The sense of the propriety or impropriety of a moral action or sentiment is, according to Adam Smith, only one side of the fact of moral approbation, a sense of their merit or demerit constituting the other side. An action or sentiment is proper or improper in relation to its cause, or the motive which excites it, whilst it is meritorious or the contrary in relation to its effect, or in accordance with its beneficial or hurtful tendency.
It is important to notice this distinction, for it is a protest, as Adam Smith himself declares, against the theories of Dr. Hutcheson and Hume, who, he complains, had considered too much the tendency of affections, their good or bad results, whilst neglecting the relation in which they stood to their causes. This was to overlook the facts of common life, since a person's conduct and sentiments are generally regarded under both these aspects, a man receiving blame for excess of love, or grief, or resentment, not only by reason of the ruinous effects they tend to produce, but also on account of the little occasion that was given for them. It is the want of proportion between a passion and its cause, as well as the sense of its disastrous effects, which make up the whole character of moral disapprobation.
Whilst praise or blame are attached to the first aspect of an action or sentiment, a stronger feeling of sympathy or antipathy attaches itself to either in connexion with their effects, a feeling that they deserve reward or punishment, a feeling in other words of their merit or demerit.
As gratitude is the feeling which most directly prompts us to reward another man, and resentment that which most directly prompts us to punish him, an action will call for reward or punishment according as it is the object of either of these feelings. The measure, therefore, of the merit or demerit of any action will be the feeling of gratitude or resentment it excites.
But here again the principle of sympathy must come into play, to decide on the rightfulness of the gratitude or resentment. An action can only seem meritorious or the contrary, as deserving of reward or punishment, if it is the proper and right object of gratitude or resentment; and only that gratitude or resentment can be proper which commands the sympathy of the impartial spectator. That man's action deserves reward as meritorious who to somebody is the object of a gratitude which every human heart is disposed to beat time to, whilst his action seems to deserve punishment as bad who to somebody is the object of a resentment which every reasonable man can sympathize with and adopt. According as everybody who hears of any action would wish to see it rewarded or punished may it fairly be accounted meritorious or the reverse.
In regarding, then, the beneficial or hurtful tendency of actions, our sense of their merit or demerit, due to sympathy with the gratitude or the resentment they respectively excites appears to arise in the following way.
Sympathizing as we do with the joy of others in prosperity, we also join them in the satisfaction with which they regard the cause of their good fortune. If the cause has been a man, this is more especially the case. We regard him in the same engaging light in which we imagine he must appear to the object of his bounty, whilst our sympathy with the joy of the latter inspires us also with a reflection of the same gratitude he feels.
In the same manner we sympathize not only with the distress or sorrow of another, but with the aversion he feels towards the cause of it. When we see one man oppressed or injured by another, our sympathy with the sufferer only animates our fellow-feeling with his resentment against his oppressor.
So we even enter into the imaginary resentment of the slain, and by an illusive sympathy with that resentment which we know he would feel, were he alive, exact vengeance from the criminal who murdered him.
But although our sympathy with the beneficial results of an act may thus lead us to join in the gratitude it occasions, and so to regard it as meritorious or deserving of reward, this is only, as has been said, one side or aspect of complete moral approbation. To constitute the latter, a sense of the propriety of an action must be joined to a sense of its merit.; and an action is only then really good when we can sympathize with the motives of the agent as well as with the gratitude his conduct produces.
Wherever we cannot enter into the affections of the agent, wherever we cannot recognize any propriety in the motives which influenced him, we fail to sympathize with the gratitude of the person he has befriended.
Where, for instance, the greatest benefits have been conferred from the most trivial motives, as where a man gives an estate to another simply because his name or his surname happen to be the same as his own, little gratitude seems due; and con- sequently the action, though beneficial in its tendency, since it fails to command our complete sympathy, fails to command our complete approbation.
So on the other hand, however hurtful in their tendency a man's actions or intentions may be, if we sympathize with his motives, that is, if we look upon him as in the right, we can feel no sympathy with the resentment of the person injuriously affected by him. If he suffers no more than our own sympathetic indignation would have prompted us to inflict upon him, we have no fellow-feeling with his suffering, and consequently no sense of the demerit of the action he regards with resentment. It would be impossible, for instance, to sympathize with the resentment expressed by a murderer against his judge. So that to constitute the sentiment of complete moral disapprobation, there must be impropriety of motive on the part of the agent as well as a hurtful result to some one else; or, in other words, for an action to be pronounced by our sympathetic imagination completely bad, it must be both improper in its motive and injurious in its result.
It is not enough for it to be simply injurious.
