ABSTRACT
Smith's account of sympathy, by contrast, opens up a potential gap between what the people feel on behalf of another person and what she herself seems to feel. Smith's account of sympathy makes sense of these kinds of judgments and thus plays into his moral system. Most philosophers who write on processes like sympathy today belong to either the “theory theory” or the “simulation theory” camp. Hume is often described as having a contagion account of sympathy, and the author will use that label for it, but what he says doesn’t entirely fit the label. The prevalence of private access views of the mind may be one reason why the idea of a basic sympathy among human beings, a basic tendency to share one another’s feelings, seemed so striking when Hume proposed it. There may however be a systematic reason why scholars have resisted attributing a purely projective theory of sympathy to Smith.
