–39. Alasdair MacIntyre also acknowledges that Hume’s sentimentalism offers necessary support when his otherwise self-interest-based account of justice faces the challenge of the sensible knave, although he insists, unlike Baier and myself, that sentimentalism is unequal to the task at hand; see MacIntyre, After Virtue. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 49, pp. 229–30. For a discussion of the recent literature on the relevance of psychopathy to sentimentalist moral philosophy, see the articles collected in Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., 2008, Volume 3, pp. 119–296. For a recent defense of this aspect of sentimentalism, see Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 134–35. Hume thus seems to advocate the propagation of the false belief that strict adherence to the rules of justice is always useful as a sort of noble lie, a point emphasized in Marcia Baron, “Hume’s Noble Lie: An Account of his Artificial Virtues,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1982), pp. 539–55. See Sayre-McCord, 1995, pp. 292–93. For another good account of how Hume can avoid “slouching toward Bentham” only by presenting his moral theory as descriptive rather than normative, see Stephen Darwall, “Hume and the Invention


25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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of Utilitarianism,” in M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994, pp. 58–82, especially pp. 73–76. Sharon Krause has suggested that Hume might be available to defend his theory of justice by turning from his category of “useful” virtues to those that are “immediately agreeable.” If we have received the proper social conditioning, just behavior gives us a sense of honor and integrity in living up to the virtues that have been inculcated into us, and is hence immediately agreeable even when it ceases to be useful. See Krause, “Hume and the (False) Luster of Justice,” Political Theory 32:5 (2004), pp. 628–55. Krause admits, however, that “if reflection reveals that justice is not actually noble . . . it is easy to think that justice will shine less brightly for us” (p. 646). And if justice’s immediate agreeableness, like its usefulness, does not withstand reflective scrutiny, then this line of argument cannot render justice a genuine virtue. See Korsgaard, 1996, p. 87. Of course, if this reflective Humean continues to share Hume’s notion of the public interest as the interest of each (taken seriatim) rather than the interest of all (in the aggregate), then she is still not, strictly speaking, an orthodox Benthamite utilitarian. Yet her direct pursuit of general utility qualifies her as a sort of heterodox utilitarian, and the point still stands. Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, 1776. In A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. London: Athlone, 1977, 1.36, p. 440. See Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics. London: Macmillan, 1874, book 4, chapters 3–5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790. Edited by J.G.A. Pocock. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987, paragraph 139/402, p 75. See Whelan, 1985, p. 243. See Editor’s Intro to EPM, p. 24. Gauthier, 1979, pp. 17–18. See also Alistair MacLeod, “Rule-Utilitarianism and Hume’s Theory of Justice,” Hume Studies 7 (1981), pp. 74–84, pp. 79–80. Of course, once we see this incompatibility between Hume’s theory of justice and his sentimentalist ethics, we can reject either his theory of justice or his sentimentalism; all that is precluded is adhering to both. Rather than rejecting Hume’s theory of justice in favor of his sentimentalism, as is done here, Stephen Darwall instead rejects Hume’s sentimentalism in favor of his theory of justice. Darwall argues that Hume’s theory is correct to “require individuals to regulate their conduct by rules they recognize as authoritative” even when doing so benefits neither themselves nor others. Although this requirement is incompatible with Hume’s broader ethics, Darwall argues that it both captures the “common-sense moral demand that requires conduct on grounds other than its beneficial consequences” and demonstrates that “agents can choose an action not because that action may be instrumental in achieving natural goods, but because it is mandated by a normative principle they accept” (Darwall, 1995, p. 318, p. 321). Yet I can see no reason why we would ever reflectively endorse a normative principle (such as inflexible adherence to social conventions) when doing so does no “natural good” to anyone, at least absent the possibility of it doing someone “supernatural” good. See John Deigh, “Empathy and Universalizability,” Ethics 105:4 (July 1995), pp. 743–63, p. 762.

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34. Krause, 2004, pp. 648–49. This point is elaborated throughout Krause, 2008, where Krause makes the necessary revisions to Hume’s sentimentalism, not based on the work of later Enlightenment sentimentalists, but on that of today’s democratic theory.

Chapter 4 1. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 301. 2. David Hume, “Abstract of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, By Adam Smith, professor of moral philosophy in the university of Glasgow,” Critical Review (Published Anonymously, May 1759). Reprinted in The Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1984), pp. 65–79, p. 74. 3. Obviously, I am here rejecting Joseph Cropsey’s odd assertion that in Smith’s work “there is not much of political philosophy to be seen, even allowing for the inclusion of jurisprudence in the morals course” (“Adam Smith and Political Philosophy,” in Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson, eds., Essays on Adam Smith. Oxford: Calrendon Press, 1975, pp. 132–53, p. 132. Reprinted in Cropsey, Polity and Economy: With Further Thoughts on the Principles of Adam Smith. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001, pp. 119–49, p. 119.). I am instead following the lead of Stephen Darwall, who argues that there is “a fascinating line of thought that leads Smith from his distinctive form of sentimentalism, probably the most interesting version ever developed, to a kind of liberalism—‘sympathetic liberalism,’ as we might call it.” (Stephen Darwall, “Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 28, 1999, pp. 139–64, pp. 140–41). Of course, in describing Smith as a “liberal” I am making use of the term in a way that Smith himself would not entirely recognize and opening myself to charges of anachronism from historians of political thought. Such an “anachronistic” reading of Smith is the polemical target of Donald Winch’s Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Edward Harpham has correctly stated in reply to Winch that Smith’s political thought can accurately be described as liberal in the current sense of the term (“Liberalism, Civic Humanism, and the Case of Adam Smith,” American Political Science Review 78, 1984, pp. 764–74). There is, moreover, a gradual evolution, rather than a sharp divide, between the myriad uses of the word “liberal” in the eighteenth century and its emergence as an “ism” in the nineteenth century. Smith himself thus calls the social system he envisions “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice” (WN IV.ix.3, p. 664). 4. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1965, p. 86. 5. Ibid., p. 90. 6. The “pitié” of eighteenth-century French discourse is probably better translated as “sympathy” or “compassion” than as the faux ami “pity,” lacking as pitié did any connotations of condescension. 7. In arguing here that the excesses of the French Revolution can be explained by appeal to Smith’s conception of the “man of system,” I by no means wish to imply that, as a matter of intellectual history, Smith intended it as such. Although


8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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the relevant passages were added to the sixth edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published in 1789, they were almost certainly written before then, and were likely sent to the publisher as the revolution was just barely underway. Smith intended the “man of system” to be a general social category, one that can be usefully applied to historical figures who lived before, during, or after the composition of the passages in question. Rawls’s fullest discussion of this position is to be found in Section 30 of A Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971/1999), pp. 160–68. All parenthetical page references in this section are to A Theory of Justice. Rawls is here reconstructing an argument for utilitarianism formulated in a number of different ways by a number of different mid-twentieth-century utilitarians; Rawls himself cites C. I. Lewis, J.J.C. Smart, and R. M. Hare. The argument, Rawls admits, was never “clearly asserted” in this way by any earlier utilitarians, although Rawls maintains that they did sometimes “hint” at this defense of their view (p. 164, fn). See T 3.2.2, p. 495. For Rawls’s summary of Hume’s “circumstances of justice” in A Theory of Justice, see Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 110. Rawls, 2000, p. 84. How Smith’s spectator may have differed from Hume’s goes unexplained, however. Smith’s moral philosophy is almost entirely ignored in the published version of Rawls’s lectures. Rawls does so both in a footnote on p. 20 and in the body of his text on p. 233. For just four of the many excoriations of Rawls’s “misinterpretation” of Smith, see D. D. Raphael, “The Impartial Spectator,” in Skinner and Wilson, eds., pp. 83–100, pp. 96–97; Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 139–40, fn.; Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 306–07; and Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 136–36. For Rousseau’s account of pitié as grounded in identification with the suffering other in the Discourse on Inequality, see Rousseau, 1754/1987, p. 54. There is a long tradition that celebrates sympathy or compassion as a means for overcoming the illusion of individual selfhood, a tradition that lauds those very features of sympathy that make it most unattractive to contemporary individualists. Schopenhauer, for example, describes the sharing of another’s sorrow as a crack in the wall of illusion that he calls the “principium indivduationis,” implying an implicit understanding that one is fundamentally the same entity as the object of one’s compassion. (Schopenhauer’s most concise statement of this idea is to be found in the appendix to On the Basis of Morality. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. Providence, R.I.: Berghan Books, 1839/1995, pp. 199–214. It is also the underlying thesis of his masterwork The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1819/1969.) Arendt, 1965, p. 85. Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 166. Specifically, Firth’s article “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12, 1952, pp. 317–45). Ibid., p. 344.

