The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [7]
IMPARTIALITY AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR
An important contrast between the Smithian approach and the approach based on social contracts lies in the form in which impartiality, needed for fairness and justice, is invoked. Smith’s thought experiment on impartiality invokes the device of the “impartial spectator” who can come as readily from outside of a community as from within it. This differs substantially from the admissible points of view that a “social contract” approach concentrates on, to wit, the views of the people within a polity in which the contract is being made. In Rawls’s discussion of what he calls a “reflective equilibrium,” distant perspectives can be invoked, but in his structured theory of “justice as fairness,” the relevant points of view are confined entirely to those of the people in the society in which the so-called original position is being contemplated. In this sense, the impartiality that Rawls and the social contract approach explores is “closed”—i.e., it is confined to the members of the contracting parties (or their “representatives”). In contrast, Smith’s impartial spectator takes us toward an open impartiality.
To be sure, both Smith and Kant had much to say about the importance of impartiality. Even though Smith’s exposition of this idea is less remembered among contemporary moral and political philosophers, there are substantial points of similarity between the Kantian and Smithian approaches. In fact, Smith’s analysis of “the impartial spectator” has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness that so engaged the world of the European enlightenment. Smith’s ideas were influential not only among enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet; Kant, too, was familiar with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as we know from his correspondence with Markus Herz in 1771 (even though, alas, Herz referred to the proud Scotsman as “the Englishman Smith”),21 which preceded by a considerable number of years Kant’s own classic works Groundwork (1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.
But it is the differences between Smith on one side and Kant—and Rawls—on the other that are particularly important for the present discussion. To Smith, the internal discussion among the participants in the Rawlsian original position would appear to be inadequately scrutinized, since we have to look beyond the points of view of others in the same society, engaged in making the social contract. As Smith argued:
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.22
Compared to Smith’s approach, the procedural device of closed impartiality in Rawlsian “justice as fairness” can be seen as being limited in its reach. Why is this a problem? There are, in fact, two principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of public reasoning about justice go beyond boundaries of a state or region: (1) the relevance of other people’s interests—far away from as well as close to a given society—for the sake of preventing unfairness to those who are not party to the social contract for that society; and (2) the pertinence of other people’s perspectives