ABSTRACT
The core of Smith’s moral theory is an account of moral approval: of the nature and causes of the feelings that lead the reader to call some actions and people (morally) “good” and others (morally) “bad.” The impartial spectator is the most famous element of Smith’s moral theory, and it makes good sense of the difference between plain approval and moral approval. There is something contemptible about extravagant joy in one’s own successes and extravagant misery about one’s own defeats, and in the people ordinary moral lives the people recognize this point. Smith brings in the impartial spectator to answer a problem in Hume’s version of moral sentimentalism. Propriety and merit are not the only elements of moral judgment, for Smith. Finally, Smith acknowledges that one component of moral judgment, especially among philosophers, consists in considering acts “as making a part of a system of behaviour which tends to promote the happiness either of the individual or of the society”.
