Part II, Section I, Chapter V

An analysis of the sense of merit and demerit.

1 Just as our sense of the propriety of conduct arises from what I shall call direct sympathy with the feelings and motives of the agent, our sense of its merit arises from what I shall call indirect sympathy with the gratitude of the person who is, if I may say so, acted upon.

Since we cannot fully enter into the beneficiary's gratitude unless we first approve of the benefactor's motives, our sense of merit seems to be a compound feeling made up of two distinct emotions: direct sympathy with the agent's feelings and indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who benefit from his actions.

On many occasions we can clearly distinguish these two emotions joining together in our sense that a particular character or action deserves praise. When we read in history of deeds displaying a greatness of spirit that is both proper and beneficial, how eagerly we enter into such plans! How much the high-minded generosity guiding them inspires us! How keenly we desire their success, and how deeply their failure grieves us! In imagination we become the very person whose actions are recounted: we carry ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant, forgotten adventures, and imagine playing the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon or an Aristides. So far our feelings rest on direct sympathy with the agent. But our indirect sympathy with the beneficiaries of such deeds is felt no less vividly. When we put ourselves in their place, with what warm and affectionate fellow-feeling we enter into their gratitude toward those who served them so profoundly! We embrace their benefactor, as it were, along with them. Our heart readily shares the most passionate transports of their gratitude. No honors or rewards, we think, can be too great for them to bestow on him. When they make this proper return for his services, we applaud them wholeheartedly and share their feelings; when their behavior betrays little awareness of what they owe him, we are shocked beyond measure. In short, our entire sense of the merit and good desert of such deeds, of the propriety and fitness of repaying them and making their author rejoice in his turn, springs from the sympathetic gratitude and love we naturally feel toward a man capable of such proper and noble beneficence when we make the beneficiaries' situation our own.

2 Just as our sense of the impropriety of conduct arises from a lack of sympathy with, or direct antipathy to, the agent's feelings and motives, our sense of its demerit arises from what I shall again call indirect sympathy with the sufferer's resentment.

Since we cannot enter into the sufferer's resentment unless our heart first disapproves of the agent's motives and rejects all fellow-feeling with them, our sense of demerit, like our sense of merit, seems to be a compound feeling made up of two distinct emotions: direct antipathy to the agent's feelings and indirect sympathy with the sufferer's resentment.

Here too, on many occasions, we can clearly distinguish these two emotions joining together in our sense that a particular character or action deserves blame. When we read in history of the treachery and cruelty of a Borgia or a Nero, our heart rebels against the detestable feelings that guided their conduct and recoils in horror and loathing from all fellow-feeling with such hateful motives. So far our feelings rest on direct antipathy to the agent's passions; our indirect sympathy with the resentment of the sufferers is felt even more vividly. When we imagine ourselves in the place of those whom these scourges of humanity insulted, murdered, or betrayed, how indignant we feel toward such arrogant and inhuman oppressors of the earth! Our sympathy with the innocent sufferers' inevitable distress is no more real or lively than our fellow-feeling with their just, natural resentment. The first feeling only intensifies the second: the thought of their distress only feeds and inflames our anger against its authors. When we consider the sufferers' anguish, we side with them more earnestly against their oppressors, enter more eagerly into every plan they form for vengeance, and find ourselves, at every moment, inflicting in imagination on these violators of society's laws the punishment our sympathetic indignation tells us their crimes deserve. Our horror at the dreadful atrocity of such conduct, our pleasure in hearing that it was duly punished, our indignation when it escapes its deserved retaliation—in short, our entire sense and feeling of its ill desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflicting harm on its author and making him suffer in his turn—spring from the sympathetic indignation that naturally surges in a spectator's heart whenever he thoroughly makes the sufferer's case his own.

To derive our natural sense that human actions deserve punishment in this way from sympathy with the sufferer's resentment may seem to most people to diminish that sense. Resentment is commonly regarded as such a hateful passion that people may think it impossible for so praiseworthy a principle as our sense of the ill desert of vice to rest upon it in any way. Perhaps they will more readily admit that our sense of the merit of good actions rests on sympathy with the gratitude of their beneficiaries, because gratitude, like all benevolent passions, is regarded as an admirable principle that cannot diminish the worth of anything founded upon it. Yet gratitude and resentment are evidently counterparts in every respect; if our sense of merit arises from sympathy with one, our sense of demerit can hardly fail to arise from fellow-feeling with the other.

