The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith on Sympathy and Conscience

Almost everyone knows Adam Smith as the father of economics, the author of The Wealth of Nations and the prophet of the “invisible hand.” Far fewer know that, seventeen years earlier, the same man wrote a profound book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and that he considered it his finest work. Reading it corrects a caricature. The Adam Smith of popular imagination is a cold apostle of self-interest; the real Smith opens his moral philosophy with a sentence about sympathy and devotes the whole book to explaining how deeply we care about one another. The thinker behind capitalism turns out to have grounded human morality in fellow-feeling.

Here is what The Theory of Moral Sentiments taught me about sympathy, about the impartial spectator within us, and about the fuller picture of the man behind modern economics.

Key takeaways

• Sympathy is the foundation of morality: we naturally feel with others.
• The “impartial spectator” is the inner judge by whom we assess our own conduct.
• Conscience is social, shaped by imagining how others see us.
• Smith the moralist and Smith the economist are one consistent thinker.
• Self-interest is real but bounded by our deep concern for others’ approval.

The reality of fellow-feeling

Smith opens the book by overturning the cynical view of human nature he is so often, wrongly, associated with. However selfish man may be supposed, he writes, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him. We are not isolated egoists. We are wired for sympathy, the capacity to feel with another person, to wince at their pain and warm to their joy, to imaginatively put ourselves in their place. This fellow-feeling, Smith argues, is the foundation of all morality. We approve of conduct that we can sympathise with and condemn what we cannot. Morality, for Smith, grows not from cold rules but from the warm, natural fact that we are deeply affected by one another.

The impartial spectator

Smith’s most original idea is the impartial spectator. How do we judge our own behaviour, not just others’? We do it, he says, by imagining how a fair, well-informed, impartial observer would view our conduct, and judging ourselves through that imagined gaze. We internalise this spectator until it becomes the voice of conscience, the inner judge who praises or blames us from a standpoint outside our own self-interest. This is a beautiful account of how a moral conscience is born. It is not a mysterious faculty implanted from above, nor mere social conformity, but the internalisation of our capacity to see ourselves as others see us, raised to an impartial standard. When I ask myself whether what I am about to do is right, Smith would say, I am consulting this spectator within.

The two Smiths are one

For two centuries scholars puzzled over what they called “the Adam Smith problem”: how could the man who based morality on sympathy also base economics on self-interest? Are these two different Smiths, contradicting each other? Reading the two books together, I think the answer is no. Smith never believed people were purely selfish. In The Wealth of Nations he showed how, in the marketplace, the pursuit of self-interest can be channelled to serve the common good; in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he showed that this self-interest is itself always embedded in a rich web of sympathy, conscience, and concern for others’ regard. The market man and the moral man are the same man, viewed in different spheres. Smith understood that we are both self-interested and other-regarding, and that a good society must reckon with both.

What I’m taking with me

The Theory of Moral Sentiments rescued Adam Smith for me from his own caricature. What I am taking from it is the reassuring foundation of morality in natural sympathy rather than cold calculation; the lovely idea of the impartial spectator, the inner judge who lets me see myself from outside my own self-interest; and the corrective lesson that the founder of economics never preached pure selfishness. Smith reminds me that we are, by nature, creatures who care what others think and feel, and that this fellow-feeling, not naked self-interest, is the true ground of a decent life.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Theory of Moral Sentiments about?

It is Adam Smith’s work on ethics, arguing that morality is grounded in sympathy, our natural capacity to feel with others, and that conscience arises from judging ourselves through an imagined “impartial spectator.”

What is the “impartial spectator”?

Smith’s idea of an imagined fair and well-informed observer through whose eyes we judge our own conduct. Internalized, it becomes the voice of conscience.

Does this book contradict The Wealth of Nations?

Not really. Smith never thought people were purely selfish. Sympathy and self-interest are two sides of his consistent view of human nature, applied to morality and to markets respectively.

References & further reading

1. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (1759; edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Oxford University Press, 1976.)
2. Ross, Ian Simpson. The Life of Adam Smith. Oxford University Press, 1995.
3. Raphael, D. D. Adam Smith. Oxford University Press, 1985.