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19. Ibid., p. 333. For a good discussion of Firth’s position, contrasting it with Smith’s, see T. D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), pp. 128–34. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord provides an analogous contrast between Hume’s practical use of the general point of view and Firth’s otherworldly ideal observer; see Sayre-McCord, 1994, pp. 202–28. 20. T. D. Campbell, “Scientific Explanation and Ethical Justification in the Moral Sentiments,” in Skinner and Wilson, eds., 1975, pp. 68–83, pp. 70–71. Campbell explains this idea further in Campbell, 1971, pp. 134–45. 21. Such cases, for Smith, are the exception, and not the rule. See Marie A. Martin, “Utility and Morality: Adam Smith’s Critique of Hume,” Hume Studies 16 (1990), pp. 107–20, p. 118. 22. Later scholars have repeatedly compared the process Smith describes here to the internalization of the Freudian superego. See, for example, Gilbert Harman, Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 192, 204. 23. For a similar argument by Butler, see 5S Dissertation 8, p. 74. Surely Campbell goes too far, however, when he argues that, for Smith, “God is a utilitarian” and thus—in a sort of ultimate, cosmic way—Smith too is a utilitarian (Campbell, 1971, p. 217). 24. That Smith was here parting from Hume in his understanding of sympathy was recognized in the eighteenth century, such as by Smith’s student Dugald Stewart. See his “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.” (1794). Edited by I. S. Ross. Included in Smith, EPS, 1982, pp. 269–352, p. 281. 25. Darwall, “Empathy, Sympathy, Care,” Philosophical Studies 89 (1998), pp. 261–82, p. 264. 26. See Griswold, 1999, p. 116. And please note that, wherever possible, I have treated the “spectator” as female and the “actor” as male, both so as to avoid pronoun-based confusion and to achieve pronoun equity. The only exception to this rule when I am speaking of these two figures in my own voice comes when I am integrating direct quotes from Smith into my discussion. Smith, as was typical of his time, spoke of all generic figures (spectators, actors, and so on) with masculine pronouns. 27. While some have mistakenly identified Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s pitié (e.g., Cropsey, 2001, p. 125), for a refutation of this position see Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008, pp. 62–63. 28. Páll S. Árdal provides another possible explanation Hume could give of the comfort we find from the sympathy of another with our pains, although this argument is nowhere suggested by Hume’s own writings. Sympathy with sorrow, Árdal writes, may “make it more bearable although the emotion remains unabated. One may draw an analogy with [physical] pain to illustrate the point: people suffering similar pains may give each other mutual support, so that each finds his pain more bearable. The doctor may make this condition more tolerable by an injection that reduces the pain. To reduce a pain and to make it more bearable are thus two different things. To diminish sorrow and to make it more


29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

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bearable may likewise be distinguished” (Árdal, 1966, p. 55). Our experience of others’ sympathy with our sorrows, however, suggests not only that such sympathy makes our sorrow more bearable, but also that it diminishes this sorrow— sometimes so dramatically that we can no longer be said to feel sorrow at all. Successfully “cheering up” a grieving friend surely involves the reduction or elimination, not merely the palliation, of his misery. Harman, 2000, pp. 188–89. Darwall, 1998, pp. 267–69. This element of judgment, however, is necessarily absent from a purely mechanistic account of sympathy as emotional infection. After insisting that Smith’s account of sympathy fits Rousseau’s model of emotional infection, Cropsey claims to find Smith involved in an “inconsistency.” “How,” Cropsey asks, “if each man’s spirit responds passively to the stimuli of other men’s behavior, can it so far insulate itself from those stimuli to judge of them—to approve or disapprove of them?” (Cropsey, 2000, p. 19). The answer, of course, is that Rousseau’s instinctual model of sympathy is not actually Smith’s own. Consider what it means to say that we are “sympathetic” to a certain school of thought or that we find a particular person or fictional character to be “sympathetic.” See Haakonssen, 1981, p. 51, whose lead I follow here. Here, it is important to point out that Smith’s account of this imaginary change of situations does not merely involve projecting oneself into the actor’s circumstances—putting oneself in his shoes, so to speak—but instead projecting oneself into the whole person of the actor. (See TMS VII.iii.1.4, p. 317). The importance of this seemingly technical point will become clear in chapter 6, which will describe how Herder developed Smith’s ideas into a full theory of how one can sympathize properly even with those very different from oneself. Darwall is thus mistaken to hold that sympathy, as we use the term today, is not an appropriate term for the phenomenon described by Smith. Since the feeling in question is still felt “as from your standpoint, and not from my standpoint in appreciation of yours,” Darwall argues that in Smith’s account “we have empathy without sympathy” (Darwall, 1998, p. 269). Yet Darwall here fails to follow Smith’s multistage process of sympathy through to its conclusion; while stage one or two in this process may not meet Darwall’s criterion for sympathy, surely the complete process does so. See the footnote that Smith added to the second edition of the Theory, apparently in response to Hume’s letter (TMS I.iii.1.9, fn., p. 46.). See Robert M. Gordon, “Sympathy, Simulation and the Impartial Spectator,” Ethics 105:4 (July 1995), pp. 727–42, pp. 740–74 and Griswold, 1999, p. 88. Although resentment is not a central idea in his theory of justice, Hume does discuss the concept in passing. When we sympathize with others, Hume writes, “their sufferings proceed from the treachery, cruelty, or tyranny of an enemy, our breasts are affected with the liveliest resentment against the author of these calamities” (EPM 5.2.27). For more on the real but limited role that resentment plays in Hume’s philosophy, see Annette Baier, “Hume on Resentment,” Hume Studies. 6:2 (1980), pp. 133–49. Smith does discuss a sort of immediate, unreflective resentment, which can be felt toward inanimate objects or animals insofar as we instinctually anthropomorphize

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40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

Notes to Pages 103–107 them. These, however, are not the “complete and perfect” objects of such feelings and the resentment felt toward a rock against which we stub our toe or a cat that scratches us will disappear with “the least reflection,” especially when the injury involved is a minor one (TMS II.iii.1.1–4, pp. 94–95). “When an inhuman murderer is brought to the scaffold,” Smith writes, “though we have some compassion for his misery, we can have no sort of fellow-feeling with his resentment, if he should be so absurd as to express any against either his prosecutor or his judge” (TMS II.i.3.3, p. 73). This is not true, of course, if we feel that capital punishment is an excessive punishment even for murder, as few felt in Smith’s day, yet many more do in our own. Let our inhuman murderer then be brought, rather than to the scaffold, to prison; Smith’s point now stands. Strictly speaking, of course, this is not possible with patients who are somehow incapable of feeling proper resentment; many of those who would be most warranted in feeling resentment (murder victims, very young abused children, proletarian reactionaries suffering from false consciousness under capitalist hegemony, etc.) may be incapable of doing so. In such instances, there is no judgment of the propriety or impropriety of the patient’s feelings per se; it is sufficient to determine that, were he capable of feeling resentment, doing so would be proper. Note the importance of Smith’s qualification “upon most occasions,” however. One can also easily imagine certain omissions or nonperformances that might hurt others in such a manner as properly to draw resentment to a greater or lesser extent. I have generally preferred to quote from LJA (the “report of 1762–63”) rather than from LJB (the “report dated 1766”) when Smith’s discussion of the same subject is preserved in both of these sets of notes. Although LJA is an incomplete and unpolished record of Smith’s lectures, it treats all of the subjects covered in much greater length than LJB. See LJA i.12, p. 8. The division between natural and adventitious rights in roughly this sense was commonplace among modern natural lawyers. For Hutcheson’s version of the distinction, see 2.5.1 Vol. I, p. 293. For more on Smith’s version, see Neil MacCormick, “Adam Smith on Law,” Valpraiso University Law Review 15 (1981), pp. 243–63. See LJA i.24–25, p. 13. It is thus important not to make too much of Smith’s passing comment in the Wealth of Nations that “the property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable” (WN I.x.c.12, p. 138). Labor, of course, plays a key role in the process by which Smith believes an individual may originally acquire property, but it is the sympathetic resentment of the spectator when the fruits of one’s labor are taken away and not a Lockean process of mixing one’s labor into the item procured that is the ultimate moral grounds for the right to property. It is also worth noting that, although the idea of a social contract plays no role in Smith’s sympathy-based arguments, Smith does have a separate, sympathy-based argument for those rights that actually do arise as a result of contracts. When a contract is agreed to, Smith says, “the expectation and dependence of the promittee that he shall obtain what was promised is here altogether reasonable, and such as an impartial spectator would readily go along with” (LJA ii.45, p. 87).


