Adam Smith and Moral Facts

Julia Driver

Recent interest in moral constructivism has led to the adoption of a view that the perspective from which moral facts emerge is that of the deliberator. This is seen as a semi-historical development-the move from philosophers David Hume and Adam Adam Smith, to that of Kant. The Key to understanding this move is understanding the“corrective mechanism”employed by sentimentalists-such as Hume and Adam Smith-in their development of moral theory. In this paper I will explore the Adam Smithian alternative, contrasting it to the Humean.

Adam Smith and Hume are both correct that the evaluative perspective is best captured by that of the spectator, not the deliberator. This is because the spectator has access to important facts that are-indeed, in some cases, must be-opaque to the deliberator. This interpretation rests on viewing Adam Smith as someone who was engaged in the metaphysics as well as the epistemology of virtue. It also views Adam Smith as offering us a normative account of virtue, and an account of the basis of that normativity. I will also discuss places where Adam Smith's account goes wrong, on my view, in the particulars-for example, some of his claims on utility, against Hume, are misguided. My diagnosis is that Adam Smith is concerned over ly much with having a normative account that maps on to the descriptive account as much as possible. However, Adam Smith is correct in some particulars, particularly when it comes to distinguishing between virtues. Further, the impartial spectator Adam Smith appeals to as a corrective for sympathy incorporates deliberative elements, though the evaluative perspective is primary. In providing an account of what virtues are, as well as how we ought best to arrive at virtue judgments, Adam Smith, I believe, commits himself to moral facts, though these facts are responsedependent.

Ⅰ Standards for Virtue and for Judgments of Virtue

Adam Smith seems well aware of the distinction noted above between criteria for virtue itself, and accounts of judgments of virtue. At the opening of Book VII TMS Adam Smith notes that there are two questions of central concern to moral philosophy：

First, wherein does virtue consist? Or what is the tone of temper, and tenour of conduct, which constitutes the excellent and praise-worthy character, the character which is the natural object of esteem, honour, and approbation? And, secondly, by what power or faculty in the mind is it, that this character, whatever it be, is recommended to us? Or, in other words, how by what means does it come to pass, that the mind prefers one tenour of conduct to another, denominates the one right and the other wrong; considers the one as the object of approbation, honour, and reward, and the other of blame, censure, and punishment?（TMS, VII, I,2）

On the metaphysical question Adam Smith provides the example of Hut-cheson, who viewed virtue as benevolence. This is an example of holding the view that a virtue is a character trait understood as a disposition to help others in some way, or act so as to improve things for others. It may be“interested”or“disinterested”，but the motive that characterizes virtue will always be some form of benevolence. It is a trope of the non-philosophy Adam Smith scholarship that he, of course, would not agree with such a view of virtue. But he is clearly in broad agreement with Hutcheson and Hume on the way we go about making judgments of virtue, the explanation, and the faculty that underlies such judgments-sympathy, but in Adam Smith's case, sympathy that has been corrected by conscience in the form of an impartial spectator.

But on the metaphysical issue, in addition to the benevolence model, he notes a self-interest model, which contrasts sharply with the benevolence model, and a third model, what he calls the“propriety”account. On this account“…the virtuous temper of mind does not consist in any one species of affections, but in the proper government and direction of all our affections, which may be either virtuous or vicious according to the objects which they pursue, and the degree of vehemence with which they pursue them. ”（TMS, VII）On this type of view, virtue is the proper control of sentiments and affections. There are many examples of such views, and Adam Smith goes over some in painstaking detail, particularly in the example of the Stoics, which. many commentators have noted, heavily influenced Adam Smith. But Adam Smith also viewed Shaftesbury as a propriety theorist, since Shaftesbury believed that virtue consisted in keeping ones feelings and affections in proper balance, and appropriately targeted. Adam Smith's problem was that“propriety”or fittingness is not sufficient for virtue. Later, he also seems to indicate that it isn't even necessary, strictly speaking. The harder view to disagree with, Adam Smith held, was the benevolence model. A motive of benevolence always seems to confer approbation, and virtue. However, Adam Smith found shortcomings here because of the narrowness of the criterion. Some good qualities do not seem characterized by the motive of benevolence. Justice, for example, may frequently be motivated by simple considerations of fairness, and even in contrast to benevolence and compassion.

