Adam Smith objects to this, that we do recognize some- thing morally good in correct moral sentiments, and that we do consider a man worthy of moral approbation whose praise and blame are always accurately suited to the value or worthlessness of conduct. If we saw a man "shouting with admiration and applause at a barbarous and unmerited execution, which some insolent tyrant had ordered," we should be surely justified in calling such behaviour vicious, and morally evil in the highest degree, though it expressed nothing but a depraved state of the moral faculties. There is no perversion of sentiment or affection we should be more averse to enter into, or reject with greater disapprobation, than one of this kind;and so far from regarding such a state of mind as merely strange, and not at all vicious or evil, we should rather regard it "as the very last and most dreadful stage of moral depravity."Nor are the difficulties less if we found the principle of moral approbation, not upon any sense analogous to the external senses, but upon some peculiar sentiment, intended for such a purpose; if we say, for instance, that as resentment may be called a sense of injuries, or gratitude a sense of benefits, so approbation and disapprobation, as feelings or emotions which arise in the mind on the view of different actions and characters, may be called a sense of right and wrong, or a moral sense.
For if approbation and disapprobation were, like gratitude or resentment, an emotion of a particular kind, distinct from every other, whatever variations either of them might undergo we should expect them to retain clearly marked and distinguishable general features; just as in all the variations of the emotion of anger, it is easy to distinguish the same general features.
With regard to approbation it is otherwise, for there are no common features running through all manifestations of moral approval, or the contrary.
"The approbation with which we view a tender, delicate, and humane sentiment, is quite different from that with which we are struck by one that appears great, daring, and magnanimous. Our approbation of both may, upon different occasions, be perfect and entire; but we are softened by the one and we are elevated by the other, and there is no sort of resemblance between the emotions which they excite in us. And, in the same way, our horror for cruelty has no resemblance to our contempt for meanness of spirit.
By his own theory Adam Smith thinks that this difference in the character of approbation is more easily explained. It is because the emotions of the person whom we approve of are different when they are humane and delicate from what they are when they are great and daring, and because our approbation arises from sympathy with these different emotions, that our feeling of approbation with regard to the one sentiment is so different from what it is with regard to the other.
Moreover, not only are the different passions and affections of the human mind approved or disapproved as morally good or evil, but the approbation or disapprobation itself is marked with the same moral attributes. The moral sense theory cannot account for this fact; and the only explanation possible is, that, in this instance at least, the coincidence or opposition of sentiments between the person judging and the person judged constitutes moral approbation or the contrary. When the approbation with which our neighbour regards the conduct of another person coincides with our own, we approve of his approbation as in some measure morally good; and so, on the contrary, when his sentiments differ from our own, we disapprove of them as morally wrong.
If a peculiar sentiment, distinct from every other, were really the source of the principle of approbation, it is strange that such a sentiment "should hitherto have been so little taken notice of as not to have got a name in any language. The word `moral sense' is of very late formation, and cannot yet be considered as making part of the English tongue.... The word `conscience' does not immediately denote any moral faculty by which we approve or disapprove. Conscience supposes, indeed, the existence of some such faculty, and properly signifies our consciousness of having acted agreeably to its directions. When love, hatred, joy, sorrow, gratitude, resentment, with so many other passions which are all supposed to be the subjects of this principle, have made themselves considerable enough to get them titles to know them by, is it not surprising that the sovereign of them all should hitherto have been so little heeded thata few philosophers excepted nobody has yet thought it worth while to bestow a name upon it?"In opposition then to the theory which derives moral approbation from a peculiar sentiment, Adam Smith reduces it himself to four sources, in some respects different from one another. "First, we sympathize with the motives of the agent; secondly, we enter into the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions; thirdly, we observe that his conduct has been agreeable to the general rules by which those two sympathies generally act; and last of all, when we consider such actions as making a part of a system of behaviour which tends to promote the happiness either of the individual or of the society, they appear to derive a beauty from this utility not unlike that which we ascribe to any well-contrived machine."CHAPTER XIV.REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL CRITICISMS OF ADAM SMITH'STHEORY.
