Adam Smith's moral decision-making process

The aim of this paper is to explore Adam Smith’s account of the process of making moral judgements as he describes it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). The paper argues that we can make sense of Smith’s decision-making process in moral cases only if we refer to the complete account of the faculties of the human mind that he presents in his work. In order to pursue this, the paper begins with a description of the concept of sympathy, even though sympathy is not the main topic of this discussion. The concept of sympathy is perhaps the most discussed facet of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, and there have been many contributions on this concept in recent years. Darwall offered a good summary of some of the work on this topic (Darwall 1999: 139–164), and reading Darwall’s review points at the shortcoming in the literature and at the novelty of the point made about sympathy in this paper.