The Theory of Moral Sentiments

he analysis of the sense of merit and demerit.

1. As our sense, therefore, of the propriety of

conduct arises from what I shall call a direct sympathy

with the affections and motives of the person

who acts, so our sense of its merit arises from what

I shall call an indirect sympathy with the gratitude

of the person who is, if I may say so, acted upon.

As we cannot indeed enter thoroughly into the

gratitude of the person who receives the benefit,

unless we beforehand approve of the motives of the

benefactor, so, upon this account, the sense of merit

seems to be a compounded sentiment, and to be

made up of two distinct emotions; a direct sympathy

with the sentiments of the agent, and an indirect

sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive

the benefit of his actions.

We may, upon many different occasions, plainly

distinguish those two different emotions combining

and uniting together in our sense of the good desert

of a particular character or action. When we read in

history concerning actions of proper and beneficent

greatness of mind, how eagerly do we enter into

such designs? How much are we animated by that

113high-spirited generosity which directs them? How

keen are we for their success? How grieved at their

disappointment? In imagination we become the very

person whose actions are represented to us: we transport

ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant

and forgotten adventures, and imagine ourselves

acting the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon

or an Aristides. So far our sentiments are founded

upon the direct sympathy with the person who

acts. Nor is the indirect sympathy with those who

receive the benefit of such actions less sensibly felt.

Whenever we place ourselves in the situation of these

last, with what warm and affectionate fellow-feeling do

we enter into their gratitude towards those who served

them so essentially? We embrace, as it were, their

benefactor along with them. Our heart readily sympathizes

with the highest transports of their grateful

affection. No honours, no rewards, we think, can

be too great for them to bestow upon him. When

they make this proper return for his services, we

heartily applaud and go along with them; but are

shocked beyond all measure, if by their conduct they

appear to have little sense of the obligations conferred

upon them. Our whole sense, in short, of the

merit and good desert of such actions, of the propriety

and fitness of recompensing them, and making

the person who performed them rejoice in his turn,

arises from the sympathetic emotions of gratitude

and love, with which, when we bring home to our

own breast the situation of those principally concerned,

we feel ourselves naturally transported towards

the man who could act with such proper and noble

beneficence.

1142. In the same manner as our sense of the impropriety

of conduct arises from a want of sympathy, or

from a direct antipathy to the affections and motives

of the agent, so our sense of its demerit arises from

what I shall here too call an indirect sympathy with

the resentment of the sufferer.

As we cannot indeed enter into the resentment of

the sufferer, unless our heart beforehand disapproves

the motives of the agent, and renounces all fellow-feeling

with them; so upon this account the sense of

demerit, as well as that of merit, seems to be a compounded

sentiment, and to be made up of two distinct

emotions; a direct antipathy to the sentiments

of the agent, and an indirect sympathy with the resentment

of the sufferer.

We may here too, upon many different occasions,

plainly distinguish those two different emotions combining

and uniting together in our sense of the ill

desert of a particular character or action. When

we read in history concerning the perfidy and cruelty

of a Borgia or a Nero, our heart rises up against the

detestable sentiments which influenced their conduct,

and renounces with horror and abomination all fellow-feeling

with such execrable motives. So far

our sentiments are founded upon the direct antipathy

to the affections of the agent: and the indirect sympathy

with the resentment of the sufferers is still

more sensibly felt. When we bring home to ourselves

the situation of the persons whom those

scourges of mankind insulted, murdered, or betrayed,

what indignation do we not feel against such insolent

and inhuman oppressors of the earth? Our

115sympathy with the unavoidable distress of the innocent

sufferers is not more real nor more lively, than our

fellow-feeling with their just and natural resentment.

The former sentiment only heightens the latter, and

the idea of their distress serves only to inflame and

blow up our animosity against those who occasioned

it. When we think of the anguish of the sufferers,

we take part with them more earnestly against their

oppressors; we enter with more eagerness into all

their schemes of vengeance, and feel ourselves every

moment wreaking, in imagination, upon such violators

of the laws of society, that punishment which

our sympathetic indignation tells us is due to their

crimes. Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity

of such conduct, the delight which we take in

hearing that it was properly punished, the indignation

which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation,

our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill

desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflicting evil

upon the person who is guilty of it, and of making

him grieve in his turn, arises from the sympathetic

indignation which naturally boils up in the breast of

the spectator, whenever he thoroughly brings home

to himself the case of the sufferer[2].

2. To ascribe in this manner our natural sense of the ill desert

of human actions to a sympathy with the resentment of the sufferer,

may seem, to the greater part of people, to be a degradation

of that sentiment. Resentment is commonly regarded as so odious

a passion, that they will be apt to think it impossible that so laudable

a principle, as the sense of the ill desert of vice, should in

any respect be founded upon it. They will be more willing, perhaps,

to admit that our sense of the merit of good actions is founded

upon a sympathy with the gratitude of the persons who receive

the benefit of them; because gratitude, as well as all the

other benevolent passions, is regarded as an amiable principle,

which can take nothing from the worth of whatever is founded

116upon it. Gratitude and resentment, however, are in every respect,

it is evident, counterparts to one another; and if our sense of

merit arises from a sympathy with the one, our sense of demerit can

scarce miss to proceed from a fellow-feeling with the other.