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47. LJA reads: “But though the sovereign may be resisted, it can’t be said that there is any regular authority for so doing . . . nor is it or can it be ascertained what abuses justify resistance. No laws, no judges, have or can ascertain this matter, nor formed any precedents whereby we may judge” (LJA v.138, p. 325). 48. Smith’s mention of an “enlarged” compassion felt for humanity as a whole is the closest he ever comes to echoing Hutcheson’s idea of universal benevolence or Hume’s talk of sympathy for the public interest. More properly, given the content of his own account of sympathy, Smith should limit himself to mention of sympathy with the criminal’s specific victims, for here our sympathy with individuals is sufficient to remind us that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Considerations of general utility for all of mankind can then reinforce this dictate of sympathy for individuals, without themselves stemming from an impossible sympathy with aggregates. 49. Smith discusses this example at LJA ii.91, pp. 104–05 and LJB 182, p. 475. 50. The manuscript fragment is published, along with commentary, in Appendix II to the Glasgow edition of TMS, pp. 383–402. 51. Raphael, 1972–73, p. 97. 52. Ibid., p. 95.

Chapter 5 1. Kant’s former student Marcus Herz tells Kant in 1771 that he heard from their mutual friend David Friedländer that Smith is Kant’s “Liebling.” (Cited in Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 193.) Kant could not read English, but Christian Gunether Rautenberg translated Smith’s Theory into German in 1770. Kant also read Hume in translation; many of Hume’s writings (with the notable exception of the Treatise) had been collected and translated into German in four volumes of Vermischte Schriften, which came out between 1754 and 1756. Translations of the works of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were also available in German by 1760 and most of these translations were to be found in Kant’s personal library. For more on these translations, see the editor’s factual notes in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 447–48. For ample historical evidence of Kant’s abiding interest in British moral sentimentalism, see Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. As Kuehn recounts, Kant’s closest friend was the Königsberg-based British merchant Joseph Green, who shared Kant’s love of recent British philosophy. Through his friends Green, J. G. Hamann, C. J. Kraus, and J. G. Herder—all of whom could read English—Kant may have learned much about English texts which he himself could not read. Hamann is known to have owned an English copy of Hume’s Treatise and to have sometimes lent it to Green (Kuehn, 2001, p. 265). 2. For one summary of this recent move in Kant scholarship, see Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 4. See also Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. New York: Oxford University

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Press, 2000, as well as Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Earlier misinterpretations of Kant can be attributed to the fact that the relevant works were unavailable to those in the Anglo-American scholarly community unable to read German; as Marcia Baron notes the second half of The Metaphysics of Morals, the “Doctrine of Virtue,” was not translated into English until 1964 (See Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 63). 3. Given that the many German words which Kant uses for what is in English referred to as one of the family of feelings known as compassion, sympathy, pity, or fellow-feeling—and given that each of these German terms fails to correspond perfectly to any particular English term—I will always provide, in brackets, German terminology for the sympathetic feelings being discussed in passages quoted in translation. 4. See Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 17–49 and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 335–93 and Baron, 1995, pp. 146–87. The mistaken idea that Kant is urging us to purge our souls of love and sympathy dates back at least as far as the famous satirical distich on this subject by Kant’s contemporary Friedrich Schiller: Scruples of Conscience: I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it from inclination and so often I am bothered by the thought that I am not virtuous. Decision: There is no other way but this! You must seek to despise them, and do with repugnance what duty bids you. (Schiller, Xenien, The Philosophers, as translated in Wood, 1999, p. 28). 5. See Sherman, 1997, pp. 127–28. 6. For further explication of this unique feeling, see Guyer, 1993, pp. 356–61, as well as Kant’s own discussion of the subject in his lectures (LE 27:498). Kant apparently was quite skilled at evoking this moral feeling in his own students; see the report of R. B. Jachmann quoted and translated in Paul Arthur Schlipp, Kant’s Pre-Critical Ethics. Second Edition. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1938/1960, p. 6. 7. Kant uses the word “aesthetic” in a much broader sense than it is used today; it refers to feelings of any sort, not merely those feelings typical of our responses to beauty or sublimity. 8. See Nancy Sherman, “The Place of Emotions in Kantian Morality.” In Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, eds., Identity, Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 149–70, pp. 158–59. Technically, Sherman’s analysis concerns the emotions more generally; I am here including only those of her “claims” which apply to sympathy specifically. 9. Wood, 1999, p. 36. For other versions of the “perceptual claim” in recent writings on Kant, see Guyer, 1993, pp. 388–90, Baron, 1995, pp. 220–21, and Christine M. Korsgaard, “From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on


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Morally Good Action.” In Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting, eds., Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 203–36, p. 221. 10. It is worth noting that, with this passage, Kant picked up a rather unlikely defender in Friedrich Nietzsche. As David Cartwright observes (Cartwright, “Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity.” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 [1984], pp. 83–98, p. 84) Nietzsche quotes directly from this passage in a note of the 1880s (later included in The Will to Power) summarizing his oversimplified view of Kant’s opposition to compassion. Nietzsche writes: Compassion [Das Mitleid] is a squandering of feeling, a parasite harmful to moral health: “there cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world.” If one does good merely out of compassion, it is really oneself one really does good to, and not the other. Compassion does not depend upon maxims but upon affects; it is pathological. The suffering of others infects us; compassion is an infection. (Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1906/1930. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale as The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, 1968, section 368, p. 251). 11. For one attempt at this task, see Susan Mendus, “The Practical and the Pathological,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 19 (1985), pp. 235–43, p. 241. Marcia Baron, however, has given up on this task, however, and has proclaimed that Kant is simply wrong on this matter; it is this line of reasoning alone for which Baron feels the need to apologize in her book Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (1995, p. 9, p. 221). 12. J. B. Schneewind, “Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue: An Overview of Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” In Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 309–41, p. 311. A similar idea is expressed in Wood, p. 8. It is important to note, however, that Kant objects to a society built around sympathetic sentiments as much for its liberal, humanitarian features as for its inegalitarian features. For example, Kant claims that Beccaria was “moved by overly compassionate feelings of an affected humanity [aus teilnehmender Empfindelei einer affektierten Humanität]” in his misguided opposition to capital punishment (MM 6:335). 13. Here, there are important parallels to Nietzsche’s objections to compassion, inegalitarian objections quite at odds with the egalitarian objections of Schneewind and Wood. See Cartwright, 1984, pp. 89–90. 14. Versions of this distinction versions of it appear in the Anthropology (APV 7:251– 54), the Metaphysics of Morals (MM 6:407–09), the third Critique (CJ 5:272, footnote), Collins’s lecture notes (LE 27:368), and a Latin rectoral address entitled “On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body” (PMB 15:940). 15. My translation of Mitleidenschaft as “being affected” is both meant to capture Kant’s apparent categorization of this feeling (despite its name) as an affect and to reflect common German usage of the term, in which one speaks, for example, of a piece of metal as “being affected” by rust (durch Rost in Mitleidenschaft gezogen). 16. For further discussion of Kant’s critique of rhetoric in this passage, see Garsten, 2006, pp. 87–88.

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17. David E. Cartwright, “Kant’s View of the Moral Significance of Kindhearted Emotions and the Moral Insignificance of Kant’s View.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 21 [1987], pp. 291–304, 1987, p. 296. 18. Nussbaum, 2001, p. 381. 19. Given that one of the main appetites in question is that for heterosexual intercourse, the common practice of translating “Menschen” as “men” is, in this context, not only sexist, but also directly contrary to Kant’s meaning. 20. See the comment by Mary J. Gregor in Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, translator’s note, 7:266, p. 133. 21. That Kant was a moral sentimentalist in the early 1760s was the consensus view among Kant scholars through the first half of the twentieth century. Arthur Paul Schlipp then challenged this view, but did so on the basis of an impoverished understanding of sentimentalism. Schlipp argues that the Kant of 1764 depends on “the necessity of both rational and emotional elements in the moral life” (Schlipp, 1938/1960, p. 61). The position which Schlipp attributes to Kant at this time, however, is precisely the form of reflective sentimentalism which I argued in earlier chapters should be attributed to Hume and Smith. 22. It is likely, however, that Kant privately began to change his ethical position sometime in the mid-1760s. Kant’s notes in his own copy of the Observations, notes perhaps written in 1765, may be interpreted to bring Kant closer to the ethics of the critical period. Selections from these notes are translated in Kant, Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rasucher. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1–24. See especially the notes on sympathetic feelings on p. 8, p. 13, and p. 16. For commentary, see Schneewind, 1998, pp. 486–507; Shell, 1996, pp. 81–105; and Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 39–84. 23. It should be noted that Sentiment is not really a German term; Kant simply left the English terminology of the British sentimentalists untranslated. 24. See, for example, Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 235–36; as well as Cartwright, 1987, p. 297. 25. For a recent argument against the (later) Kantian conception of the self along roughly these lines, see Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 250–56. 26. John Zammito hypothesizes that—suffering from severe melancholy at having turned forty the previous year and having been spurned in his quest for marriage—Kant underwent a “conversion experience” sometime around 1765, renouncing the emotional component of his psyche and identifying his true self with philosophical reason alone. See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 83–135, especially pp. 131–35. Kant’s biographer Manfred Kuehn concurs that Kant underwent a sort of “rebirth” at about the age of forty (Kuehn 2001, p. 148), though he suspects that this may have had more to do with the death of Kant’s friend Johann Funk than with any romantic failure.


