how we learn about right and wrong
Re-reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, which has a beautiful opening paragraph:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.
I recently had to make a difficult and complicated decision, one that would affect my future, the life of my family and friends, my own and others’ happiness. Asking for advice, some people would say: “Just think what’s best for yourself”, implying I should decide on the basis of what I want, ignoring others. But as Smith argues, however selfish we are or even aspire to be, we do care about the happiness of others, and this applies even for “the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society.”
The second paragraph is equally beautiful:
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. .. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situa-tion, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.
Smith argues that it is the ability to reflect, to imagine yourself to be the other that is at the heart of morality, of how we learn about right and wrong. We learn this through our personal relations with other individuals, and how others react to our behavior.
It is this lack of imagination that gives rise to horrors, Elaine Scarry would argue. Her fabulous book The Body in Pain illustrates how pain can be political, how the lack of imagination between the observer and the person in pain makes torture and war possible. There is a saying: “kill one person, it’s murder, kill a thousand and it’s war”. Smith helps us understand that once we lose sight of the individual, imagination fails us, and right and wrong gets obscured. Levinas attaches similar importance to the personal relationship, the face-to-face encounter: “The face is a living presence; it is expression … The face speaks. .. [it] is what forbids us to kill.”
That’s why it is impossible, not to mention wrong, to just think about what I want, or what is best for me, when making a decision. I see the faces of my mum, my dad, my brother, my family, my friends, the people I care about. And that is a good thing.
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