Where does a utility based theory fall? In the propriety category：

（A）That system which places virtue in utility, coincides too with that which makes it consist in propriety. According to this system, all those qualities of the mind which are agreeable or advantageous, either to the person himself or to others, are approved of as virtuous, and the contrary disapproved of as vicious. But the agreeableness or utility of any affection depends upon the degree which it is allowed to subsist in. Every affection is useful when it is confined to a certain degree of moderation; and every affection is disadvantageous when it exceeds the proper bounds. According to this system therefore, virtue consists not in any one affection, but in the proper degree of all the affections. The only difference between it and that which I have been endeavouring to establish, is, that it makes utility, and not sympathy, or the correspondent affection of the spectator, the natural and original measure of this proper degree.（TMS, VII, ch. IV）

It is obvious in this section that Adam Smith is referring to Hume. In fact, whenever he makes use of the term“utility”it is almost always in reference to Hume. For Adam Smith，“propriety”was used quite a bit. He discussed it in his rhetoric lectures, for example. Rhetorical propriety, for example, consisted in modulating one's speech to suit the context-the audience one was speaking to, the subject one was speaking on, the purpose one was trying to achieve by the speech，and so forth. The view that moral virtue a kind of propriety involves the same notions-that, for someone with a virtue, how one feels and what one does is appropriate given certain variable features of the situation. So, in modern terminology, it is“context sensitive”. But not just this. Emotions that fulfill norms of propriety are proportional to the situation as well. Adam Smith notices that, for example, our sympathy for someone's suffering flags when we notice that the person is just completely emotionally out of whack with what is appropriate in the circumstances. If someone's flower garden has been ruined by a storm, then wild, wailing grief is bizarre. Moderate sadness seems appropriate. A person's virtue, as on the Aristotelian model, will involve for Adam Smith, feeling and doing the right thing in the circumstances, and in a way that is properly modulated-thus, the proprietary model. We discern this by putting ourselves in the position of the person being evaluated, and seeing if we would have the same motivation, eliciting the same behavior, as that person. It is not, on Adam Smith's view, a matter of discerning the good the trait does. The idea in putting utility based views of virtue in this category, then, involves the view that utility is not served when the person's emotional responses and subsequent actions are out of line. This is what occurs on the Humean model, the appropriateness is measured in terms of it's utility. The good served by grief will be ill-served if the grief is too much.

Of course, this is a problematic test. I may approve of someone who runs into a burning building to save someone's life, but it is not true that I would do the same thing in those circumstances, or think the same way. This is especially problematic given that Adam Smith, as we shall see in a bit, views virtue as somehow out of the norm. Further, I might disapprove of and yet admire someone. Someone with a good deal of courage and yet who pushes for something I disagree with. This may be because I admire them in terms of their courage, but think they are lacking in epistemic virtue, perhaps.

However, in the passage above Adam Smith is arguing that Hume put the cart before the horse. It isn't utility that demarcates virtue, and then we are so psychologically constructed as to find utility pleasing-that's Hume's view. Rather, Adam Smith seems to be arguing that virtue traits directly engage our sympathy, sympathy with the actor and in many cases the acted upon, and that's what makes them virtues. The appropriate level of response is determined by sympathy, not utility. Adam Smith, and others, actually criticized Hume because they felt that his standard failed to show why we shouldn't ascribe virtue to objects such as tables and chairsaren't they pleasing as well? Some modern writers endorse this criticism of Hume. But for Hume this is just a category mistake. When I talk of moral virtues, I am talking about mental qualities, not physical ones.

Adam Smith also notes in TMS that sympathy needs correction. Indeed, this is a standard move for any sentimentalist account of morality. In TMS we get Adam Smith's famous discussion of his corrective mechanism. He asks us to consider the case of a“man of humanity”in Europe who hears of a huge disaster in China, an earthquake that has killed many thousands of people. He, himself, is unconnected to those people. What would his reaction be?

（B）He would…express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man…If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren…

He then asks the reader whether the man of humanity would be willing-given the discrepancy in feeling-to allow thousands to die in order to spare himself a relatively small injury. The response：

Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? …It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct….