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Chapter 6 1. This identification of Herder as a liberal is a matter of some consensus among recent commentators; see F. M. Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003, p. 15 and Michael N. Forster, “Introduction,” in Herder: Philosophical Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. xxxi. 2. Liberal nationalism of this sort has recently experienced a revival in political theory, a revival for which Herder is a celebrated predecessor. See, for example, Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 14, p. 79. 3. For Berlin’s description of Herder as a pluralist see his “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 70–90, esp. pp. 79–80; see also his Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Incorporating Vico and Herder (1960) and The Magus of the North (1993). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 198, fn. 4. Thomas Reid, “A Sketch of Dr. Smith’s Theory of Morals,” edited by J. C. StewartRobertson and David Fate Norton in On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith. Edited and introduced by John Reeder. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997, pp. 69–88, 81. 5. Letter 16, March 16, 1740, To Francis Hutcheson, in L vol. 1, p. 40. 6. See, for example, Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. Translated by J. E. Anderson with a foreword by Sir Isaiah Berlin. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 160 and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 83. 7. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 293. 8. Frederick Watkins, Hume’s Theory of Politics. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1951, p. xv. 9. For the worst of Hume on race, see EMPL, “Of National Characters,” p. 208, fn. 10. For a fuller analysis of the ways in that Hume deals with conflicting moral worldviews in “A Dialogue,” see Kate Abramson, “Hume on Cultural Conflicts of Values,” Philosophical Studies 94 (1999), pp. 173–87. 11. Fortunately for the victim, the chief also felt the quasi-theft in question, while not a violation of her right to property, was an act of great avarice on the part of the accused. While the accused thus could not be coerced to return the necklace—for the matter at hand was not a question of justice—she could be urged to do so lest she acquire a scandalous reputation. Smith’s source is a 1744 French travel narrative by one P.F.X. de Charlevoix. See LJA i.48, p. 21. 12. For more on Smith’s position on applying the same moral principles across cultural contexts, with an emphasis on how this approach to moral judgment can be the basis for political opposition to imperialism, see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, chapter 2, p. 25–58. 13. Theodore Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics, Including a Critical Survey of Moral Systems (1840). Translated from the French by William H. Channing and excerpted in On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith. Edited and Introduced by John Reeder. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997, pp. 167–216.

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14. “Besonnenheit” is a particularly difficult term to translate. Herder sometimes identifies it with “reflection” (Reflexion), but sharply distinguishes it from mere “consciousness” (Besinnung). As Forster observes, “for Herder Besonnenheit is a precondition for Besinnung but not conversely,” whereas normal German usage “would if anything have suggested converse dependence” (Forster, p. 82, fn.). Forster chooses to translate Besonnenheit as “awareness” and Besinnung as “taking-awareness;” I hope my own choices of “reflective awareness” and “consciousness” respectively help clarify Herder’s meaning while remaining recognizable as English. F. M. Barnard suggests instead “the power of thinking” as a translation of Besonnenheit; see Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 42–43. 15. See Charles Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” in Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 89. 16. Maurizio Viroli seems guilty of such confusion, interpreting Herder as a defender of “national homogeneity;” (Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 120). For an important corrective to the mistaken interpretation of Herder, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 222. 17. One of Kant’s several passages endorsing biological racism makes explicit reference to the passage from Hume in “Of National Characters” cited earlier; see OBS 2:253, pp. 110–11. For more on this topic, see Muthu, 2003, pp. 182–86. 18. Raymond Geuss observes that Herder “doesn’t in general share Kant’s penchant for creating a distinctive technical vocabulary . . . Despite this pluralism about national ways of life, Herder’s use of the term Kultur is still that of Kant and the Enlightenment: it refers to the general state or level of human faculties. As has been pointed out, Herder never uses the word Kultur in the plural” (Raymond Geuss, “Kultur, Bildung, Geist,” in Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 29–50, p. 34). Indeed, the word Kultur was not to be used widely in the plural until the 1870s (Ibid., pp. 35–37). 19. For a brief and eloquent statement of Berlin’s position on this topic, see “The Pursuit of the Ideal” in Berlin, 1990, p. 1–19. 20. Anthony Pagden, for example, claims “Herder pushed the notion of incommensurability to the point where the very concept of a single human genus became, if not impossible to achieve, at least culturally meaningless.” See Pagden, European Encounters with the New World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 180. For a refutation of Pagden’s interpretation of Herder, see Muthu, 2003, pp. 232–33. 21. See, e.g., Meinecke, 1972, p. 297; Berlin, 2000, p. 197. 22. For the classic formulation of this empathetic conception of Verstehen, see Max Weber, Economy and Society. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Witich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922/1978, pp. 8–9. 23. Letter dated June 1780 from Moses Mendelssohn to J. G. Herder; printed in H. Düntzer and F. G. v. Herder, Aus Herders Nachlass. Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger, 1856, 2:216. Quoted and translated in Barnard, 1988, p. 259. 24. Robert T. Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955, p. 193.


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25. For a few of the many descriptions of Herder as a relativist along roughly these lines, see Clark, 1955, p. 320; Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 142–43; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948, p. 172. For refutations of this view, see Berlin, 1990, p. 76 and Barnard, 2003, p. 103. 26. For a more recent argument along roughly these lines, see Blackburn, 2000, pp. 283–84. 27. Berlin, 1990, p. 79. 28. A. Gillies, Herder. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945, p. 92. 29. Barnard, 1965, p. 88, p. 92. 30. See Muthu, 2003, p. 243. 31. See Rawls, Political Liberalism. Revised Paperback Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993/1996, esp. p. 51.

Chapter 7 1. See, e.g., Mark H. Davis, Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996, pp. 3–4; Lauren Wispé, The Psychology of Sympathy. New York: Plenum Press, 1991, pp. 1–17; C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question: Towards a Social Psychological Answer. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991, pp. 29–32; and Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 2–3, 245–46. 2. For a review of this research, see Davis, 1996, pp. 116–18 and Hoffman, 2000, pp. 206–09. 3. Davis, 1996, p. 112. 4. For a thorough defense of this “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” see Batson, 1991. 5. For an accessible review of the literature on mirror neurons, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 6. For a wide-ranging edited volume on such psychological models, see Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope, eds., Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. New York: Guilford, 1999. 7. Hoffman, 2000, pp. 36–62. 8. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. Vol. 2 of Essays on Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984, p. 176. 9. I had been playing this game for years before I discovered that Annette Baier assigned it as a final exercise in her introductory ethics class. Baier, her students, and I all agreed in our classification of Hume as a Stage 3 subject (Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 10. Kohlberg, 1984, pp. 174–75. Kohlberg admits that Adam Smith offers “an excellent exposition of the Stage 3 elements of moral psychology,” though he refrains from categorizing Smith as a Stage 3 subject per se (Kohlberg, The Philosophy of

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11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Notes to Pages 171–172 Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice. Vol. 1 of Essays on Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981, p. 150). Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982/1993. See, among others, Baier, 1995, chapter 4; Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 79 and Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 20. Gilligan, 1982/1993, p. 2. Reviewing the many studies on the subject that accumulated during the 1980s, Susan Moller Okin concludes that “the evidence for differences in women’s and men’s ways of thinking about moral issues is not (at least yet) very clear; neither is the evidence about the source of whatever differences there might be” (Susan Moller Okin, Justice Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989, p. 15). For another review of the many studies giving us reason to doubt Gilligan’s empirical findings, see Tronto, 1993, pp. 82–85. See Hoffman, 2001, pp. 250–70. For a review of these literatures and suggestions for their integration, see Steven L. Blader and Tom R. Tyler, “Justice and Empathy: What Motivates People to Help Others?” In Michael Ross and Dales T. Miller, eds., The Justice Motive in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 226–50. For one of the first major studies to place affect on the low road in a dual-process model of cognition, see R.B. Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35 (1980), pp. 151–75. The classic collection of papers on unconscious heuristics is Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heurestics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. For a wide-ranging edited volume covering the more recent literature, see Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. In the latter volume, see especially Paul Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor, “The Affect Heuristic,” pp. 397–420. Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108, 2001, pp. 814–34. See also Haidt and Fredrik Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology,” in Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., 2008, pp. 181–218. See Hauser, 2006, and Hauser, Young, and Cushman, 2008, as well as the discussion in chapter 1 of this book of the parallel criticisms that can be made of both Hutcheson and Hauser. Haidt and Bjorklund do acknowledge that, when conscious moral reflection occurs, it may not be “the sort of logical and dispassionate reasoning that philosophers would respect” but instead a “weighing of alternatives in which feelings play a crucial role” (Haidt and Bjorklund, 2008, p. 201). While they do not conduct any further empirical investigation of this possibility, they do point to the work of neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio as a model of research about the essential role emotion may play in so-called “rational” deliberation. See Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.


