Adam Smith Part 1: Through Sympathy There is Progress 

Your comments about Smith's view on morality seemed more shame based than guilt. Your points were solid and interesting. However, when I audiobooked this I got the impression that part of his belief was that you compare yourself against a perfect version of yourself when evaluating your own behaviors. I would like to hear more from you about the latter.

Having never studied 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴, I may be unwise to comment. But, then, that has never stopped me before. It sounds like one of the errors some thinkers have made when approaching Smith's theory of sympathy or moral sentiments is trying to treat the theory as normative when it is purely descriptive. A theory about how, in a practical sense, human individuals develop the morals that guide their behavior is potentially compatible with any normative morality, whether one based on Scripture, a non-Christian religious tradition, or ethical philosophizing on a nonreligious basis. Some modern atheists seem to make the same error when they present an evolutionary theory for why people hold the moral convictions they do as a substitute for or alternative to religious morality grounded in Divine authority. Normatively, the fundamental issue is not whether or why humans have the moral convictions they do; it is to what extent, and on what basis, any human individual is justified trusting his moral convictions (moral sentiments, moral sense). Neither Smith's theory nor today's evolutionary explanations do anything to address the fundamental normative issue; both seek only to explicate why humans have the moral beliefs they do. Whether they should trust and obey those moral beliefs or view them with suspicion is something neither descriptive theory can help us determine. Such, at least, was my initial response partway through your video. As the video progressed, however, I gathered that even Smith tried to make his descriptive theory normative through an appeal to practicality. This may work when the individual steps outside himself, views a whole community, and thinks what would happen if people there failed in large numbers to adhere to the morals they'd been taught. At the individual level, I think it fails. Why should any specific individual step outside himself and look at a whole community when deciding how he alone will behave? Your host appealed to subjective factors like staying up at night feeling guilty about violating moral sentiments. But what this suggests is that the optimal state from the individual perspective is to be a sociopath (for want of a better term): to be freed from the constraints of moral sentiments and free to act in terms of objective calculation of one's own interests. Though it would still be advantageous to the individual to keep his violations of community morals secret, there is no need for him to avoid such violations altogether. If there is no moral authority above the human individual, as attempts to treat Smith's theory as the normative basis for morals would imply, anything is permitted, just as the Dostoevsky character asserted. Self-interest can only justify disciplined moral behavior in the public space where chances are good that one will be observed and punished. It doesn't justify avoiding immoralities one can keep secret and learn to live with, either because one has a psychological condition freeing one from concern, or because one just works at it long enough to get used to it. I can certainly see why a friend of Hume who could see the secularizing trends already in progress in his day would want to find a way to make moral behavior appealing to people who reject the idea of a God-given or innate moral sense that makes certain more truths self-evident to anyone with a functioning mind who not does intentionally deceive himself. I can also see why someone in the grips of a radically empiricist blank-slate epistemology would want to explain how people acquire their moral beliefs absent any innate ideas to be discovered within as one's mental faculties mature to the point of being able to perceive them. (That last ponderous sentence draws upon an Augustinian theory of knowledge, which I've acquired by way of Christian philosopher Gordon Clark and his disciples, in case you're curious.) I'm not sure an atheist or agnostic should see in Smith's theory a good basis for justifying moral beliefs and behaviors, however. Thank you for taking time to read these comments.