He is referring to the impartial spectator. For Adam Smith, it is the response of the impartial spectator, the ideal sympathizer, if you will, that sets the standard of virtue. It is via the deliverances of the impartial spectator that we actually do realize the impropriety of preferring the deaths of thousands to our own minor injuries. The impartiality of the spectator means that a person's self-interest is corrected for. When we adopt the impartial stance we must recognize that we, as individuals, count for no more or less than any other individuals. Numerous commentators on Adam Smith have noted that, for Adam Smith, the impartial spectator is not“ideal”in the sense developed by later writers, such as Rockerick Firth. That is, Adam Smith's impartial spectator does not seem to be omniscient. We can make a distinction between two senses of“ideal”-there is“ideal”as in“perfect”and“ideal”as in“not actual”. Adam Smith's impartial spectator is not ideal in the first sense, but is ideal in the second sense. There is no little man living in your breast, really. When he is talking about how people go about making judgments of virtue his view is that they rely on their consciences, which can be represented by an impartial spectator heuristic. This is fairly uncontroversial. However, there is a further question as to whether or not Adam Smith views this method as allowing us to arrive at a normative truth, and a further issue still, is the normative truth itself somehow emerging from the impartial spectator? My answer is“yes”to both.

I have argued elsewhere that there is, in Hume, a metaphysics as well as an epistemology, of virtue. We should not think of Hume as offering an ideal observer standard, but, rather, an account of virtue such that virtue meets some objective criteria（though relational）, albeit ones that only beings with the right kind of sensitivities will pick up on. It his account of moral judgment that appeals to a corrective mechanism-the general point of view-to account for the fact that we make consistent moral judgments, which is necessary for proper communication. The appeal of a metaphysical criterion of some sort gives us a way to account for mistaken judgments. Hume held in several places that people-even reasonable people-could, in principle, be mistaken if they were unaware of the long term utility or disutility of a trait. While Adam Smith clearly believes people, individual people, make mistakes about virtue, it's not clear that he would think a impartial observer would be able to make a mistake. Thus, a distinction in the account of what a virtue is, itself, though a similarity in the account of how we make judgments of virtue.

Michael Slote has recently endorsed a Adam Smithian approach to virtue evaluation. He believes that Adam Smith's discounting of utility is correct, and that Adam Smith, further, is correct in maintaining that correct judgments of virtue are those made from the point of view of the impartial spectator, in which the impartial spectator empathizes with the agent performing the action in question, or exhibiting the trait in question. Hume's mistake, he argues, is to focus on the acted-upon. Of course, there are passages where Adam Smith also claims that the impartial spectator sympathizes, or empathizes, with both. Leaving that issue aside, though, what can be said for Slote's view? For him the approval of the impartial spectator is“warm”and the disapproval is a“chill”. This is his description of how it works：

When I, as judge or non-agent observer, empathetically feel the warmth of an agent as displayed in a given action, then the derivative or reflecting warmth that I feel is a（morally non-judging）feeling of approval toward the action or its agent qua doer of that action; and, similarly, when the agent's actions display an absence of warmth/tenderness, my observer empathy will register or reflect the contrast with agentive warmth as a cold feeling or（as we say）“chill”of disapproval.（138）

The correct judgments are the one's that stand corrected by reflection, using the impartial spectator heuristic. It is the judgment of the impartial spectator that sets the standard. Slote's view is that this spectator will view the good motivations warmly and the bad motivations with a chill. But the image he is painting here must be over-simplified. Critics of early forms of care ethics often noted, for example, that there were situations where warm feelings of care were actually bad. This is because they cause interference with what ought to be done. A doctor at work in an army field hospital, operating on the basis of triage, may have to tamp down the sympathy to be able to accomplish the most good. At least in terms of his first order attitudes, he may need to view the people he is working on as complicated objects that need to be repaired. Otherwise, he gives into despair. Of course, the justifying reason behind this attitude is something like care-it is important to save as many as possible. But, in my view, the Humean has the far superior way to diagnose what is going on here, and that is by way of utility.

Ⅱ Kinds of Virtue

Let's consider Adam Smith's account as it handles more fine-grained virtue judgments.

When it comes to intellectual virtues the approval is based on the extent to which they enable us to arrive at the truth in our judgments. Again, Adam Smith writes that it is not their utility, though their utility may add to our approval after the fact.

Originally, however, we approve of another man's judgment, not as some thing useful, but as right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality…Taste, in the same manner, is originally approved of, not as useful, but as just, as delicate, and as precisely suited to its object. ”（TMS, I, I. 33）

There is a lot packed into this paragraph. When we evaluate propositions there are different-dramatically different-normative standards we can use. We can evaluate according to the truth of the proposition, it's beauty, or its usefulness when we believe it. Consider something like“My love is a red rose”；this scores low on truth but high on beauty;its usefulness would depend on context, and note that when people discuss the usefulness of a proposition that is shorthand for the usefulness of believing a proposition. So, Pascal thought“God exists”may or may not be true, but regardless of that it was useful to believe“God exists”as long as God's existence is possible.

