The Theory of Moral Sentiments Read Free Page A

“oppresses and domineers in the East Indies” but was also “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions,” he was drawing not on any oddly devised social contract (it would have been very hard to fit such a judgment into the contractarian framework) but on the kind of reach that the impartial spectator allows, without confining judgments of justice to the limits of a sovereign state.
    Similar issues remain extremely alive today. How America tackles its economy influences not only Americans but also those in the rest of the world. AIDS and other epidemics have moved from country to country, and from continent to continent, and the medicines developed and produced in some parts of the world are important for the lives and freedoms of people far away. Also, what can be said about the environmental challenges we currently face has to be based on global reasoning about the sharing of obligations and burdens, rather than on a strictly contractarian line of analysis confined within the limits of a sovereign state.

THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR AND THE AVOIDANCE OF PAROCHIALISM
     
    Another argument for an “open” approach, in Smithian lines, is that it works to avoid the trap of parochialism. If the discussion of the demands of justice is confined to a particular locality—a country or even a region larger than that—there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counterarguments that might not come up in local political debates, or be accommodated in the discourse confined to the local culture, but that are eminently worth considering, from an impartial perspective.
    This is still an active issue in contemporary legal debates—for example, among the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the admissibility of invoking arguments and judgments in courts in other countries in seeking an appropriate understanding of the demands of justice in the United States. 23 Smith’s insistence that “the eyes of the rest of mankind” must be invoked to understand whether “a punishment appears equitable” remains deeply relevant here.
    Smith was particularly keen on avoiding the grip of parochialism in jurisprudence and moral and political reasoning. In a chapter in Moral Sentiments revealingly entitled “Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the Sentiments of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation,” he gives various examples of how discussions confined within a given society can be incarcerated within a seriously narrow understanding.
. . . the murder of new-born infants was a practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the polite and civilized Athenians. . . . Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorized the practice, that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this barbarous prerogative, but even the doctrine of philosophers, which ought to have been more just and accurate, was led away by the established custom, and upon this, as upon many other occasions, instead of censuring, supported the horrible abuse, by far-fetched considerations of public utility. Aristotle talks of it as of what the magistrate ought upon many occasions to encourage. The humane Plato is of the same opinion, and, with all that love of mankind which seems to animate all his writings, nowhere marks this practice with disapprobation. 24
     
    Smith’s insistence that we must view our sentiments, inter alia , at “a certain distance from us” thus extends, beyond the imperative to scrutinize the influence of vested interests, to the need to question the captivating hold of entrenched traditions and customs. In scrutinizing established rules today, including the permissibility of practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women under the Taliban and the widespread use of capital punishment (with or without the public jubilation with which it is sometimes accompanied)—for example, in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United States (to name the four