Théorie des sentiments moraux
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La Théorie des sentiments moraux, écrite en 1759, est l'un des plus importants travaux d'Adam Smith sur la théorie du capitalisme. On y trouve les principes psychologiques, philosophiques, et méthodologiques qui sous-tendent ses œuvres ultérieures, les Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms ("Conférences sur la justice, la police, les recettes publiques et les armes", 1763), A Treatise on Public Opulence ("Traité sur l'opulence publique", 1764), la Richesse des nations(1776), les Essays on Philosophical Subjects ("Essais sur des sujets philosophiques", 1795).
Pour aller vite, Smith hérite des conceptions de son mentor, Francis Hutcheson, qui divisait la morale en quatre parties :
1) la moralité et la vertu ;
2) les droits privés et la liberté naturelle ;
3) les droits de la famille (l'économie domestique) ;
4) l'État et les droits individuels (la politique).
Plus précisément, Smith distingue, au sein de la morale :
- les catégories qui touchent à la nature de la moralité : la propriété, la prudence, la générosité, la licence ;
- les catégories qui touchent aux mobiles de la moralité : l'amour-propre, la raison, les sentiments.
Hutcheson avait abandonné les questions psychologiques, affirmant que les mobiles des actions sont trop instables pour servir de fondements à une philosophie morale. Au problème des mobiles, il substitua l'hypothèse d'une sorte de « sixième sens » moral — thèse, reprise par David Hume dans son Traité de la nature humaine, selon laquelle l'homme est naturellement porté à préférer l'utile.
Smith rejected his teacher's reliance on this special sense. Starting in about 1741, Smith set on the task of using Hume's experimental method (appealing to human experience) to replace the specific moral sense with a pluralistic approach to morality based on a multitude of psychological motives. The Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with the following assertion:
« How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. »
Smith departed from the "moral sense" tradition of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, as the principle of sympathy takes the place of that organ. "Sympathy" was the term Smith used for the feeling of these moral sentiments. It was the feeling with the passions of others. It operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed the experience of the person he watches: «
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. 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. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation. »
Sympathy arose from an innate desire to identify with the emotions of others. It could lead people to strive to maintain good relations with their fellow human beings and provide the basis both for specific benevolent acts and for the general social order. Thus was formed within the beast the psychological basis for the desire to obey natural laws. The Theory of Moral Sentiments culminated in man as self-interested and self-commanded. Individual freedom, according to Smith, was rooted in self-reliance, the ability of an individual to pursue his self-interest while commanding himself based on the principles of natural law.
However, Smith rejected the idea that Man was capable of forming moral judgements beyond a limited sphere of activity, again centered around his own self-interest:
« The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.... But though we are ... endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them. »
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