What does this mean for character traits? Consider the intellectual virtue of intelligence. We approve of this because it leads to correct judgments. Consider the trait of discernment-we approve of this also because it leads to true beliefs about what's beautiful, for example. Of course, arriving at true beliefs can be very useful, and that adds to our approval, but the original approval was in response to truth in some respect or other. This suggests the following counterfactual test: if discernment did not lead to any social benefit, would it still be a virtue? Adam Smith would answer“yes”to this, but his opponent，“no”.

Now, consider a moral virtue, such as generosity. Generosity consists in responding appropriately to another's need. We judge generosity a virtue because the man in our breast, as Adam Smith refers to the impartial spectator, approves of it. Again, on a Humean view, the approval is, at least in part, due to its utility. For example, he famously distinguished natural from artificial virtue. Natural virtues, such as benevolence, generosity, are those character traits, or qualities of the mind, that are immediately pleasing to the spectator, and please in every instance. Artificial virtues, such as justice, however, please only due to their systematic connection to utility. For Hume, it is commonly supposed, traits are artificial vir tues in virtue of the perception that they are socially useful.

It is true, Adam Smith argues, that justice is necessary for stable society. But this observation is not what is actually and initially used to justify our feelings of anger and resentment against the unjust.

But though it commonly requires no great discernment to see the destructive tendency of all licentious practices to the welfare of society, it is seldom this consideration which first animates us against them. All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.（TMS, II, III）

Thus, Adam Smith's view, the appreciation of utility adds to the approval, but does not underlie the initial approval. There is a very real disagreement with Hume, who thought that recognition of utility served to account of actual judgments of virtue（as well as their normativity）. So it accounts for judgments and it is actually relevant in that it ought to account for the judgments. Adam Smith disagrees with both of these claims.

But generosity and intelligence differ in terms of what they give rise to. We don't view generosity a virtue because it leads to true beliefs. It has an inherently practical dimension. This will often involve true beliefs, in that it is generally the case the agents are more successful in their aims the more accurate their beliefs, but this needn't be so. It is an empirical issue as to whether or not true beliefs help one achieve one's aims. On Pascal's view, recall, the true belief that God's existence is underdetermined by the evidence may interfere with one's aims quite dramatically.

Hume's actual view, in my opinion, is that when we make moral judgments we may not have utility in view, but it is nevertheless utility which provides a criterion for virtue. He's not subject to this particular criticism of Adam Smith's. How ever, Adam Smith is right in that his system provides a way to understand distinctions between virtues that avoids the notorious conflation problem that plagued Hume. Hume articulated numerous definitions of virtue in the Treatise and the Enquiry, all of which, one way or another, tied virtue evaluation to a trait's pleasing quality from“the general point of view”or“the common point of view”. Thus, there is a problem distinguishing moral from aesthetic virtues, and some have noted the oddity of regarding cleanliness as a virtue. Hume himself did not view conflation as a problem for his account. As long as what we are talking about is a quality of the mind, and it is pleasing from the proper perspective, it is a virtue. He wasn't worried by the complaint that inanimate objects had virtue because they had no mental qualities.

However, I've argued elsewhere that Hume was overly optimistic on this feature of his account, and it is useful to mark the distinction between types of virtue. At that time my focus was on the good that was achieved-that is-the utility itself that the traits promoted. So the distinction was understood in normative terms, and not just normative terms, utility terms. But I believe that Adam Smith's approach offers another way to look at it.

We can distinguish virtues on the basis of the state they promote or bring about. In the case of intelligence, we admire it because it leads to true belief, but as I've argued this is independent from another sort of normative judgment we make about beliefs, in terms of their utility. That a belief is true is a positive epistemic feature of the belief, that having the belief is useful is a positive pragmatic feature. Further, the pragmatic norms can be broken down further in that the utility could be for oneself or one's own projects, or for others. This generally marks the distinction between prudential and moral norms, or prudential and moral virtues. On Adam Smith's account intellectual virtues are excellences not simply because of their pleasing qualities, and certainly not their social utility, but because the object-true or justified belief-is something which epistemically improves agents. Moral virtues also improve agents, though not epistemically. A virtuous person's actions are deemed fitting and admirable by the impartial spectator. On the Adam Smithian view there is something admirable about being the sort of person who is intelligent, industrious, and generous, though all these traits may be different sorts of virtues via their objects. They are not bound by a common utility of purpose.

