Narrowing the Scope of Resentment in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments

• In Event: The Political Theory of Sentiments and Passions

Abstract

For Adam Smith, resentment is the natural passion we feel at experiencing or witnessing injustice and the basis for our natural sense of justice. Unfortunately, resentment is also an unruly passion: we often become resentful about things other than injury, such as ingratitude, or simply excessively resentful, both of which are inappropriate on Smith’s terms. What is his argument for restricting justifiable resentment—that is, for restricting the propriety of resentment—given his seeming admission that we do naturally feel resentment beyond the case of injury? Since Smith himself never directly addresses why such resentments are inappropriate according to the account of propriety he develops in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, especially if we can imagine an impartial spectator might reasonably be expected to sympathize with them, we reconstruct a response drawn from his moral psychology and social theory. First, we explain the origins of Smith’s narrow view of justice, drawn from the modern jurisprudential tradition. We then turn to Smith’s account of resentment, explaining its purpose as the natural motive for narrow justice, but also questioning the split between Smith’s descriptive and normative accounts of resentment. We ultimately argue that resentment’s logical tie to punishment for Smith is a necessary but not sufficient one, and that injury and resentment are separate conditions required to justify punishment. Finally, we reconstruct Smith’s normative justifications for severing the tie between improper resentments and punishment and for limiting the propriety of resentment, arguing that Smith’s reasons for doing so are driven by his claims about equal status and about sociability.

Authors

• John T. Scott, University of California, Davis

• Michelle A. Schwarze, University of Wisconsin, Madison