The Impartial Spectator

1. Scope and evidence

The core exposition on this card is Established: the mechanics of sympathy, the impartial spectator, "the man within the breast," self-deceit, and the justice/beneficence distinction are all drawn directly from Smith's text and are uncontested among scholars. The interpretation that Smith deepened the connection between the impartial spectator and conscience in the sixth edition is Established (documented through his correspondence and the added Part VI and Part III revisions). The status of the "Adam Smith Problem" is itself a claim requiring care: it is Established that the debate occurred and Shared/Settled that modern scholarship regards it as a misconception based on a misreading of "sympathy" and "self-interest" — it is not a live, unresolved controversy. The link between Smith's spectator and Roderick Firth's 1952 "ideal observer" theory is Established as a documented scholarly parallel but is offered as influence/affinity, not as a claim that Firth simply restated Smith.

2. Publication history and the six editions

The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Adam Smith's first book, published in 1759 while he held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and grew directly out of his lectures to students. It went through six editions in his lifetime: 1759, 1761, 1767, 1774, 1781 and 1790. The second edition (1761) incorporated revisions prompted by philosophically minded friends and added a chapter on the influence and authority of conscience. Editions three, four and five differ comparatively little from the second; the third (1767) appended Smith's essay "Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages," and the fourth (1774) expanded the title into a descriptive subtitle.

The sixth edition (1790), published in May of the year Smith died (17 July 1790), contains very extensive additions and significant changes — so much so that the modern Glasgow Edition adopts it as its copy-text. Smith took leave from his Edinburgh Customs duties to prepare it, writing to his publisher Thomas Cadell that he had "been labouring very hard in preparing the proposed new edition" and that the subject of practical morality "has grown on me." In his "Advertisement to the Sixth Edition" Smith himself flagged the principal alterations as being "in the last Chapter of the third Section of Part First; and in the four first Chapters of Part Third," adding that "Part Sixth, as it stands in this New Edition, is altogether new." That new Part VI, "Of the Character of Virtue," together with substantial revisions to Part III (on the sense of duty and conscience) and Part I, means Smith deepened and clarified the connection between the impartial spectator and conscience in his final revision. He introduced (implicitly) a spectrum of spectators rising from the ordinary bystander up to an idealised, wiser "man within the breast" — the "supposed impartial and well-informed spectator" — to whom we appeal against the mistaken verdicts of actual onlookers.

3. Sympathy as the foundational mechanism

Smith's use of "sympathy" is a technical term and does not mean the modern colloquial sense of "feeling sorry for someone." For Smith, sympathy is "fellow-feeling with any passion whatever" — an imaginative sharing of another's emotion, whether joy, grief, gratitude or resentment. Crucially, we have no direct access to what another person feels: "As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation." We imagine ourselves into the other's circumstances — "with all its minutest incidents" — and generate in ourselves the feeling we suppose appropriate to that situation.

Because sympathy is projective (we imagine what we would feel there) rather than contagious (the emotion simply passing to us, as in Hume's account), a gap opens between the spectator's imagined feeling and the sufferer's actual feeling. This gap is the engine of moral judgement. When the sentiment expressed by the person concerned corresponds with the feeling the spectator imagines to be appropriate, the spectator approves; when it fails to correspond, the spectator disapproves. As Smith puts it, "To approve of the passions of another … is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathise with them." Moral approval, then, is a judgement about propriety — about whether a sentiment fits its object.

4. The impartial spectator explained

The move from judging others to judging ourselves is Smith's central innovation. We cannot see our own conduct objectively, because self-love biases us in our own favour. Smith's solution: we learn to view our own conduct as we imagine an impartial, well-informed, disinterested observer would view it. In a much-quoted passage, Smith writes that a solitary human being raised without society "could no more think of his own character … than of the beauty or deformity of his own face," having "no mirror which can present them to his view." Society is that mirror. Having learned, as spectators, to judge others, we internalise the process and turn it upon ourselves.

This internalised judge Smith names "the man within the breast" — also "the inhabitant of the breast," "the great judge and arbiter of our conduct," reason, principle and conscience. It allows genuine moral self-assessment: an appeal "from the sentence of man … to a much higher tribunal, to the tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of the man within the breast." Smith distinguishes the desire for actual praise ("the man without") from the deeper desire to be praiseworthy ("the man within"): "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely" — not only praise, but to be worthy of it. In the sixth edition Smith even personifies this inner judge as a "demigod within the breast," "partly of immortal, yet partly too of mortal extraction" — steady and admirable when guided by the sense of praiseworthiness, but liable to be "astonished and confounded" by the clamour of actual opinion.

Smith is a realist about how often this inner judge is corrupted. When our selfish passions are engaged, they induce "the man within the breast to make a report very different from what the real circumstances of the case are capable of authorising." This is self-deceit, which Smith calls a "fatal weakness of mankind" and "the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us … a reformation would generally be unavoidable." The partial remedy is the formation of general rules of conduct, distilled from our observations of what shocks or pleases us, which steady our judgement when passion would distort it.

5. Propriety and the justice/beneficence distinction

Propriety is the backbone of Smith's system: virtuous conduct consists, in large part, in a sentiment or passion being proportionate and suitable to its object, as an impartial spectator would approve. Excess and defect of passion alike are improper; the mean that the spectator can "go along with" is proper.