Consider too that resentment, though perhaps the most hateful of passions at the intensity at which we too often see it, is not disapproved of when properly restrained and brought entirely down to the level of a spectator's sympathetic indignation. When we bystanders feel that our own anger corresponds exactly to the sufferer's, when his resentment goes no further than ours in any respect, when no word or gesture betrays an emotion stronger than we can share, and when he never seeks to inflict a punishment beyond what we would rejoice to see imposed, or would even wish to help impose ourselves, we cannot help approving of his feelings entirely. In our eyes our own emotion must undoubtedly justify his. Experience also teaches us how few people are capable of this moderation and how great an effort is required to bring the raw, undisciplined impulse of resentment down to a suitable temper. We therefore cannot help feeling considerable esteem and admiration for someone who can exercise such self-command over one of his nature's least governable passions. When the sufferer's anger exceeds what we can share, as it almost always does, we necessarily disapprove because we cannot enter into it. Indeed, we disapprove more strongly than we would of an equal excess in almost any other passion that springs from the imagination. Instead of carrying us along, this excessive resentment itself becomes the object of our resentment and indignation. We enter into the opposing resentment of the person who is the target of this unjust emotion and stands in danger of suffering from it. Revenge, then, as resentment carried to excess, appears the most detestable of all passions and inspires everyone's horror and indignation. And because this passion, as people commonly display it, is excessive a hundred times for every time it is moderate, we are very inclined to regard it as altogether hateful and detestable, since that is what it is in its most familiar forms. Yet Nature, even in humanity's present corrupted condition, does not seem to have treated us so unkindly as to give us any principle wholly evil in every respect, incapable in any degree or direction of properly earning praise and approval. On some occasions we recognize that this passion, usually too strong, can also be too weak. Sometimes we complain that someone shows too little spirit and has too little sense of the injuries done to him; we are as ready to despise him for too little resentment as to hate him for too much.

The inspired writers surely would not have spoken so often and so forcefully of God's wrath and anger if they had considered every degree of those passions vicious and evil, even in a creature as weak and imperfect as a human being.

Consider too that our present inquiry concerns not a question of right, if I may put it so, but a question of fact. We are not asking on what principles a perfect being would approve of punishing bad actions, but on what principles a creature as weak and imperfect as a human being actually does approve of it. The principles I have just described evidently have a powerful effect on human feelings, and it seems a wise arrangement that they should. The very existence of society requires that unmerited, unprovoked malice be checked by suitable punishments; consequently, inflicting those punishments must be regarded as a proper and praiseworthy act. Though human beings naturally desire society's welfare and survival, the Author of nature has not left it to their reason to discover that certain punishments are the proper means to that end. Instead he has given them immediate, instinctive approval of precisely the application of punishment best suited to achieve it. In this respect Nature's design is wholly consistent with its design on many other occasions. For every end that, by reason of its special importance, might be called—if the expression is permissible—one of Nature's favorite ends, she has consistently endowed humanity not only with an appetite for the proposed end but also with an appetite for the means that alone can bring it about, valued in themselves and independently of their tendency to produce that end. Thus self-preservation and the propagation of the species appear to be the great ends Nature pursued in forming all animals. Human beings are endowed with a desire for those ends and an aversion to their opposites: a love of life and dread of death, a desire for the species to continue and endure, and an aversion to the thought of its total extinction. Yet although we have a strong desire for these ends, Nature has not entrusted the discovery of the proper means to the slow and uncertain judgments of reason. She has guided us toward most of them through original, immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion uniting the sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain prompt us to pursue those means for their own sake, without considering their tendency to achieve the beneficial ends intended by the great Director of nature.

Before concluding this note, I must point out a difference between approving of propriety and approving of merit or beneficence. Before we can approve of someone's feelings as proper and suited to their objects, we must not only feel as he does but also perceive the harmony and correspondence between his feelings and ours. Thus, if I hear that my friend has suffered a misfortune, I may feel precisely the degree of concern he expresses; yet until I learn how he behaves, until I perceive the harmony between his emotions and mine, I cannot be said to approve of the feelings guiding his behavior. Approval of propriety therefore requires not only that we fully sympathize with the agent but also that we perceive this perfect accord between his feelings and our own. By contrast, when I hear that someone has received a benefit, however he may feel about it, if I put myself in his place and feel gratitude arise in my own heart, I necessarily approve of his benefactor's conduct and regard it as meritorious and properly deserving of reward. Whether the beneficiary himself feels gratitude plainly cannot affect our judgment of the benefactor's merit in any degree. No actual correspondence of feelings is required here. It is enough that their feelings would correspond if he were grateful. Our sense of merit often rests on one of those illusory forms of sympathy by which, when we make another's case our own, we feel something the person chiefly concerned is incapable of feeling. There is a similar difference between our disapproval of demerit and our disapproval of impropriety.

How we come to sense merit and demerit.

1 Our sense that conduct has propriety arises from what I will call direct sympathy with the feelings and motives of the person acting. In the same way, our sense that conduct has merit arises from what I will call indirect sympathy with the gratitude of the person affected by the action.

We cannot fully share a recipient's gratitude unless we first approve of the benefactor's motives. Our sense of merit therefore seems to combine two different feelings: direct sympathy with the actor's feelings and indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those helped by his actions.

On many occasions we can clearly tell these two feelings apart, even though they combine when we judge a person's character or action worthy of reward. When we read history and find great acts of kindness performed for good reasons, we eagerly share the people's plans. Their bold generosity excites us. We keenly want them to succeed and grieve when they fail. In imagination we become the people whose actions we read about. We picture ourselves in the scenes of those long-past adventures, playing the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon or an Aristides. That is direct sympathy with the person acting. We also clearly feel indirect sympathy with those helped by these actions. When we put ourselves in their place, we warmly share their gratitude toward people who did so much for them. We embrace their benefactor along with them, so to speak. We readily share their most intense feelings of gratitude. We think no honor or reward they give him could be too great. When they repay him as they should, we wholeheartedly approve. But we are deeply shocked if their conduct suggests they hardly appreciate what he has done for them. In short, our whole sense that such actions have merit and deserve reward comes from sympathetic feelings of gratitude and love. We feel them toward someone capable of such proper and noble beneficence when we imagine ourselves in the place of the people he helped. These feelings make us think it right and fitting to repay his actions and give him happiness in return.