We can learn a lot about a person's theoretical commitments when we try to consider how that person's theory handles mistakes. Adam Smith clearly thought that mistakes were made at the judgment level. In fact, this is what makes his theory distinct from a crude form of subjectivism. For example, he notes that we confuse the kinds of approval felt for virtues with the positive feelings we have with respect to wealth and power.（TMS）“Inattentive observers”make the confusion. On reflection it is clear that wealth and power are not deserving of moral admiration, and not deserving of the same respect as virtue, but, he notes“…they almost constantly obtain it”. Hume would argue, I think, that the inattentive observers here are committing a kind of category mistake.“Wealth”is not a quality of the mind, neither is power. But then we just change the point to something like ambition-is ambition a virtue, deserving of admiration? Adam Smith often speaks ill of ambition, when that seems to be affiliated with avarice; but surely the form of ambition associated with industry he approves of.

But propriety isn't in and of itself all there is to virtue. Adam Smith notes that sometimes some things conform to propriety, and yet are too ordinary to count as virtuous. Eating neatly at the dinner table might be an example of this. Also, some behaviors are virtuous even though, strictly speaking, they fail to satisfy propriety. Someone who cries while being tortured, and yet resists far beyond what a normal person would be able to resist, for example. Strictly speaking, then, is it the case that propriety is not even necessary to virtue? This seems to conflict with some of his earlier statements in TMS on propriety and virtue. There is a way to go here to make it consistent, and in keeping with what Adam Smith intended. The imagination via the impartial spectator judges propriety in two distinct ways: relative to an idealized standard and relative to one determined with a statistical sense of what is normal for humans. Relative to the first standard, the agent fails, but relative to the second the agent succeeds. And here Adam Smith makes use of an analogy with the art critic. Allowing for a standard of propriety that is set by what is normal in a statistical sense, when combined with what Adam Smith says about contextsensitivity, allows for a very nuanced account of moral virtue. Adam Smith's is a propriety view, but when which limits virtue to what is extraordinary in some way. Ordinary propriety is not virtuous, extraordinary, and positive, lack of propriety is virtuous, but in the purely statistical sense.

He needs to make some distinctions along these lines since viewing virtue as, in some way, out of the norm, poses problems for other things he says about virtue in TMS. He claims that justice is a virtue, and a virtue that largely consists in doing nothing. Does that mean that it involves doing a lot of nothing? More nothing than the normal person doesn't do? If this is Adam Smith's considered view it seems mistaken. But justice is a difficult virtue for any account that focuses on approval or disapproval of motives independent of utility. Isn't it possible for a judge to be just if all he wants is a good reputation and a regular paycheck? I don't believe that there is a way to make Adam Smith perfectly consistent in his account of virtue, however. What we can aim for, though, is an account that captures the spirit of his approach.

Ⅲ The Source of Normativity Itself

Many Adam Smith commentators would say that I've overreached in this essay as it is. Now, however, I would like to make a further stretch. It may well be that Adam Smith had no account of moral facts, even ones analogous to secondary qualities. Let's call these facts“reactive”or“response-dependent”facts. These facts are about response-dependent properties that states of affairs might have. They really do exist on this view, so one gets one sense of objectivity. However, they don't exist independent of the responder. People usually draw an analogy with secondary qualities. The claim“Sandy's shirt is red”in virtue of the shirt Sandy is wearing have the property of being red, and being red is response-dependant. We normally claim that an object is red if it would appear to the normal spectator under normal lighting, etc. , to be red. Analogously, one might argue that killing someone is wrong in virtue of a spectator falling under a certain description has a disapproving reaction to the killing. The spectator doesn't actually exist, so is ideal, but is usually considered ideal in the other way as well-as being omniscient, impartial, and so forth. In this way moral truths correspond to moral facts that do not diverge from spectator to spectator. If Alice approves of the killing, then that doesn't make the killing right since Alice isn't the right kind of spectator.

So, does Adam Smith have a spectator based account of moral facts? I think he did have an account, but the further discussion should be read independent of this exegetical issue. If Adam Smith did have such an account of these facts they are emergent from the ideal spectator perspective, and I would like to defend that perspective.

Constructivists, in general, believe that there are moral facts, but they are not objective in the sense of existing independent of human agency（or rational agency）.

