ABSTRACT
Throughout this section, we discuss the necessary defensive attitudes that are essential to develop the moral structure that are integral to his “know world”.Adam Smith’s system of ethics and moral structure is based on what he calls sympathy. According to Smith, sympathy is “our fellow feeling with any passion whatever” (p. 13). Sympathy is considered as one of the principles of human nature which interest people “in the fortune of others”. Even the greatest “ruffian” is not without it. Smith’s argument is that “sympathy” is the process that allows us to build morality. His conceptualizes the argument by using the characters of the “spectator” and
“agent” or actor. The spectator puts himself in the actor’s situation and forms an idea of how the actor is affected in that situation. The dynamic of this interaction between spectator and agent is used throughout the book to illustrate the development of his moral structure. Smith says we put ourselves in the other’s situation because we do not have any immediate experience of what others feel:1
Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. It is by imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations…by imagination we place ourselves in his situation, 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.
