ABSTRACT
One of Adam Smith’s aims in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is to vindicate these convictions about concern and understanding. Given that they are backed by the authority of common sense, we might ask: why does Smith think a further, more philosophical, defense is needed? At least part of the reason is that he endorses a particular picture of the difference between self-directed understanding and concern and other-directed understanding and concern. I will call this the ‘picture of egocentric primacy’. This picture presents our self-concern and self-understanding as uniquely primitive and self-evident. Our own minds are immediately transparent to us, but ‘we have no immediate experience of what other men feel’ (TMS I.i.1.2; Smith 1976). Similarly, our self-concern is immediate, but our concern for others looks like the kind of thing that we can only come to through considerable mental maneuvering. Once one admits that our understanding and concern for others need to be explained, one had better follow up with an explanation. The skeptic can press the point: if the origin and nature of our understanding and concern for others are mysterious, and if we cannot dispel that impression of mystery with a plausible explanation of how and why we come to understand and be concerned for others, then our everyday impression that we do in fact understand and have concern for others may not be good enough reason to reject the skeptical alternatives.
