Moral Sentiments

We judge right and wrong by imagining how an impartial observer would feel. Hume and Smith both grounded ethics in sympathy rather than calculation.

Hume argued that reason alone cannot motivate moral action: you can know all the facts about a situation and still feel nothing about it. What moves us is sentiment, specifically the capacity to feel what others feel. Smith built on this with the figure of the impartial spectator: an imagined observer whose sympathies are fully informed and fully impartial. Moral judgment is not calculation but calibration, tuning your own reactions to what such an observer would feel. This tradition was a direct challenge to rationalist ethics, and Kant wrote the Groundwork partly in response to it.