As to the authority of our moral faculties, of our perception, howsoever derived, of different qualities in conduct, it is, in Adam Smith's system, an ultimate fact, as indisputable as the authority of other faculties over their respective objects; for example, as the authority of the eye about beauty of colour, or as that of the ear about harmony of sounds. "Our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety," approve or disapprove of actions instantaneously, and this approval or judgment is their peculiar function. They judge of the other faculties and principles of our nature;how far, for example, love or resentment ought either to be indulged or restrained, and when the various senses ought to be gratified. Hence they cannot be said to be on a level with our other natural faculties and appetites, and endowed with no more right to restrain the latter than the latter are to restrain them. There can be no more appeal from them about their objects than there is from the eye, or the ear, or the taste with regard to the objects of their several jurisdictions. According as anything is agreeable or not to them, is it fit, right, and proper, or unfit, wrong, and improper.
"The sentiments which they approve of are graceful and becoming; the contrary, ungraceful and unbecoming. The very words, right, wrong, fit, proper, graceful, or becoming, mean only what pleases or displeases those faculties."Hence the question of the authority of our moral faculties is as futile as the question of the authority of the special senses over their several objects. For "they carry along with them the most evident badges of this authority, which denote that they were set up within us to be the supreme arbiter of all our actions, to superintend all our senses, passions, and appetites, and to judge how far either of them was either to be indulged or restrained." That is to say, it is impossible for our moral faculties to approve of one course of conduct and to disapprove of another, and at the same time to feel that there is no authority in the sentiment which passes judgment either way.
Perhaps the part of Adam Smith's theory which has given least satisfaction is his account of the ethical standard, or measure of moral actions. This, it will be remembered, is none other than the sympathetic emotion of the impartial spectatorwhich seems again to resolve itself into the voice of public opinion. It will be of interest to follow some of the criticism that has been devoted to this point, most of which turns on the meaning of the word impartial .
If impartiality means, argues Jouffroy, as alone it can mean impartiality of judgment, the impartiality of a spectator must be the impartiality of his reason, which rises superior to the suggestions of his instincts or passions; but if so, a moral judgment no longer arises from a mere instinct of sympathy, but from an operation of reason. If instinct is adopted as our rule of moral conduct, there must be some higher rule by which we make choice of some impulses against the influence of others; and the impartiality requisite in sympathy is itself a recognition of the insufficiency of instinctive feelings to supply moral rules.
It may be said, in reply to this, that by impartiality Adam Smith meant neither an impartiality of reason nor of instinct, but simply the indifference or coolness of a mind that feels not the full strength of the original passion, which it shares, and which it shares in a due and just degree precisely because it feels it not directly but by reflection. If the resentment of A. can only fairly be estimated by the power of B. to sympathize with it, the latter is only impartial in so far as his feeling of resentment is reflected and not original. His feeling of approbation or disapprobation of A's resentment need be none the less a feeling, none the less instinctive and emotional, because he is exempt from the vividness of the passion as it affects his friend. It is simply that exemption, Adam Smith would say, which enables him to judge; and whether his judgment is for that reason to be considered final and right or not, it is, as a matter of fact, the only way in which a moral judgment is possible at all.
The next objection of Jouffroy, that the sympathy of an impartial spectator affords only variable rules of morality, Adam Smith would have met by the answer, that the rules of morality are to a certain extent variable, and dependent on custom. Jouffroy supposes himself placed as an entire stranger in the presence of a quantity of persons of different ages, ***es, and professions, and then asks, how should he judge of the propriety of any emotion on his part by reference to the very different sympathies which such an emotion would arouse. Lively sensibilities would partake of his emotions vividly, cold ones but feebly. The sympathies of the men would be different from those of the women, those of the young from those of the old, those of the merchant from those of the soldier, and so forth.
To this it might fairly be replied, that as a matter of fact there are very few emotions with which different people do not sympathize in very different degrees, and of which accordingly they do not entertain very different feelings of moral approbation or the reverse. Each man's sympathy is in fact his only measure of the propriety of other men's sentiments, and for that reason it is that there is scarcely any single moral action of which any two men adopt the same moral sentiment. That morality is relative and not absolute, Adam Smith nowhere denies. Nevertheless, he would say, there is sufficient uniformity in the laws of sympathy, directed and controlled as they are by custom, to make the rule of general sympathy or of the abstract spectator a sufficiently permanent standard of conduct.