CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

The Anguish of Adam Smith 285
of greater or lesser intensity or perhaps with discord and contention. The degree
of sympathy afforded by an impartial spectator serves to guide us in understanding
the propriety, suitability, or correctness of our own actions. 9
Smith went further than any of the other British moralists 10 in placing
his psychology of ethics wholly within the feedback loop of society. From an
inborn capacity for sympathy, this human characteristic grows through
childhood and matures in adult relationships, with the joys and sorrows of
family members, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and people unseen in distant
regions.
The philosopher David Hume, one of Smith’s close friends, believed
that moral judgments could be reached within the individual contemplating
his or her personal opinions or options. 11 Smith held otherwise and rejected
the opinion that morality could be reduced to any single motive or perceived
from a solitary vantage point.
In Smith’s analysis, when considering another person’s conduct, we approve
or disapprove based on the exercise of placing ourselves in that position
and judging the propriety of the person’s action. When pondering our
own conduct, we create an impartial spectator who is detached from us and
approves or disapproves of the propriety of our own actions. It is neither received
theology, weighing of advantages, nor internal reasoning that undergirds
Smith’s approach. 12 It is the functioning of man in society, in
communication with his fellow man, evolving through “habit and experience”
an ever-widening archive of moral sensitivities and convictions that
constitutes the driving force in his ethical system.
Adam Smith is a beautiful writer, exhibiting in his thirties when he
composed Moral Sentiments a richness of language and style that captivated
his readers. Illustrating his example of the impartial spectator, he
speaks of
the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter
of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect
the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing
the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude,
in no respect better than any other in it, and that when we prefer
ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others we become the proper
objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is he who shows us
the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice. 13