Let it be considered too that resentment, though, in the degrees

in which we too often see it, the most odious, perhaps, of all the

passions, is not disapproved of when properly humbled and entirely

brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the

spectator. When we, who are the bystanders, feel that our own

animosity entirely corresponds with that of the sufferer, when the

resentment of this last does not in any respect go beyond our own,

when no word, no gesture, escapes him that denotes an emotion

more violent than what we can keep time to, and when he never

aims at inflicting any punishment beyond what we should rejoice to

see inflicted, or what we ourselves would upon this account even

desire to be the instruments of inflicting, it is impossible that we

should not entirely approve of his sentiments. Our own emotion

in this case must, in our eyes, undoubtedly justify his. And as

experience teaches us how much the greater part of mankind are

incapable of this moderation, and how great an effort must be made

in order to bring down the rude and undisciplined impulse of resentment

to this suitable temper, we cannot avoid conceiving a

considerable degree of esteem and admiration for one who appears

capable of exerting so much self-command over one of the most

ungovernable passions of his nature. When indeed the animosity

of the sufferer exceeds, as it almost always does, what we can go

along with, as we cannot enter into it, we necessarily disapprove of

it. We even disapprove of it more than we should of an equal

excess of almost any other passion derived from the imagination.

And this too violent resentment, instead of carrying us along with

it, becomes itself the object of our resentment and indignation. We

enter into the opposite resentment of the person who is the object of

this unjust emotion, and who is in danger of suffering from it.

Revenge, therefore, the excess of resentment, appears to be the

most detestable of all the passions, and is the object of the horror

and indignation of every body. And as in the way in which this

passion commonly discovers itself among mankind, it is excessive a

hundred times for once that it is moderate, we are very apt to consider

it as altogether odious and detestable, because in its most ordinary

appearances it is so. Nature, however, even in the present

depraved state of mankind, does not seem to have dealt so unkindly

117with us, as to have endowed us with any principle which is

wholly in every respect evil, or which, in no degree and in no direction,

can be the proper object of praise and approbation. Upon

some occasions we are sensible that this passion, which is generally

too strong, may likewise be too weak. We sometimes complain

that a particular person shows too little spirit, and has too little

sense of the injuries that have been done to him; and we are as

ready to despise him for the defect, as to hate him for the excess of

this passion.

The inspired writers would not surely have talked so frequently

or so strongly of the wrath and anger of God, if they had regarded

every degree of those passions as vicious and evil, even in so weak

and imperfect a creature as man.

Let it be considered too, that the present inquiry is not concerning

a matter of right, if I may say so, but concerning a matter of

fact. We are not at present examining upon what principles a perfect

being would approve of the punishment of bad actions; but

upon what principles so weak and imperfect a creature as man

actually and in fact approves of it. The principles which I have

just now mentioned, it is evident, have a very great effect upon his

sentiments; and it seems wisely ordered that it should be so. The

very existence of society requires that unmerited and unprovoked

malice should be restrained by proper punishments; and consequently,

that to inflict those punishments should be regarded as a

proper and laudable action. Though man, therefore, be naturally

endowed with a desire of the welfare and preservation of society,

yet the Author of nature has not entrusted it to his reason to find

out that a certain application of punishments is the proper means

of attaining this end; but has endowed him with an immediate

and instinctive approbation of that very application which is most

proper to attain it. The œconomy of nature is in this respect exactly

of a piece with what it is upon many other occasions. With

regard to all those ends which, upon account of their peculiar importance,

may be regarded, if such an expression is allowable, as

the favourite ends of nature, she has constantly in this manner not

only endowed mankind with an appetite for the end which she proposes,

but likewise with an appetite for the means by which alone

this end can be brought about, for their own sakes, and independent

of their tendency to produce it. Thus self-preservation, and the

propagation of the species, are the great ends which Nature seems

to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are

118endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary;

with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire

of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion

to the thoughts of its entire extinction. But though we are in

this manner endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has

not been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our

reason, to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature

has directed us to the greater part of these by original and

immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites

the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt

us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration

of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the

great Director of nature intended to produce by them.

Before I conclude this note, I must take notice of a difference

between the approbation of propriety and that of merit or beneficence.

Before we approve of the sentiments of any person as proper

and suitable to their objects, we must not only be affected in the

same manner as he is, but we must perceive this harmony and correspondence

of sentiments between him and ourselves. Thus,

though upon hearing of a misfortune that had befallen my friend,

I should conceive precisely that degree of concern which he gives

way to; yet till I am informed of the manner in which he behaves,

till I perceive the harmony between his emotions and mine, I cannot

be said to approve of the sentiments which influence his behaviour.

The approbation of propriety therefore requires, not only that we

should intirely sympathize with the person who acts, but that we

should perceive this perfect concord between his sentiments and our

own. On the contrary, when I hear of a benefit that has been bestowed

upon another person, let him who has received it be affected

in what manner he pleases, if, by bringing his case home to myself,

I feel gratitude arise in my own breast, I necessarily approve of the

conduct of his benefactor, and regard it as meritorious, and the proper

object of reward. Whether the person who has received the

benefit conceives gratitude or not, cannot, it is evident, in any degree

alter our sentiments with regard to the merit of him who has bestowed

it. No actual correspondence of sentiments, therefore, is here required.

It is sufficient that if he was grateful, they would correspond;

and our sense of merit is often founded upon one of those

illusive sympathies, by which, when we bring home to ourselves the

case of another, we are often affected in a manner in which the person

principally concerned is incapable of being affected. There is a

similar difference between our disapprobation of demerit, and that of

impropriety.

119

SECTION II.

Of justice and beneficence.