In Kant, the perspective involves the essentially practical-in taking a practical standpoint we view ourselves as agents, deliberating and acting. We might call the relevant facts“deliberative”facts in contrast with“reactive”facts. We also need to account for certain facts of moral phenomenology, such as the very strong feeling we have that moral truths have a kind of necessity attaching to them. Realists, like Shafer-Landau, argue that constructivists in general have a great deal of difficulty with moral phenomenology. It is certainly true that the Sentimentalists have a good deal of trouble with it, since they view moral facts as“reactive”in the way discussed above（in the case of Humeans and Adam Smithians）. Since reactions are contingent on facts of human nature, this takes away from the moral phenomenology element. But Kant's recognition of a“fact of reason”transcends human nature. Morality is binding on all rational beings, regardless of the content of the de sires they happen to have. One feature of the deliberative process is that we are bound by norms of reason, such as consistency. Indeed, very many writers, including Adam Smith, note that impartiality in ethics is often presented as a recognition that one person is no more important, intrinsically, than any other and that this imposes a kind of practical consistency on us. Using a Kantian constructivist approach, for example, Rawls argues that the pertinent question with respect to justice-to actually establish the norms of justice-is what would one agree to under conditions of ideal deliberation. The Hume/Adam Smith paradigm is: what judgment would one make under conditions of idealized evaluation. There is a very substantive issue about the right way to idealize these conditions, which I won't go into here. Adam Smith, if writers like Raphael are correct, is probably too minimalist on this issue. But this should not prevent us from trying to flesh it out. However, my project right now is to simply defend the evaluator standpoint employed by Adam Smith. Further, in keeping with the focus on Adam Smith's account of virtue, my examples will involve virtue.

There are some traits agents have that rest on deliberative errors. For example, virtues of ignorance require that agents commit epistemic errors. When a person is modest about her accomplishments, she is underestimating them in some respect. Thus, the agent is not in a position to be aware of what makes her actions modest. If modesty is a virtue, then she cannot self-evaluate and be accurate. An ideal deliberator, the ideal first-person deliberator, if ideal according to the norms of rationality, will not be able to model virtues like modesty. But an ideal evaluator can.

It is also true that in many cases when agents behave virtuously they are mis-taken about the reasons they are responsive to. This may involve deliberation that, again, is incompatible with the description of the act in question that makes it a virtuous action. Parents, for example, tend to overestimate their children at least slightly, and as long as they don't go overboard, this is generally considered goodit is good because they are offering support for their children and a realistic target for the children to aim for. Yet the parents cannot view themselves as overestimating.

These are all moral goods that the good deliberator misses. But they are captured from the perspective of the evaluator. To the extent that constructivism seeks to“construct”the moral from the standpoint of a being of a certain sort, the evaluative standpoint seems to be more comprehensive.

But as Adam Smith's discussion of the evaluative standpoint demonstrates, the evaluator takes a mixed perspective, so the distinction between first-person and third-person can be blurred. An evaluator is doing something-she's evaluating. In ordinary situations when one sees a person behaving a certain way-let's say, viscously-it just strikes one that way. But the impartial spectator is different since the impartial spectator employs reason as a way of correcting and moderating our judgments even against what our feelings tell us in light of their intensity and persistence. Adam Smith uses very Kantian sounding language in places to make this point. But Adam Smith does not view reason as sufficient; there is also the need for feeling. This is where there's a crucial split. But neither does he seem to view reason as“the slave of the passions”. We are essentially goal directed beings who sympathize with others, and have a strong sense of propriety that is required in our interactions with others. The moral facts, of“x is a virtue”or“helping others is good”arise from this feature of our nature, and our need to determine whether someone else has behaved virtuously, which in part involves the impartial spectator imagining himself in various practical roles. Contemporary writers try to solve the relativity problem by appealing to“rigid designation”of moral terms. This is in keeping with the Humean position that, in effect, reference needs to be fixed for the purposes of communication. The core problem is that there is a disconnect be tween truth and pragmatics, and it looks like the sentimentalist is holding that pragmatic concerns are what determine how the reference for words, like virtue terms such as“generous”，are fixed. This does not conform to moral phenomenology.

At this point in my project, however, I will assume that constructivism can solve this problem, or at least provide a reasonable error theory. My point now is that, within this strategy for accounting for moral truth, we need to adopt the evaluator standpoint to account for judgments of virtue in which, for example, moral excellences split from epistemic or intellectual excellences. While the latter are accounted for in the deliberator perspective, not all of the moral are. Thus, the standpoint articulated by Hume and Adam Smith is superior to that of Kant.