On the Wealth of Nations Read Online Free PDF Page B

defer to his superior wisdom. Doing good and doing well should be enough for us. That we then should be obliged to listen to campaign speeches, make campaign contributions, and vote for fools is asking too much. As Smith himself declared in
Moral Sentiments,
'We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.' 5
    And it is from a certain kind of sitting still and doing nothing that, according to
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
our sense of right and wrong arises. The foremost invention of our imagination is morality.
    Adam Smith begins
Moral Sentiments
with the riddle upon which all our well-being depends: 'How selfish soever manmay be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it.' 6 The root of these principles is, according to Smith, sympathy. We are sympathetic creatures. We possess one emotion that cannot be categorized by cynics as either greed or fear. And it isn't love. We may love without any fellow feeling, the way John Hinckley 'proved his love' for Jodie Foster.
    Our sympathy makes us able, and eager, to share the feelings of people we don't love at all. We like sharing their bad feelings as well as their good ones. We enjoy, in a daytime-TV way, commiserating with the sorrows of perfect strangers. And we are so eager to have the most trivial of our own feelings shared that, Smith wrote, 'We are even put out of humour if our companion laughs louder or longer at a joke than we think it deserves.' 7
    This sympathy, Smith argued, is completely imaginative and not, like most emotions, a product of our physical senses. No matter how poignantly sympathetic the situation, we don't feel other people's pain. In a preemptive rebuttal of a future president of the United States, Smith used the example of seeing one's brother being put to the rack. (Although the brother of Roger Clinton might have chosen a more poignantly sympathetic case.) 'Our senses,' Smith declared, 'never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person.' 8 It is our imagination that generates sympathy and gives sympathy its power.
    People have the creative talent to put themselves in another person's place and to suppose what that other person is feeling.Even very shallow and frivolous people have this creative talent. We call them actors.
    But sympathy by itself – be it for humans, animals, or Clintons – can't be the basis of a moral system. Otherwise a person who watched daytime TV all day would be regarded as a saint. 'He must not be satisfied with indolent benevolence,' Smith wrote, 'nor fancy himself the friend of mankind, because in his heart he wishes well to the prosperity of the world.' 9
    Imagination, already working to show us how other people feel, has to work harder to show us whether what they feel is right or wrong. Then there's the problem of whether
we're
right or wrong. We'll always have plenty of sympathy for ourselves. 'We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness,' Smith wrote. 'This is by no means the weak side of human nature.' 10 Morality can't be just a bunch of good feelings, or I know a pill we can swallow to be moral.
    Our imaginations must undertake the additional task of creating a method to render decent judgments on our feelings and on the feelings of others and on the actions that proceed from these feelings. Adam Smith personified these conscious imaginative judgments and named our brain's moral magistrate the 'Impartial Spectator'. Perhaps this was a sly nod to the early eighteenth-century
Spectator
essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in which 'Mr Spectator' made the diffident claim of taking 'no practical part in life'. That was like Oprah Winfrey saying she takes none. With the Impartial Spectator, Smith had, indeed, predicted daytime TV hosts, spreading sympathy in all directions and acting as sympathy's