Carl Christian Abrahamsen

For sentimentalists like Hume, the most basic objects of our approval are actions or character traits that cause pleasure. But Adam Smith instead takes as the fundamental object of approval the propriety of sentiments: a sentiment’s being ‘suited’ and ‘proportionate’ to its cause. Yet he is not particularly clear about what it is for a sentiment to match an object in this way. Moreover, extant interpretations are unsatisfying, because they generally fail to make sense of Smith’s claim that, in judging of your sentiment’s propriety, I use my own sentiment as a “rule or canon” for yours (TMS I.i.iii.9). This article provides a novel account of Smithian propriety, based on the idea that Smith sees our sentiments as representations of value. Sentimental propriety, on this account, is a kind of representational correctness; I judge your sentiment to be proper just insofar as I share your sentimental perspective on the relevant object.

Sophie de Grouchy discusses tragedy, or more broadly, “spectacles of suffering,” at length as part of her theory of sympathy and human psychology. Yet her account of tragedy, centered around an appeal to our “need to be moved,” is elusive, and there has been relatively little discussion of it in the secondary literature. I reconstruct this account by placing it in the context of Grouchy’s general physiological approach to human psychology, and, in particular, her discussion of the development of our faculties. Given this background, we can see the need to be moved as expressing the fact that we require strong emotions, both as adults and in childhood, in order to develop and maintain our capacities for feeling. I also argue that this kind of account constitutes a break with the standard eighteenth-century approach to tragedy, which is governed by the assumption that our experience of tragedy is overall pleasurable.

For Smith, acting morally is acting with regard to what would garner approval from the perspective of the other. In this sense, Smith is part of an early modern ethical tradition that I call esteem theory, which makes the regard for esteem both the central moral motive and in some ways the ground of morality. Yet Smith is also sensitive to worries, from Rousseau and others, that the desire for esteem can degenerate into deference and deception. For this reason he is careful to distinguish between what he calls the love of praise and the love of praiseworthiness. I offer a new interpretation of the love of praiseworthiness, on which the love of praiseworthiness is the desire to be such that one can praise oneself. Central to this interpretation is a distinction between what I call the subject-sides and the object-sides of praise.

Abstract coming!

I can decide to do the dishes or strive to be kinder. Can I, in the same sense, decide for you to do the dishes or to strive be kinder? Orthodoxy in the philosophy of action holds that this is not the case: decisions and intentions are, in some sense, irreducibly first-personal. I show that the standard arguments for this view, from the control condition and the right-way-causation condition, all fail; there is no special causal connection that holds only between my decisions and my actions and not between my decisions and your actions.

Yet I do think there is a difference between the kind of practical-deliberative stance I can take towards my own actions and the ones I can take towards yours. This difference has to do with the sense in which decisions function as reasons. In the kind of second-personal cases we would ordinarily call ‘deciding for others,’ you take my practical-deliberative attitude as a reason for acting; you do the dishes at least in part because I advised or commanded you to do so. But when I decide to do something myself, it is at least sometimes the case that I act from that decision without taking that decision itself as a reason for action. This feature can be obscured by the fact that many, if not most, of our ordinary decisions have a structure more like the second-personal case; our nature as temporally extended creatures means we must often relate to our earlier decisions as we do to advice or commands. Hence, while there is a core kind of practical-deliberative stance that is essentially first-personal, the ordinary notion of decision is not.

The approval of the impartial spectator, for Smith, is the final and most authoritative “measure” of what is morally right. But what gives such authority to impartiality in particular? I offer a novel suggestion, namely that the authority of impartiality arises from the structure of our judgments of approval, which consists in seeing whether our sentiments can be shared with an other. The significance of impartiality lies in this connection to shareability; the approval of the impartial spectator is authoritative because it picks out those sentiments which are universally shareable, or what is equivalent, those sentiments which are shareable with the other as such. Notably, this interpretation conflicts with widespread ‘Humean’ interpretations on which the impartial spectator is a conventionally established standard for our patterns of approval; on my reading, a commitment to the perspective of the impartial spectator is implicit in the very activity of self-evaluation.