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21. See Davis, 1996, p. 102. 22. George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael Mackuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. See also George E. Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. For one important application of affective intelligence theory, see Ted Brader, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. For an edited volume covering a wide array of responses to and applications of affective intelligence theory, see W. Russell Neuman, George E. Marcus, Ann N. Crigler and Michael MacKuen, eds., The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 23. Marcus, et. al., 2000, p. 129. For another criticism of Marcus’s work from a Humean perspective, see Krause, 2008, pp. 55–56. 24. For evidence that this view is indeed common, see Brader, 2006, pp. 38–39. Something like this view seems to lie behind popularity of “libertarian paternalism” that seeks to use the conscious, rational thinking of elites to guide the automatic, emotional, and heuristic-governed decision-making of the populace. See Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. Updated Edition. New York: Penguin, 2009 and Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 25. Brader, 2006, especially pp. 96–103, pp. 140–43. 26. For a summary and discussion of this research, see Darren Schreiber, “Political Cognition as Social Cognition: Are We All Political Sophisticates?” In Neuman et. al., eds., 2007, pp. 48–70. 27. Brader, 2006, pp. 142–43. 28. One critique of Schreiber’s explanation of his findings makes a claim along roughly these lines, arguing that political sophisticates do not exhibit “a mindless reliance on reflex,” but instead “a style of processing that relies more on selfrelative evaluations than on abstractly held associations.” See Michael L. Spezio and Ralph Adolphs, “Emotional Processing and Political Judgment: Toward Integrating Political Psychology and Decision Neuroscience,” in Neuman, et. al., eds., 2007, pp. 71–95. p. 78. 29. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903). Edited with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 30. For the classic statements of metaethical emotivism, see Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936). New York: Dover, 1952, Ch. 6 (pp. 102–19) and Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944/1960. Analytic metaethics drawing on the insights of Enlightenment sentimentalism continues fruitfully to this day and has taken on a level of conceptual sophistication far beyond that of Stevenson and Ayer. Perhaps the most sophisticated of all has been Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 31. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008, especially pp. 5–28. For an X-Phi “manifesto” as well as a

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32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

Notes to Pages 175–178 variety of recent articles, see Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. See, e.g., Blackburn, 2000; Michael Slote, Morals from Motives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2007; and Prinz, 2007. For a relatively recent sentimentalist approach to justice written for a popular audience, see Robert C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice: Emotion and the Origins of the Social Contract. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” in Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., 2008, Volume 2, pp. 47–76, pp. 50–51. For a similar view, see Joshua D. Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in Ibid., Volume 3, pp. 35–80, p. 67 and Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003), pp. 848–50. It is notable that while recent sentimentalists are often Humeans when it comes to descriptive moral psychology, they can turn into Nietzschean debunkers of universal morality when it comes to issues of the relevance of this descriptive psychology to morality’s normative justification; see, e.g., Prinz, 2007. First and most famously, J. D. Greene, R. B. Somerville, L. E. Nystrom, J. M. Darley and J. D. Cohen. “An fMRI Study of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science 293 (2001), pp. 2105–08. See, e.g., M. Koenigs, L. Young, R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, F. Cushman, M. Hanser, and A. Damasio, “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgments,” Nature 446 (2007), pp. 908–11. Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions,” in Knobe and Nichols, eds., 2008, pp. 105–28. Greene (2008 and 2006) draws roughly this conclusion. See Mark Timmons, “Toward a Sentimentalist Deontology,” in SinnottArmstrong, ed., 2008, Volume 3, pp. 93–104. Nichols and Knobe, 2008, also suggest the possibility of an “affective competence model” in which the emotional sources of a judgment are no grounds whatsoever for its dismissal. For another sentimentalist defense of deontology, see Slote, 2007, ch. 3, pp. 42–54. For empirical evidence that this fear of emotional manipulation is indeed widespread among the general populace, see Brader, 2006, pp. 35–38. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, p. 295; emphasis in original. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 55. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Lernhardt and Sherry Weber Nicholson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, p. 202, 182. These citations to Habermas are drawn from the discussion of the cognitive and affective elements in Habermas’s theory of deliberation in Sharon Krause, “Desiring Justice: Motivation and Justification in Rawls and Habermas,” Contemporary Political Theory 4 (2005), pp. 363–85, especially pp. 374–77. See also Krause, 2008, pp. 37–47.


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44. See Mark E. Warren, “The Self in Discursive Democracy,” in Stephen K. White, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 167–200, p. 181. 45. Any edited volume on the subject of deliberative democracy produces ample evidence of this position among many (if far from all) deliberative democrats today. In Democracy and Difference, for example, the editor Seyla Benhabib praises how proper deliberation protects political decision-making from the partiality of affectivity (p. 72), and Joshua Cohen insists that deliberation exists only when the force of the (rationally) better argument alone prevails (p. 100), while Iris Young criticizes the view of Thomas Spragens that proper deliberation must remain “unsullied by irrationality” (p. 130); see Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 46. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 50–51. 47. See, for example, John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, especially pp. 52–53, p. 167. 48. Allen, 2004; see especially pp. 58–59, pp. 140–60. For another roughly Aristotelian defense of rhetoric, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 49. For one notable exception, see Krause, 2008, especially pp. 142–74. 50. Leechman’s preface to the System of Moral Philosophy recalls that Hutcheson’s own pedagogy had this distinctly sentimentalist goal; he “regarded the culture of the heart as the main end of all moral instruction” (SMP Preface, vol. 1, p. xxxi). 51. Davis, 1996, pp. 80–81. 52. Batson, 1991, pp. 218–20 and Hoffman, 2001, pp. 287–98. 53. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, especially pp. 85–112. 54. For one statement of this realization, see Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.


B IBLIOGRAPHY

The main primary sources cited in this book are referred to using the following system of abbreviations. I have adopted the practice of modernizing and Americanizing spelling and punctuation in English-language eighteenth-century works when the editors of the editions below failed to do so, both for purposes of clarity and to bring quotations into conformity with the surrounding text. Similarly, I have felt free to modify translations of foreign-language works when doing so helps clarify the point at hand.

Works by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury Citations from Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711) are from the recent three-volume Liberty Fund edition: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Foreword by Douglas Den Uyl. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2001. Although I did not cite Shaftesbury from the single volume Cambridge edition, I did consult it: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Works within the Characteristics are cited according to the following system of abbreviations: LCE: “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (vol. 1, pp. 1–36 in Liberty Fund Edition) SC: “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor” (vol. 1, pp. 37–94) SAA: “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” (vol. 1, pp. 95–224) IVM: “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit” (vol. 2, pp. 1–100) MPR: “The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody” (vol. 2, pp. 101–247) MRT: “Miscellaneous Reflections on the Said Treatises, and Other Critical Subjects” (vol. 3, pp. 1–211)

Works by Joseph Butler The most widely available recent edition of Butler’s works includes only a selection of his sermons and a small section of the Analogy. Whenever possible, I have cited Butler from: 213

214

Bibliography

Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue. (5S) Edited, with Introduction and Notes by Stephen L. Darwall. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983. For passages not included in the above edition, I cite: Fifteen Sermons, 1729 (15S). New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1860. Reprinted Charlottesville, Va.: Lincoln-Rembrandt, 1993. Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736 (AR) London: James, John and Paul Knapton, 1736. Reprinted Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2003.

Works by Francis Hutcheson Whenever possible, I have quoted from The Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725 (IBV). Edited with an introduction by Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2004. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, 1728/1742 (ENC). Edited with an introduction by Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2002. On the Natural Sociability of Mankind, 1730 (NSM). In Logic, Metaphysics and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. Edited by James Moore and Michael Silverthorne. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2006, pp. 189–216. Philosophiae Moralis Insitutio Compenderia, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, 1742/1745/1747 (PMIC). Edited with an introduction by Luigi Turco. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2007. The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor, 1742 (MEM). Edited with an introduction by James Moore and Michael Silverthorne. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2008. A Synopsis of Metaphysics Comprehending Ontology and Pneumatology, 1742. (SM) In Logic, Metaphysics and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, pp. 57–188. Although Hutcheson’s last work is forthcoming in this series, since it was not yet available at the time of composition, I instead cited: A System of Moral Philosophy, 1755 (SMP). With an introduction by Daniel Carey. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Works by David Hume At the time of the initial composition of this book, no single scholarly edition of the complete works and correspondence of David Hume was available, although Oxford University Press is now in the process of publishing one. I therefore cited: A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40 (T). Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford Philosophical Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. I also consulted the earlier edition: A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited, with an analytical index by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Second Edition with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

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Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 1740/1777 (EMPL). Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1985. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748 (EHU). Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford Philosophical Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. I also consulted the earlier edition in: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited with an introduction, comparative table of contents, and analytical index by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Third edition with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751 (EPM). Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford Philosophical Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. I also consulted the earlier edition in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (op. cit.). The History of England, 1754–1762/1778 (HE). 6 vols. Foreword by William B. Todd. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1983. The Natural History of Religion, 1757 (NHR). In Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. The Letters of David Hume (L). 2 Vols. Edited by J. Y. T. Greig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932.

