The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith: Summary in 30 Seconds : Free Summarizer

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith · moral philosophy, 1759·10 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg

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Sympathy starts from imagining pain, not sharing it. Smith opens by asking why a happy stranger's misery moves us at all. "Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers," he writes, so we conjure his pain by imagination alone, entering his situation "in fancy" rather than his body.
Justice is the load-bearing wall of society. Smith ranks beneficence as "the ornament which embellishes" a society, but calls justice "the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice." Remove it, he writes, and "the immense fabric of human society... must in a moment crumble into atoms."
A hundred million strangers die; the humane man sleeps fine. In the China-earthquake passage, a European man of humanity hears the whole empire has been swallowed up, delivers his "melancholy reflections," then sleeps soundly, while losing his own little finger tomorrow "would not sleep tonight." Smith uses the gap in feeling to introduce the "man within the breast" as the only force that overrides the arithmetic.
The invisible hand first appears here, not in Wealth of Nations. Describing a landlord surveying his fields, Smith writes that the rich, though they intend "only their own conveniency," are "led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life" as if the land had been divided equally. He used the same phrase seventeen years later in his economics book.
Self-command is the virtue that makes the others possible. By Part VI, Smith treats command of anger and "self-command" as the trait that lets courage, temperance, and justice function at all. The degree of self-command an act requires, he argues, is what separates the merely "amiable" virtues from the "respectable" ones.
The book closes on Latin grammar, not virtue. Later editions append Smith's essay on language, so the work ends not on ethics but on a line-by-line comparison of Virgil's word order against a literal English rendering of Milton's Latin ode. Translated word-for-word, Smith notes, "Œdipus himself could not make sense of it."

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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that gave economics the "invisible hand" seventeen years before Wealth of Nations, and it makes the case that markets and morals both run on the same human trick, imagining yourself in someone else's place.

Adam Smith argues morality runs on imagination, not calculation: we judge right and wrong by imagining ourselves inside another person's skin.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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The Theory of Moral Sentiments

•Why it earns a slot

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