A Foggy Moral Compass

Smith’s perspective on human sympathy provides an interesting conception of human relations. Some of the other blog posts brought up Smith’s failure to incorporate different types of sympathy, or his failure to incorporate empathy. However, I believe they miss the point. Smith doesn’t believe that people can ever truly put themselves in another person’s shoes, and therefore, he doesn’t believe in empathy. As he puts it, “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing place in fancy with the sufferer, that we come to either conceive or be affected by what he feels…” The entire basis, Smith believes, of our feelings for others comes from our imaginations of our own pain in their place. Because we can never truly be in their place, either at the moment they experience a certain pain, or throughout their emotional history that would lead them to that specific brand of pain, we can only have some filtered shadow of their passions. Empathy, truly feeling what another person feels, it not possible.

This leads one to a clear conception of Smith’s human being. Perhaps this is obvious, but under this theory, a person’s relation to the world is based entirely on his own experiences, thoughts, and feelings. This implies that people cannot possibly sympathize with people in a situation they have never encountered before. Only by relating a portion of it to pains or joys in their past can they try to conceive of the pain being suffered. For example, if a person falls out of a tree, I attempt to measure their pain by thinking about times when I fell from similar heights, or by recalling situations in which I was similarly shocked by an unexpected turn of events. These human beings are profoundly limited, and cannot simply evaluate a situation based on its own merits and faults. They are intensely subjective, and they cannot ever truly evaluate another person’s experiences. Smith’s person could never truly understand another person. Although obvious, this conception has profound implications for morality, effective human interaction, and normative behavior in general.

In order to appeal to such a being, the most effective tactic would clearly be to appeal to what they can relate to. The more similar a person’s situation is to another person’s situation, the more he can pretend to understand it. However, there will forever be the subjective component. Even if two people experience the exact same situation, their idea of what the other suffers is still based on their own imagination of the feelings involved. He can never feel the exact emotions of the other person.