Works by Adam Smith In all cases, references are to The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759–1790 (TMS). Edited by A. L. Macfie and D. D Raphael. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1984. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776 (WN). General editors R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Textual editor W. B. Todd. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1981. Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS). Edited by W. P. D. Wrightman and J. C. Bryce. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1982. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (LRBL). Edited by J. C. Bryce. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1983. Lectures on Jurisprudence (LJ). Edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1982. LJA: Report of 1762–63, pp. 1–394; LJB: Report Dated 1766, pp. 195–560. Correspondence of Adam Smith (CAS). Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1987.

Works by Immanuel Kant As per standard practice, all works by Immanuel Kant are cited by the abbreviations below according to the volume and page in:

216

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Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. von der Koeniglich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin, 1902. Available online via Past Masters at http:// www.library.nlx.com.; English translations were also consulted for all the works cited, whenever possible from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, although, as with translations of Herder, these were occasionally modified when quoted in the text. The Cambridge edition provides the Gesammelte Schriften (KGS) pagination in the margins, but where other translations do not, the page number in the translation is also provided. Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, 1764 (INM). KGS 2:273–2:301. Translated in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Translated and Edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 243–75. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764 (OBS). KGS 2:205–58. Translated by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Program of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765–1766 (AL). KGS 2:303–2:313. Translated in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, op. cit., pp. 287–300. Inaugural Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, 1770 (DSI). KGS 2:387–2:419. Translated in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755– 1770, op. cit., pp. 373–416. Prolegegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Come Forward as Science, 1783 (PFM). KGS 4:255–386. Translated by Paul Carus. Translation revised by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1977. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? 1764 (WE). KGS 8:35–8:42. Translated by Mary J. Gregor in Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. General introduction by Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 11–22. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785 (G). KGS 4:386–463 Translated by Mary J. Gregor in Practical Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 37–108. Reviews of Herder’s “Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,” 1785 (RH) KGS 8:42–68. Translated by H. B. Nisbet in Kant: Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Critique of Practical Reason, 1788 (CPR). KGS 5:3–163. Translated by Mary J. Gregor in Practical Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 133–272. On Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body, 1788 (PMB). KGS 15:939–953. Translated by Mary J. Gregor in Kant’s Latin Writings. Edited by Lewis White Beck. New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 217–43. Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790 (CJ). KGS 5:167–484. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Edited by Paul Guyer. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 1793 (RBR). KGS 6:3–202. Translated by George di Giovanni in Religion and Rational Theology. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood

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and George Di Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 39–216 The Metaphysics of Morals, 1797 (MM). KGS 6:203–493. Translated by Mary J. Gregor in Practical Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 353–604. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798 (APV). KGS 7:119–333. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. I also consulted: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell, with an introduction by Frederick P. Van de Pitte. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Lectures on Ethics (LE). KGS 27. Translated by Peter Heath. Edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Notes and Fragments (NF). Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rasucher. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Works by J. G. Herder There are two widely used editions of Herder’s works in German: Gaier, Ulrich, et. al., ed., Johann Gottfried Herder Wërke in Zehn Bänden. Frankfurt Am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. Suphan, Benhard, et. al., ed., Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke. Berlin, 1887–1913. Reprinted Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1967–1968. The latter of these has the virtue of being more complete, the former of being more recent and in Latin script; I have consulted both. Following the convention established by Michael Forster, for any given parenthetical citation to the volume and page numbers in a German edition of Herder’s work, an “S” refers to the Suphan edition, a “G” to the Gaier. With a few exceptions, translations of Herder’s works into English have appeared in anthologies that collect complete translations of some shorter works alongside translated excerpts from longer ones. Whenever a translation has been consulted, a page reference to the relevant English volume (indicated with the first-listed editor/translator’s surname initial) follows the reference to the German edition: e.g., (G 1:559, F 50). Adler, Hans, Ernest A. Menze, and Michael Palma, tr. and ed. (A) On World History: An Anthology. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Barnard, F. M. tr. and ed. (Ba) J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Bunge, Marcia, tr. and ed. (Bu) Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language and History. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1993. Churchill, T., tr. (C) Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. [A complete translation of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit.] London: 1800. Reprinted New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966. Evrigenis, Ioannis D. and Daniel Pellerin, tr. (E) Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2004.

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INDEX

Absolute justice, 86 Adventitious rights, 107 Aesthetics, 24, 45, 46, 59, 121, 134 and emotions, 120 and evaluation of literary text, 163 and reason, 47–48 and virtue, 119 Affection, 17–18, 19, 23, 35, 128 and benevolence, 20, 26, 27–28 tranquil, 18 universal, 75, 135 Affective intelligence theory, 173 Affecte (affects), 113, 127 definition of, 128, 129 and passions, 130 significance of, 128 sudden, 127–29 Age of reason, 4, 5 Aggregates, sympathy with, 93–94 Allegiance, 67, 71, 81 Allen, D., 178, 179 Analogy, 31, 32, 71, 154–7 Animal soul, 19 Anthropomorphism, 57 Apathy political, 14 Stoic, 19, 128 sullen, 62 Approbation, 26, 43, 46, 68, 79 moral, 68, 69, 73–76, 78, 83, 85 self-, 31, 32, 35, 58 Arendt, H., 89, 90, 94, 95

Artificial language, 148 Artificial practice, 69 Artificial virtue, 79, 83, 85 Humean justice as, 66–69, 74 Attitude claim, 121 Aurelius, M., 19, 30 Austin, J. L., 178 Authority of conscience, 30–33 normative, 16 Autonomy individual, 132, 138, 139, 180 political metaphor, 3 reflective, 4, 5, 6, 83, 114, 138, 173, 178, 179, 181 self-legislation and, 178, 180 Baier, A., 33, 52 Bauhaus theory of approval, 44, 81 and habits, 82 Beneficence, 120, 125, 126, 145 Benevolence, 17, 21, 26, 34, 37, 84, 85, 115 and natural jurisprudence, 35 public sense of, 36 and reason, 22 and sociability, 20 Bentham, J., 75, 82, 88, 93 Berlin, I., 139, 152 Besonnenheit (reflective awareness), 148–49, 150, 165 Bildung (cultivation of soul), 151, 152, 154, 158 229

230

Index

Billigkeit (reasonableness/reciprocity), 165–67 Biological racism, 150 Brader, T., 173, 174 Burke, E., 83, 88 Butler, J., 4, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30–31, 104 on benevolence, 37 on justice, 37–38 on resentment, 38, 39, 102

Delusion, 131 Demerit, 102 Direct reflexivity normativity as, 33, 58–59 Disapprobation, 43, 68 of injustice, 74 self-, 116 Divine command theory, 29 Dual-process model, 172, 175 DuBois, W. E. B., 54

Calm passion, 55, 135 Campbell, T. D., 95 Caricature, 40, 136, 137 Christian love, 149 Christian sentimentalists, 16 Christianity, universal, 164 Civil justice, 34 Civil society, 130, 135 Civilization and taste, 48 Clark, R., 156 Clarke, S., 4 Collective self-legislation, 3, 178 Collins, G. L., 123 Communication, types of, 123 Compassion, 20, 38, 120, 122, 137 immediate inclinations of, 134, 135 for multiple individuals, 94 private, 94 unrefined, 135 Conscience, 17, 23–24, 37, 96, 145, 149 authority of, 30–33 Consequentialism, 35 Cooperation mutual, 70 social, 94 Creative fiction, 159 Cultural difference, 142, 144, 160, 177 Cultural pluralism, 152 see also Herder, J. G.