Within this framework Smith draws a sharp and influential distinction between two social virtues. Justice is a "negative" virtue — it consists chiefly in not harming others (in person, property or reputation) — and its rules are precise, accurate and enforceable. Smith compared the rules of justice to the rules of grammar: "precise, accurate, and indispensable." Justice is indispensable to society's very existence: it is "the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society … must in a moment crumble into atoms." Beneficence, by contrast — generosity, kindness, gratitude, friendship — is a "positive" virtue that cannot be extorted by force and whose absence "tends to do no real positive evil." Smith likened its rules to those "which critics lay down for the attainment of what is sublime and elegant in composition": "loose, vague, and indeterminate." Beneficence "is the ornament which embellishes, not the foundation which supports the building." A person may be taught to act justly "by rule, with the most absolute infallibility," as one learns grammar; but no rulebook can make one generous or magnanimous, any more than rules of composition can guarantee sublime prose.

6. The "Adam Smith Problem" examined — and largely resolved

The "Adam Smith Problem" (das Adam Smith-Problem) is the name given to an argument among German scholars in the second half of the 19th century — associated with Richard Zeyss, Witold von Skarżyński and August Oncken — concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (which they read as founded on altruistic "sympathy") and The Wealth of Nations (which they read as founded on egoistic "self-interest"). Some, notably Skarżyński, suggested Smith had undergone a "change of mind," converting to egoism under the influence of French materialist thinkers met during his Continental tour of the 1760s.

Modern scholarship treats this as a misconception rather than a genuine contradiction. Several strands of evidence dissolve the alleged problem:

The concepts were misread. For Smith, "sympathy" is a mechanism of moral judgement, not a motive of action — it is not the same as benevolence — and "self-interest" in The Wealth of Nations was never crude, asocial selfishness. As D.D. Raphael stressed, The Theory of Moral Sentiments "does not make sympathy a motive of action; it makes sympathy the basis of moral judgment." The originators of the debate, as Richard Teichgraeber put it, wrongly "equated Smith's account of sympathy with benevolence."

The chronology refutes the "change of mind." When Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence were discovered and published in 1896, they showed that the concept of self-interest deployed in The Wealth of Nations was already clear in Smith's Glasgow teaching before his French tour.

Smith himself saw no conflict. He continued to revise and expand The Theory of Moral Sentiments throughout the years after 1776, culminating in the enlarged sixth edition of 1790 — strong evidence that he considered his moral philosophy to stand alongside, not against, his economics.

The books occupy one framework. The self-interested market behaviour of The Wealth of Nations operates within the moral and legal framework of justice and propriety already set out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; the market is one institution among those serving the social order Smith's moral philosophy describes.

The standard reference for the resolution is the introduction to the 1976 Glasgow Edition by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, which dismisses the Problem in memorable terms as "a pseudo-problem based on ignorance and misunderstanding" (Introduction, p. 20). Importantly — and consistent with the site's "accuracy over patriotism" standard — modern historians such as Keith Tribe also stress that the German debate was not merely an error to be forgotten: it was the first sustained scholarly attempt to grasp Smith's project as a whole, and in that sense founded modern Smith scholarship.

7. Comparison with Hutcheson's moral sense theory

Smith's model is a deliberate departure from and advance upon the "moral sense" theory of his teacher Francis Hutcheson (covered in full on Card #4). Hutcheson held that we perceive virtue and vice directly through an innate, God-implanted internal "sense," a distinct faculty analogous to the external senses. Smith rejected this. He argued that a "moral sense" is not a sixth capacity to be grouped with sight and hearing, and that Hutcheson's model provided no independent measure of its own normative status — it could not ask whether the sense's own approvals were themselves proper. In place of a primitive faculty, Smith explains moral perception through a more basic mechanism — sympathy and the imagined impartial spectator — that is social, imaginative and developmental rather than innate and perceptual. Where Hutcheson's sense simply registers moral qualities, Smith's spectator builds moral standards up from experience, exposure to others, and the works of imagination (poetry and drama included). This is the specific theoretical shift: from an internal perceptual sense to an internalised social-imaginative standpoint.

8. Legacy (including the ideal observer connection)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a landmark of the Scottish Enlightenment and of moral sentimentalism, and it has enjoyed a marked scholarly revival since the mid-20th century. The leading modern authority is D.D. Raphael, co-editor of the definitive Glasgow Edition (1976) and author of The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (2007), which reads the impartial spectator specifically as Smith's theory of conscience — in Raphael's summary, our accumulated knowledge of how spectators would judge us "forms conscience, an imagined impartial spectator who tells us whether an action is right or wrong."

Smith's spectator is widely regarded as a forerunner of the "ideal observer" theories in 20th-century meta-ethics. The classic modern statement is Roderick Firth's "Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer" (1952), which analysed ethical statements in terms of the reactions an ideal observer — disinterested, dispassionate and omniscient — would have. Scholars credit Firth with reviving the idea, and trace ideal observer theories back to the 18th-century Scots. The parallel should be drawn with care: Smith's spectator is not fully idealised in Firth's sense — Smith requires knowledge but not omniscience, and his spectator is rooted in ordinary human sympathy rather than being a bloodless abstraction — and several scholars caution against collapsing the two. The connection is best presented as a documented influence and affinity rather than an identity.