第46章

The same explanation is then applied to the fact, that beneficence, or the doing good to others, as less necessary to society than justice, or the not doing evil to others, is not enforced by equally strong natural sanctions. Society is conceivable without the practice of beneficence, but not without that of justice. without justice, society, "the peculiar and darling care of nature," must in a moment crumble to atoms. It is the main pillar which upholds the whole edifice, whilst beneficence is only the ornament which embellishes it. For this reason stronger motives were necessary to enforce justice than to enforce beneficence. Therefore nature "implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend its violation, as the great safeguard of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty."In the influence of fortune over our moral sentiments, in our disposition to attach less praise where by accident a good intention has stopped short of real action, to feel less resent- ment where a criminal design has stopped short of fulfilment, and to feel a stronger sense of the merit or demerit of actions when they chance to occasion extraordinary but unintended pleasure or pain, Adam Smith again traces the working of a final cause, and sees in this irregularity of our sentiments an intention on the part of Nature to promote the happiness of our species. For were resentment as vividly kindled by a mere design to injure as by an actual injury, were bad wishes held equivalent to bad conduct, mere thoughts and feelings would become the objects of punishment, and a state of universal suspicion would allow of no security even for the most innocent. If, on the other hand, the mere wish to serve another were regarded as equivalent to the actual service, an indolent benevolence might take the place of active well-doing, to the detriment of those ends which are the purpose of man's existence. In the same way, man is taught, by that mere animal resentment which arises naturally against every injury, howsoever accidental, to respect the well-being of his fellows, and, by a fallacious sense of guilt, to dread injuring them by accident only less than he dreads to do so by design.

Let us take next the manifestation of fortitude under misfortune. Aman's self-approbation under such circumstances is exactly proportioned to the degree of self-command necessary to obtain it; or, in other words, to the degree in which he can assume with regard to himself the feelings of the impartial and indifferent spectator. Thus a man who speaks and acts the moment after his leg has been shot off by a cannon-ball with his usual coolness, feels, as a reflex of the applause of the indifferent spectator, an amount of self-approbation exactly proportioned to the self-command he exhibits. And thus Nature exactly apportions her reward to the virtue of a man's behaviour. But it is nevertheless not fitting that the reward which Nature thus bestows on firmness of conduct should entirely compensate him for the sufferings which her laws inflict on him. For, if it did so, a man could have no motive from self-interest for avoiding accidents which cannot but diminish his utility both to himself and society. Nature therefore, "from her parental care of both, meant that he should anxiously avoid all such accidents."This is a good illustration of the difficulties of this kind of reasoning in general. It will be easily seen that it raises more doubts than it solves.

If there really is this parental care on the part of Nature for mankind, why are her measures incomplete? If the reward she bestows on fortitude did entirely compensate for the misfortunes it contends with, would not all the evil of them be destroyed? And might not Nature, with her parental care, have made laws which could not be violated, rather than make laws whose observance needs the protection of misfortune? It does not solve the problem of moral evil, to show here and there beneficial results; it only makes the difficulty the greater. Where there is so much good, why should there be any evil?

To this question Adam Smith attempts no answer, or thinks the problem solved by the discovery of some good side to everything evil. His whole system is based on the theory that the works of Nature "seem all intended to promote happiness and guard against misery." Against those "whining and melancholy Moralists," who reproach us for being happy in the midst of all the misery of the world, he replies, not only that if we take the whole world on an average, there will be for every man in pain or misery twenty in prosperity and joy, and that we have no more reason to weep with the one than to rejoice with the twenty, but also that, if we were so constituted as to feel distress for the evil we do not see, it could serve no other purpose than to increase misery twofold. This is true enough; but it is another thing to argue from the fact to the purpose, and to say that it has been wisely ordained by Nature that we should not feel interested in the fortune of those whom we can neither serve nor hurt. For it is to men whose sympathies have been wider than the average that all the diminution of the world's misery has been due; and it is fair, if we must argue about Nature at all, to say that had she endowed men generally with wider sympathies than she has done, the misery in the world might have been still more reduced than it has been, and the sum-total of happiness proportionately greater.