Einfühlung (empathy), 154–57, 160 Emotional contagion, 97, 98, 146 Emotional infection, 99 Emotions, 5, 8, 12, 14, 23, 100, 116, 147, 170, 172–80 exclusion of, 113, 137 painful, 98–99 sharing of, 18, 90, 113, 138 sympathetic, 112, 113, 127, 128 and tranquility, 50 Empathy, 100, 155 increasing the, 180 and neuroscience, 169–70 projective, 99 and understanding of another culture, 159–60 Enlightenment liberalism, 5 Enlightenment sentimentalism, 4, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, 22, 25, 169, 171, 173, 175 Epictetus Encheiridion, 125 Epicureans, 61, 63 Ethical duties, 119–20 Ethical reflection, 5, 174 Ethics of care, 171 Evil, 35, 45, 121 moral, 39, 68, 74, 129–31 necessary, 113 true source of, 117–18 Experimental philosophy (X-Phi), 175 Experimentation, Hume on, 10 Extensive sympathy, 166 External rights, 36–37

Darwall, S., 97, 99 De Las Casas, B. Short Account of the Destruction of the Indian Nation, 161

Index Fairness, 38, 154 justice as, 87, 88 moral commitment to, 165 Fallback motivation, 121 Faute de Mieux Claim, 121 Feelings, 17, 55, 87, 99, 120, 122–28, 149, 166 fellow-, 12, 97, 102, 114, 162 human, 158 imagined, 44, 167 moral, 119, 133, 135 positive, 92 primitive, 48 refined, 4, 114 reflection and, 4, 7 sharing of, 13, 18, 74, 98, 99, 113 social, 34 sympathetic, 62, 75, 79, 113, 114, 115–16, 121, 125, 136 Firth, R., 95 Free sympathy, 122, 123 Freud, S., 9, 175 Gauthier, D., 79 Gebildet (cultured), 151 Gillies, A., 162 Gilligan, C., 170 Good, 68, 85 moral, 35, 45, 74, 159 of others, 17, 18, 21, 27 private, 20, 21 public, 21, 35, 39, 72, 75, 79, 80, 83, 109 Grotius, H. 106 Gutmann, A., 179 Haakonssen K., 74, 75 Habermas, J., 178, 179 Haidt, J., 172 Happiness, 9, 152, 154 human, 16, 21, 26, 31, 41, 63 personal, 21, 28 of virtue, 25–28, 58–63, 77, 78 Harman, G., 99 Harmony, 6, 12, 19, 28, 40 reflexive, 63 sympathetic, 103

231

Hauser, M., 172 Herder, J. G., 4, 10, 88, 133, 139, 177 on Billigkeit and justice, 165–67 on creative fiction, 159–60 on diversity development, 150–52 on Einfühlung through analogy, 154–57 on history, 158 on Humanität, 162–64 Ideas towards the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, 154, 155, 156, 161, 165 on implications of diversity, 152–54 on instinctual and reflective sympathy, 147–50 Letters on the Advancement of Humanität, 162, 166 relativism, rejection of, 160–61 on religion, 160, 164 on travel descriptions and effect on humanity, 159 Treatise on the Origin of Language, 147 Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Formation [Bildung] of Humanity, 154, 155 Hobbes, T., 19, 20, 67 Hoffman, M., 170, 171 Human nature, 152, 163 human heart, observing, 17–18 reason and reflection, 22–25 Stoic and selfish interlocutors, 18–21 Humanity, 18, 20, 30, 34, 54, 87, 122 ages of, 156 duty of, 120 feeling of increase of, 48 long-term interest of, 135 natural, 84 sentimental education and, 157–60 sympathy as insult to, 126–27 virtue of, 85, 86 Hume, D., 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 32, 40, 65, 89, 92, 111, 112, 140, 144, 176, 180 comparison with Smith’s revised anatomy of sympathy, 97–100

232

Index

Hume (continued) corrected moral sentiments, 54–56 Herder on evaluation of, 157–58, 161 History of England, 142 justice, as an artificial virtue, 66–69 on imagination, 49–50 on intrapersonal contradictions, 52–53 justice, content of, 71–73 justice, development of, 69–71 justice, moral approbation of, 73–76 on moral language, 51 on moral sentiments, 43–46, 52–53 on moral theory and tranquility, 50 on morality and reason, 142 nature of sympathy and, 41–43 normative theory of, 16, 56–58 sensible humanitarian, 83–88 sensible knave of, 76–80 sensible utilitarian, 80–83 on slavery, 53–54 on social coexistence, 51–52 on sources of happiness of virtue, 60–63 on standard of taste, 46–49 on value pluralism, 144–46 on virtue, 53, 58–60 Treatise of Human Nature, 10, 29, 41, 45, 50, 58, 59, 66, 67, 73, 76, 85, 86, 145 unhappiness and indignity of false virtues, 63–64 uniformitarianism of, 143 Hutcheson, F., 4, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29, 56, 133, 146 on benevolence, 35 on external rights, 36 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 19–20, 24 on moral sense, 32 Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, 32, 37 on resentment, 39 System of Moral Philosophy, 17, 33 on virtue and benevolence, 27

Ideal observer, 95, 96 Imagination, delicacy of, 48 Immoral behavior, 117 Impropriety, 103, 105 Injury, 38, 39, 87, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109–10 Injustice, 80, 83, 127 personal, 104 and resentment, 37–39, 104 Instinctual and reflective sympathy, 147–50 Introspective observation, 17 Irony, 89, 156, 174 Judicious spectator, 92 Jurisprudence and benevolence, 35 natural, 34, 35, 73, 105–8 Justice, 3, 110, 111 absolute, 86 as an artificial virtue, 66–69 as benevolence, 34–37 Billigkeit and, 165–67 commitment, 126, 171 Humean, content of, 71–73 Humean, development of, 68–71 and liberal tradition, 87–88 moral approbation of, 73–76, 85 and natural jurisprudence, 105–8 non-consequentialist judgments of, 109 obligation to, 80 Smith’s theory of, 102–105 strict adherence to, 84, 85, 94 Kant, I., 4, 12, 112, 155 Anthropology, 116, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131 Critique, 116, 123 determining grounds of duty, exclusion of inclination from, 115–17 on duties of sympathy as duties of love, 119–22 on evaluation of sympathy, 134–36 on free and unfree sympathy, 122–25

Index Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 114, 115, 116, 134 on inclination in human moral life, 118–19 innocence of inclinations and source of evil, 117–18 Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, 133 Metaphysics of Morals, 119, 124, 128 on moral worth, 114–15 Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 133, 134 on passions, 113–14, 129–32, 137, 138 precritical position, 132–33 Religion, 117, 130 on sudden affects, 127–29 on sympathy, as insult to humanity, 126–27 on useful and useless sympathy, 125–26 Kohlberg, L., 170 Korsgaard, C., 33, 58 Krause, S. R., 88 Kultur, 151, 152 Leechman, W., 17 Leidenschaften (passions), 113 Lewis, D., 78 Liberal sentimentalism, 89 individualist sentimentalism, requirements of, 95–97 moral judgment, 100–101 personal separateness, sympathy’s political threat to, 93–94 politics, twentieth-century suspicion of sympathy in, 90 revised anatomy of sympathy, 97–100 space between actors, 102–11 Locke, J., 19, 23, 106 Luther, M., 160 MacIntyre, A., 143 Mandeville, B., 9, 19, 20, 37, 67, 175

233

Fable of the Bees, 57 Marcus, G. E., 173 Marx, K., 9, 175 Medelssohn, M., 155 Menschlichkeit, 157, 162 Mercer, P., 42 Merit, 102 Metaethics, 113, 127, 137, 175 Mill, J. S., 65, 93 Mirror neurons, 170 Mitleidenschaft (being affected), 122, 123, 125, 128, 131 Moor, J., 19 Moore, G. E., 175 Moral agents, 120 Moral approbation, 68, 69, 73–76, 78, 83, 85 Moral approval, 101, 104 Moral beauty, 47 Moral choice, 118 Moral development, 170–71 corrected moral sentiments, 54–56 general point of view, 49–54 standard of taste, 46–49 Moral duty, 136 Moral emotions, 172 Moral evaluation, 44, 46, 95, 141 bias in, 45 Moral feeling, 119, 135 Moral judgment, 25, 44, 46, 49, 50, 81, 95, 100–101, 141, 171 dual-process model of moral evaluation and, 172 Moral language, 46, 51 Moral law, 22, 118, 119, 121 passions and, 131 Moral passion, 161 Moral philosophy, 40, 141 Moral presumption, 161 Moral psychology, 9, 134, 136 descriptive, 7, 8 Moral reasoning, 171, 172 Moral reflection, 3, 140, 170 Moral relativism, 45 rejection of, 160–61 Moral sense, 24–25, 32, 35, 58

