The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [9]
Smith’s insistence that we must view our sentiments, inter alia, at “a certain distance from us” thus extends, beyond the imperative to scrutinize the influence of vested interests, to the need to question the captivating hold of entrenched traditions and customs. In scrutinizing established rules today, including the permissibility of practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women under the Taliban and the widespread use of capital punishment (with or without the public jubilation with which it is sometimes accompanied)—for example, in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United States (to name the four countries that led the world in the frequency of capital punishment in 2008)—the perspectives of other people from far as well as near have a relevance for reasons that Smith presented definitively in the Moral Sentiments.
INCLINATIONS, INCLUSION, AND EQUALITY
I end with some remarks on Smith’s personal sentiments. This introduction has been concerned almost entirely with Smith’s reasoning, rather than with his inclinations and predispositions. This has some rationale: I believe Smith was right in thinking (as I quoted him earlier) that “our most solid judgments . . . with regard to right and wrong, are regulated by maxims and ideas derived from an induction of reason.” And yet Smith also argued, again quite persuasively, that our “first perceptions” of right and wrong “cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense and feeling.”25Even though our first perceptions may change in response to critical examination (as Smith also noted), these perceptions can still give us interesting clues about our inclinations and emotional predispositions.
One of the striking features of Smith’s personality is his inclination to be as inclusive as possible—not only locally but also globally. He does acknowledge that we may have special obligations to our neighbors, but the reach of our concern must ultimately transcend that confinement. I have already discussed the strikingly global feature of Smith’s moral and political inclusiveness. To that I want to add the understanding that Smith’s ethical inclusiveness is matched by a strong epistemic inclination to see people everywhere as being essentially similar. There is something quite remarkable in the ease with which Smith rides over barriers of class, gender, race, and nationality to see human beings with a presumed equality of potential, and without any innate difference in intrinsic talents and abilities.
Smith’s empirical presumption of equality of potential of different human beings is stated most explicitly in The Wealth of Nations:
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither