The Greatest Virtue, Part 1: The Theory of Moral Sentiments

After my series on Everyday Evil I thought I should do a little series on the psychology of moral goodness. Specifically, I’d like to devote a few posts to what I’m going to call The Greatest Virtue.

Historically, and within the Christian tradition, lots of different kinds of virtue lists have been created. Some lists focus on behavior and others are more characterological (mental, emotional, or behavioral dispositions).

I’m going to argue that there is a Greatest Virtue. It is the virtue that sits at the foundation of moral practice. It is the root of goodness and, as such, should be the constant focus of all church communities.

The Greatest Virtue is empathy.

In the posts that follow I’ll defend this claim by citing both philosophical and empirical evidence.

To start, a couple of dictionary definitions of empathy:

The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives.

Understanding and entering into another's feelings.

Identifying oneself completely with an object or person, sometimes even to the point of responding physically.

Direct identification with, understanding of, and vicarious experience of another person's situation, feelings, and motives.

The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.

Synonyms for empathy include:

sympathy, kindness, mercy, soft-heartedness, tenderheartedness, humaneness, charity, pity, understanding, insight, communion, compassion, fellow feeling, soul, warmth

What I’ll argue in this series is that empathy is the critical psychological factor in moral action. When active, empathy promotes compassion, kindness, and altruism. When empathy is absent we see coldness and indifference.

I’m not the first, obviously, to see the centrality of empathy. For example, Adam Smith (yes, the Adam Smith who penned The Wealth of Nations) located empathy (he uses the older word sympathy) at the heart of his work on moral psychology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

In The Theory, Smith sets out to explain not what is right versus wrong, but how we come to feel that something is right versus wrong. This focus on moral feeling rather than normative ethics might seem a poor beginning place for a discussion on virtue. But Smith’s argument is important because we can’t begin to understand what people ought to do if we don’t understand how people come to care about oughts in the first place.

In The Theory Smith claims that sympathy and fellow-feeling is the root of all moral judgment. Rightly or wrongly, all moral sentiment and, thus, all moral conversation, begins with empathy. Smith begins The Theory on just that note:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune 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 which 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 sorrow 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 and 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 goes on to describe how, via the empathic imagination, we can come to experience the pain of another person:

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 upon 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, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dullness of the conception.

To go deeper into The Theory would take us too far afield. I simply want to point out one of Smith’s big conclusions. Basically, empathy creates the moral fabric of our lives. All our hopes, dreams and desires are communally held together by the fact that we can identify with each other. We loathe immoral behavior because we can empathize with the victims. And this empathic connection binds us all together and, thus, begins the collective moral journey. Wherever our system of ethics begins it must surely begin with this simple question:

If I were in that person’s shoes how would I feel about that?