Philosophy
433
History
of Ethics
Darwall
Winter 2008
SMITH II
I.
Smith on judgments of justice.
According
to Smith, when we judge an agent’s action or motive, again, we do so by
projecting (impartially, as though we were anyone) into the agent’s
perspective
and viewing the practical situation as we imagine it to confront her in
deliberation. If the person’s actual
decision and motive match those we simulate under these ideal
conditions, then
we judge them to be “proper.” And when
we judge someone’s feeling or reaction, we do so from her perspective
as a
patient, viewing the situation, as we imagine it to face her, as
someone
responding to it.
It
is important that Smithian moral judgments involve an implicit
identification
with others as having an independent point of view.
This already pushes Smith’s thought away from
the observer-based virtue ethics of Hutcheson and Hume.
Although Smith is a metaethical
sentimentalist, like Hume and Hutcheson,
it is an important difference between his view and theirs that
Smithian
judgments of propriety are made not from a third-person perspective but
from
idealized (impartially disciplined versions) of personal and
interpersonal
standpoints. What takes Smith even
farther from Hutcheson and Hume, and into the second-person standpoint,
is his
metaethics of justice.
Injustice,
for Smith, is essentially tied to warranted resentment.
(TMS: 67, 69, 79) It is not simply
improper conduct but
improper conduct to which the proper response is a second-personal
reactive feeling
to challenge or hold the agent accountable in some way.
So on Smith’s view, injustice can be judged
only by projecting ourselves impartially into the agent’s and,
crucially, the
affected parties’ points of view and then considering whether to feel
resentment
from that perspective.
II. Justice
as respecting individuals.
This
individual-patient-regarding character of justice leads Smith to oppose
utilitarian tradeoffs and to hold that resistance to injustice is
warranted not
by considerations of overall utility but by concern for the “very
individual”
who would be injured. (TMS: 90, 138)
Moreover, what we consider from the standpoint of affected
parties is
whether to respond with a distinctive feeling that itself
presupposes mutual accountability between persons.
Sympathy with victims’ sense of injury
involves, according to Smith, not simply a sharing of their sense of
having
been wronged. It also involves
recognition of their authority to challenge the wrong by resisting it,
or,
failing that, to demand some form of compensation or punishment. It recognizes their authority to address
demands of justice. We can only judge
whether something is properly resented or resisted, therefore, by
imagining
being in the shoes of the affected parties and considering whether any
of us,
if reasonable, would feel a reactive, accountability-seeking sentiment
that
implicitly lodges some second-personal challenge or complaint and
addresses a
second-personal reason to respect this challenge.
III.
Morality and accountability
Although
it is rarely appreciated, Adam Smith also makes accountability central
to his
picture of morality. “A moral being,”
Smith says, “is an accountable being,” who “must give an account of its
actions
to some other, and that consequently must regulate them according to
the
good-liking of this other.” (Smith 1982: 111)
Although Smith says that man is “principally accountable to
God,” he
quickly adds that each “must necessarily conceive himself as
accountable to his
fellow-creatures, before he can form any idea of the Deity . . . .”
(Smith
1982: 111n)
When
someone uses your foot as his footrest, this is an injury not just to
your
foot, but also to your person. It is a
failure to respect your standing or dignity as someone who may not be
so treated
and who has the standing as one among others to hold others to this. Smith observes that we are apt to resent
disrespect for our person as much or more than any physical or psychic
injury. What most “enrages us against the
man who
injures or insults us,” Smith writes, “is the little account which he
seems to
make of us”—“that absurd self-love, by which he seems to
imagine, that
other people may be sacrificed at any time, to his conveniency.”
(Smith
1982: 96)
IV Respect, not Retaliation
It
is consistent with the object of reactive attitudes’ invariably being
disrespect, of course, that what they seek is still retaliation of some
form,
to hurt back, to give as good as we have gotten. On
reflection, however, that cannot be right,
as Smith himself saw. If reactive
attitudes were retaliatory, then they would seek to return disrespect
for
disrespect. But as Strawson pointed out,
moral reactive attitudes are themselves a form of respect.
