The Theory of Moral Sentiments Read Free

about the importance of impartiality. Even though Smith’s exposition of this idea is less remembered among contemporary moral and political philosophers, there are substantial points of similarity between the Kantian and Smithian approaches. In fact, Smith’s analysis of “the impartial spectator” has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness that so engaged the world of the European enlightenment. Smith’s ideas were influential not only among enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet; Kant, too, was familiar with The Theory of Moral Sentiments , as we know from his correspondence with Markus Herz in 1771 (even though, alas, Herz referred to the proud Scotsman as “the Englishman Smith”), 21 which preceded by a considerable number of years Kant’s own classic works Groundwork (1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.
    But it is the differences between Smith on one side and Kant—and Rawls—on the other that are particularly important for the present discussion. To Smith, the internal discussion among the participants in the Rawlsian original position would appear to be inadequately scrutinized, since we have to look beyond the points of view of others in the same society, engaged in making the social contract. As Smith argued:
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. 22
     
    Compared to Smith’s approach, the procedural device of closed impartiality in Rawlsian “justice as fairness” can be seen as being limited in its reach. Why is this a problem? There are, in fact, two principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of public reasoning about justice go beyond boundaries of a state or region: (1) the relevance of other people’s interests —far away from as well as close to a given society—for the sake of preventing unfairness to those who are not party to the social contract for that society; and (2) the pertinence of other people’s perspectives to broaden our own investigation of relevant principles, for the sake of avoiding underscrutinized parochialism of values and presumptions in the local community.

INTERDEPENDENT INTERESTS AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR
     
    By its very nature a social contract has to be confined to the members of a sovereign state—it is a contract among the citizens of that state. This makes it hard to extend the idea to the global world, as some have tried to do. Indeed, it is precisely because of the contractarian mode of reasoning that many philosophers have been tempted to argue that the idea of global justice is an absurdity at the present time, without a global sovereign state. Smith’s device of the impartial spectator gets around this limitation not by posing the problem in terms of a negotiated contract for members of a sovereign state but by invoking impartial arbitrators—from far and near—whose assessments have to be considered in order to get toward impartial reasoning. Dealing with the global mess makes the Smithian engagement altogether necessary. In some ways the world is grappling with the Smithian route, and while the gradual shift from national thinking to the G-8 and now to the G-20 is a move in the right direction, we have to go much further, for Smithian reasons.
    In many examples in each of his books, Smith did, in fact, make good use of the reach of global reasoning. For example, the misdeeds of early British rule in India, including the disastrous famine of 1770, engaged him greatly in The Wealth of Nations . When he concluded that the East India Company not only