ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that unlike Kant's other sentimentalist predecessors, Smith employs a sentimentalist moral psychology that approximates not just the phenomenology of acting from reason, but the specifically Kantian phenomenology of acting from reason. Humean moral motivation is derived more directly from humanity-based, self-directed moral evaluation than from humanity itself. Smith's attitude toward moral rationalism is not entirely negative. He interprets the modern version of this position as a response to Thomas Hobbes's egoistic and anti-realist answer to the second question with which moral philosophy is concerned. Smith's conception of the love of self-approval rests upon his belief that people desire what he calls mutual sympathy. The chapter argued that Smith's puzzling reference to reason's ability to motivate can be understood strictly in terms of his preference for his own mutual-sympathy-based account of moral sentiment over the accounts offered by his sentimentalist predecessors Hutcheson and Hume.
