• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
• /
• no.114
• /
• pp.305-335
• /
• 2016

In the eighteenth century, the scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith share the idea that morality comes from moral sense, which is a feeling of approval or disapproval of agent's motive and action. However, they have the different views in explaining the mechanism that generates the moral sentiments. Hutcheson takes a moral sense to be a unique mental faculty that is innate to all humans, and regards it as being guaranteed by supernatural apparatus like divine Providence. Hume and Smith reject Hutcheson's concept of internal moral sense and take a stage further Hutcheson's projects of internalisation by naturalizing morality in terms of the principle of sympathy. It is widely held that Hume's moral sentimentalism is essentially similar to Adam Smith's. Though there are important points of contact between Smith's account of sympathy and Hume's, the differences are considerable. The chief of them lies in the fact that Hume grounds our approval of virtue on our recognition of its utility and convention, and Smith does not. Smith grounds our approval of virtue on the impartial spectator's judgment, i.e., conscience. Hence for Smith, the impartial spectator is the one that bridges the gap between particularity and universality and works the vehicle of practical reason. Given this, in this paper, first, I will clarify the difference between Hume's and Adam Smith's understandings of sympathy. Second, I will elucidate how they explain the process to produce the moral sentiments based on their understandings of sympathy. I shall finally explicate in what way Hume's and Smith's theories on sympathy work as moral normativity.