The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [8]
INTERDEPENDENT INTERESTS AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR
By its very nature a social contract has to be confined to the members of a sovereign state—it is a contract among the citizens of that state. This makes it hard to extend the idea to the global world, as some have tried to do. Indeed, it is precisely because of the contractarian mode of reasoning that many philosophers have been tempted to argue that the idea of global justice is an absurdity at the present time, without a global sovereign state. Smith’s device of the impartial spectator gets around this limitation not by posing the problem in terms of a negotiated contract for members of a sovereign state but by invoking impartial arbitrators—from far and near—whose assessments have to be considered in order to get toward impartial reasoning. Dealing with the global mess makes the Smithian engagement altogether necessary. In some ways the world is grappling with the Smithian route, and while the gradual shift from national thinking to the G-8 and now to the G-20 is a move in the right direction, we have to go much further, for Smithian reasons.
In many examples in each of his books, Smith did, in fact, make good use of the reach of global reasoning. For example, the misdeeds of early British rule in India, including the disastrous famine of 1770, engaged him greatly in The Wealth of Nations. When he concluded that the East India Company not only “oppresses and domineers in the East Indies” but was also “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions,” he was drawing not on any oddly devised social contract (it would have been very hard to fit such a judgment into the contractarian framework) but on the kind of reach that the impartial spectator allows, without confining judgments of justice to the limits of a sovereign state.
Similar issues remain extremely alive today. How America tackles its economy influences not only Americans but also those in the rest of the world. AIDS and other epidemics have moved from country to country, and from continent to continent, and the medicines developed and produced in some parts of the world are important for the lives and freedoms of people far away. Also, what can be said about the environmental challenges we currently face has to be based on global reasoning about the sharing of obligations and burdens, rather than on a strictly contractarian line of analysis confined within the limits of a sovereign state.
THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR AND THE AVOIDANCE OF PAROCHIALISM
Another argument for an “open” approach, in Smithian lines, is that it works to avoid the trap of parochialism. If the discussion of the demands of justice is confined to a particular locality—a country or even a region larger than that—there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counterarguments that might not come up in local political debates, or be accommodated in the discourse confined to the local culture, but that are eminently worth considering, from an impartial perspective.
This is still an active issue in contemporary legal debates—for example, among the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the admissibility of invoking arguments and judgments in courts in other countries in seeking an appropriate understanding of the demands of justice in the United States.23 Smith’s insistence that “the eyes of the rest of mankind” must be invoked to understand whether “a punishment appears equitable” remains deeply relevant here.
Smith was particularly keen on avoiding the grip of parochialism in jurisprudence and moral and political reasoning. In a chapter in Moral Sentiments revealingly entitled “Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the Sentiments of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation,” he gives various examples of how discussions confined within a given society can be incarcerated within a seriously narrow understanding.
. . . the murder of