They view their targets as, like those who
feel them, “member(s) of the moral community,” and thus address them on
terms
of mutual respect. (Strawson 1968: 93)
They seek reciprocal recognition of the (equal) dignity that
they both
claim (of the addresser) and presuppose (of the addressee). Smith writes insightfully that when we resent
injuries, what our resentment is “chiefly intent upon, is not so much
to make
our enemy feel pain in his turn, as . . . to make him sensible that the
person
whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner.” (TMS:
95-96) The implicit aim of reactive
attitudes is to make others feel our dignity (and, less obviously,
their own).
V Mutual Respect in The Wealth of Nations
The
Wealth of Nations virtually begins with a discussion of the
human
capacity for the distinctive form of second-personal interaction that
Smith
calls “exchange,” and its relation to mutual respect.
When other animals need help, Smith says,
they have no other “means of persuasion but to gain the favour of those
whose
service [they] require[e].” “A puppy
fawns upon its dam, and a spaniel endeavours by a thousand attractions
to
engage the attention of its master.” (WN: 25)
Currying sympathy and favor requires no capacity for
second-personal
address or for empathy. These are
non-second-personal responses that can be gauged and elicited
third-personally. Of course, we humans
frequently do rely on one another’s sympathy.
Often, this is just fine, even desirable. “But
man has almost constant occasion for the
help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their
benevolence only.” (WN: 25) Given the
vagaries of human life, we often cannot expect others to care for us in
this
way. Moreover, attempting to gain
others’ favor can expose us to risks of subservience.
By “servile and fawning attention,” we may
put ourselves at others’ mercy and be vulnerable to their condescension
if not
domination. Happily, Smith believes,
nature has given human beings a more dignified alternative: “the
general disposition
to truck, barter,
and exchange.” (WN: 25) Free
exchange, in Smith’s view, involves a
second-personal address that presupposes a form of mutual respect.
We
are familiar with the Smithian idea that in a society with a
well-functioning
economy, rich and poor alike meet their needs and wants through formal
and
informal markets that are sites for mutually advantageous exchanges. “It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
their
regard to their own interest.” (WN: 25) But although its operative
motive is
self-interest, exchange is impossible without a presupposed
second-personal
normative infrastructure. Why are other
animals incapable of exchange? “Nobody,”
he says,
ever saw
a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with
another
dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its
gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that
yours; I am
willing to give this for that. (Smith 1976: 25)
Smith evidently
thinks of
exchange as an interaction in which both parties are committed to
various
normative presuppositions, for example, that the exchange is made by
free
mutual consent, that neither will simply
take what the
other has, and so on. Both parties must
presume that the other is dealing fairly, not in the sense that what is
offered
is of fair value (caveat emptor—self-interest and bargaining
regulate
that), but that each is dealing honestly, that the offered goods will
actually
be delivered, that each is free to refuse the deal and walk away
without
coercion, that neither will attempt to reacquire through coercion what
he
freely trades away, and so on.
Exchange
thus involves a reciprocal acknowledgment of norms that govern both
parties and
presupposes that both parties are mutually accountable, having an equal
authority
to complain, to resist coercion, and so on.
To engage in exchange at all, therefore, one must be capable of
the
requisite reciprocal recognition, and this requires empathy. To gauge whether the other is bargaining in
good faith, each must attempt to determine: whether the other is
attempting to
determine whether one is bargaining honestly, whether the other is
attempting
to determine whether one is attempting to determine whether the other
is
bargaining honestly, and so on. All this
requires that both be able to put themselves imaginatively into the
other’s
standpoint and compare the responses that one thinks reasonable from
that
perspective with the other’s actual responses, as one perceives them
third-personally. So what is required is
not merely empathy, but also, as we shall see, regulation of both
parties by
claims, demands, and norms that make sense from a second-person
standpoint.