234 Moral sentimentalism, 5, 12, 133, 139 on reason, 137, 138 on self, 138 Moral sentiments, 6, 9, 16, 23, 40 anatomizing of, 177 biased, 44–46 corrected, 54–56 creative fiction and, 159 purified, 149 refined, 73, 85 and sympathy, 43–44, 58 Moral sympathy, 136 Moral virtue, 19, 22, 45 Moral worth, 114–15, 117, 137 Morality, 3, 4, 26, 56, 83, 104, 117, 119, 137, 142 debunkers of, 9, 58, 175 human, 113 painter and anatomist of, 56–57 political, 5, 31 see also individual entries Motivation, 6, 12, 68, 84, 114, 116, 121, 126, 169 Multiculturalism, 141, 151 Narrative imagination, 181 Natural jurisprudence, 34, 35, 73 and justice, 105–8 Natural language, 148, 149 Natural law see natural jurisprudence Natural virtue, 66, 68, 79, 84, 85 Neuroscience and empathy, 169–70 Nietzsche, F., 9, 175 Non-consequentialist judgments of justice, 109, 110 Nonreflective sympathy, 150 Normativity of authority, 16 as direct reflexivity, 33 and evaluation of sympathy, 119–27 of Hume’s theory, 16, 56–58 and rationalism, 7, 8 reflective sentimentalism and, 174–76 and sentimentalism, 7, 176–78 Nussbaum, M., 130, 181

Index Obedience, 36, 71, 77, 81 inflexible, 86 Obligation interested, to virtue, 25–26, 58 to justice, 80 moral, 56 Party monster, 131 Passions, 17, 18, 40, 98, 114, 127, 137 calm, 55, 135 definition of, 113 good-natured, 134 Hobbesian, 20 moral, 131–32, 161 natural, 130 reason and, 129, 132, 137 stable, moral evil of, 129–31 and sympathy, 42–43 unsocial, 103 violent, 55 Pathos, 18 Paul, St., 17 Perceptual claim, 122 Perlocution, 179 Personal separateness, threat to, 93–94 ways, 93–94 Philanthropist, 114–15 Pitié, 42, 48, 90, 97, 123, 147, 150, 170 Plato, 6 Pleasure, shared, 98, 99 Pluralism, 140–41 see also Herder, J. G. Political justice, 35, 36 Political piety, 91 Political reflection, 3, 173 Politics, twentieth-century suspicion of sympathy in, 90 political piety, 91 rightness, analysis of, 91 utilitarianism, 91–93 Practical sympathy, 122–23 Practices, 68–69 artificial, 69 social, 78 Precritical position, Kantian, 132–33 Price, R., 4, 29

Index Projective empathy, 99, 146 Propriety, 100, 102, 103 Psychological holism, 148, 149 Psychological uniformity and cultural diversity, 142–44 Public utility, 108–11, 146 Pufendorf, S., 106 Punishment, 38, 51, 103, 109–10 Raphael, D. D., 110 Rational soul, 19 Rationalists, 4, 5 normative theory and, 8 Rawls, J., 5, 8, 9, 68, 89, 111, 165 on impartial spectator, 92, 94, 95 A Theory of Justice, 91, 93 on utilitarianism, 91–92 Reason, 4, 5, 19, 138, 142, 149, 165, 172 Hume on, 6 passions and, 129, 132, 137, 176, 179 practical, 121 and public deliberation, 179 and reflection, 22–25 Reasonableness, 22, 165 Reciprocity see Billigkeit Reflection and reason, 23–25 Reflective approval, 24, 57, 61 Reflective autonomy, 4, 5, 6, 83, 114, 138, 173, 178, 179, 181 Reflective awareness, 148–49, 150, 165 Reflective equilibrium, 3, 4, 8, 9, 57, 59, 85, 177 Reflective freedom, 3 Reflective regimes, 5–7 Reflective revolution, 3–5 Reflective self-approbation, 31 Reflective self-evaluation, 31 Reflective sentimentalism, 40, 86, 88, 94, 116, 127, 168, 169 and civic education and citizenship, 180–82 defense of, 10–14 and democratic deliberation, 178–80 and normativity, 174–76 and passions, 114 Reflexive self-endorsement, 58, 59

235

Reid, T., 142 Religious sentimentalists, 17 Resentment, 38–39, 88, 102–8, 111, 127, 146 Resistance doctrine, 81 Rhetoric, 6, 11, 14, 93, 128, 178, 179–80 Rightness, analysis of, 91 Rothschild, E., 89, 93 Rousseau, J-J., 4, 42, 48, 123, 150, 170 Russell, B., 65 Sayre-McCord, G., 44, 75 Schiller, F., 112 Schneewind, J. B., 126 Schreiber, D., 174 Self-alienation, 136, 137, 138 Self-approbation, 31, 32, 35, 58 Self-approval, 33 Self-consciousness, 148, 149, 150 Self-contemplation, 17 Self-control, 127 Self-correction, 62, 71, 76, 126, 135, 136 Self-disapprobation, 116 Self-endorsement, 58, 59 Self-evaluation, 31, 32 Self-formation, 151 Self-interest, 26, 58, 69, 71 enlightened, 79 and justice, 74, 76, 79 knavish, 82 long-term, 70 Self-legislation, 3, 178, 180 Self-love, 21, 63, 84 Self-projection, 155 Self-reflection, 148 Self, 6 analogy to, 159 integrated, 138 projection of, 154 true, 6, 138 Selfish system, 20–21 Sensible humanitarian, 83–88 Sensible knave, 76–80, 86 Sensible utilitarian, 80–83 Sensitivity, 124–25, 127

236

Index

Sensus humanitatus, 166 Sensus communis, 18 Sentimentalism, before Hume, 15 authority of conscience, 30–33 human nature, 17–25 injustice and resentment, 37–39 justice as benevolence, 34–37 standard of nature, 28–30 virtue, happiness of, 25–28 Sentimentalism and normative theory normative theory, sentimentalist method of, 176–78 reflective sentimentalism, 174–76, 178–82 Sentimentalism and political practice civic education and citizenship, 180–82 democratic deliberation and reflective sentimentalism, 178–80 Sentimentalists, 4, 5, 8–9, 12, 116, 175 British, 18, 140, 148 Christian, 16 and civic education, 180, 181 Enlightenment, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 138, 169, 171, 173 ethics and, 11, 41, 64, 66, 111, 140, 141 on human psychology, 19, 20, 34 against Hume’s theory, 76 justice and, 95, 106 moral, 79, 112, 133, 140, 176 normative theory and, 176–77 precritical Kant and, 132–33 psychological holism and, 149 on reason, 19 reflective, 8, 11, 12, 15, 88, 112, 126, 127, 129, 138, 167, 175, 176, 181 religious, 17 on social contract, 34 Stoic ideas and, 62 Sentimentality, 124 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 4, 16, 20, 79, 177 on benevolence, 21, 22, 26 on harmonious tranquility, 19 on interested obligation, 25–26 on reason and reflection, 22

on self-contemplation, 17 on standard of nature, 28–30 on virtue, 26–27 Sherman, N., 115, 116, 121, 122 Sidgwick, H., 83, 93 Sinnott-Armstrong, W., 175 Slavery, 53–54 of self, 138 willful, 132 Smith, A., 4, 9, 10, 12, 25, 39, 88, 112, 142, 144, 176 on individualist sentimentalism, 95–97 on justice, 104–5 on merit and demerit, 102 on moral judgment, 100–101 natural jurisprudence of, 105–8 on public utility, limited role of, 108–11 on resentment, 102–3 revised anatomy of sympathy, 97–100 on rhetoric, 93 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 89, 95, 106, 109, 112, 168 on value pluralism, 146–47 Wealth of Nations, 106 Sociability benevolent, 20 passion of, 131 Social coexistence, 51–52 Social contract, 34 Social conventions, 12, 86, 87 Social inclination, 131 Social practices, 78 Social rules, 67 Social science and sentimentalism descriptive moral psychology, 170–72 political science and political psychology, 172–74 social psychology and empathy, 169–70 Social virtues, 85 Soft-heartedness, 126, 127 Soliloquy, 23 Sovereignty, 6, 81, 108 Spectator, 91

Index impartial, 39, 92, 94, 95, 108, 110, 111 judicious, 92 real-world, 101 space between actor and, 97–101 Speculation, 168 Standards of justice, 3 see also justice Stoics, 18, 28, 61, 62, 63, 117, 125 ancient, 19 and apathy, 19 comparison with sentimentalists, 19 Strength of mind, 55 Sublime attributes, 134 Teleology, natural, 29 Thompson, D., 179 Tranquil affections, 18 True self, 6, 138 Unfree sympathy, 122, 123, 124 Uniformitarianism, 142–43 Unrefined customs, 144 Unrefined sympathy, 134 Unsocial passion, 103

237

Useful and useless sympathy, 125–26 Utilitarianism, 35, 82, 91–92 Value pluralism, rejection of, 144–47 Violent passion, 55 Virtue, 53, 78, 121, 154 aesthetic constitution of, 119 approval of, 125 artificial, 66–69, 74, 79, 83, 85 dignity of, 58 false, 63–64 happiness of, 25–28, 58–63 and justice, 73–74, 104 moral, 19 natural, 66, 68, 79, 84 social, 85 Watkins, F., 143 Weber, M., 95, 155 Wille and Willkür, distinction between, 118, 132 Wolin, S., 15 Wollaston, W., 4 Wood, A., 122

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