2 Likewise, our sense that conduct is improper arises when we cannot sympathize with the actor's feelings and motives, or directly oppose them. Our sense that conduct has demerit arises from what I will again call indirect sympathy, this time with the victim's resentment.

We cannot share a victim's resentment unless we first disapprove of the actor's motives and cannot share his feelings. So our sense of demerit, like our sense of merit, seems to combine two different feelings: direct opposition to the actor's feelings and indirect sympathy with the victim's resentment.

Again, we can often tell these two feelings apart, though they combine when we judge a character or action worthy of punishment. When we read in history of the treachery and cruelty of a Borgia or a Nero, we recoil from the hateful feelings behind their conduct. We utterly reject any fellow-feeling with such terrible motives. That is direct opposition to the actor's feelings. We feel indirect sympathy with the victims' resentment even more strongly. When we imagine ourselves in the place of the people these enemies of humanity insulted, murdered, or betrayed, we feel fierce anger at their arrogant and cruel oppressors. Our fellow-feeling with the victims' justified resentment is as real and strong as our sympathy with their unavoidable distress. Sympathy with their distress only increases our resentment. The thought of their suffering fuels our anger against those responsible. As we think about the victims' anguish, we side still more firmly with them against their oppressors. We enter more eagerly into every plan they have for revenge. In imagination, we repeatedly inflict on these violators of society's laws the punishment our shared indignation tells us they deserve. We feel horror at the terrible cruelty of their conduct, pleasure when we hear they were properly punished, and anger when they escape the punishment they deserve. In short, our whole sense that their conduct deserves punishment, that it is right and fitting to make the offender suffer in return, comes from the sympathetic indignation that rises in us when we truly put ourselves in the victim's place.

Explaining our natural sense that actions deserve punishment as sympathy with a victim's resentment may seem to many people to lower the value of that sense. Resentment is usually seen as such an ugly passion that people may find it impossible to believe that our praiseworthy sense of wrongdoing could rest on it in any way. They may be more willing to agree that our sense of the merit of good actions rests on sympathy with the gratitude of the people helped. Gratitude, like other kindly feelings, is seen as admirable, and anything based on it seems no less valuable. But gratitude and resentment clearly correspond to each other in every respect. If our sense of merit comes from sympathy with one, our sense of demerit can hardly fail to come from fellow-feeling with the other.

Consider also that resentment is not condemned when it is restrained to exactly the level of anger that a sympathetic spectator can share. At the excessive levels we often see, it may be the ugliest of all passions. But suppose we bystanders feel exactly the same anger as the victim. His resentment goes no further than ours. Nothing he says or does shows an emotion stronger than we can share. He never seeks a punishment beyond what we would gladly see inflicted or even wish to help inflict ourselves. In that case, we cannot help fully approving of his feelings. Surely our own emotion justifies his in our eyes. Experience teaches us that most people cannot show such restraint. It takes a great effort to bring an undisciplined impulse of resentment down to that fitting level. So we naturally feel considerable esteem and admiration for a person who can exercise so much self-control over one of our most difficult passions. When the victim's anger exceeds what we can share, as it almost always does, we necessarily disapprove of it. We disapprove of it even more than we would disapprove of a comparable excess in almost any other passion that arises from imagination. Instead of drawing us along, this excessive resentment itself arouses our resentment and anger. We share the answering resentment of the person targeted by that unjust emotion, who is now in danger of suffering from it. Revenge, then—the excess of resentment—seems the most hateful of all passions. Everyone regards it with horror and anger. People show too much resentment a hundred times for every time they show restraint. We are therefore apt to think resentment is always hateful and ugly, because it so often appears that way. Yet Nature, even in humanity's present flawed state, does not seem to have treated us so unkindly as to give us any impulse that is bad in every respect, one that could never deserve praise or approval in any degree or direction. Sometimes we realize that this passion, usually too strong, can also be too weak. We sometimes complain that a person shows too little spirit and too little awareness of wrongs done to him. We are as ready to look down on him for too little resentment as we are to hate him for too much.

The inspired writers surely would not have spoken so often or so strongly of God's wrath and anger if they thought every degree of these passions was wrong and bad, even in a creature as weak and imperfect as a human being.

Consider, too, that my question here concerns what happens, not what ought to happen. I am not asking on what principles a perfect being would approve of punishing bad actions. I am asking on what principles a weak and imperfect human being actually approves of it. The principles I have just described clearly have a great effect on our feelings, and it seems wise that they do. Society could not exist unless unearned, unprovoked malice were held in check by suitable punishments. People must therefore see imposing those punishments as right and praiseworthy. Humans naturally want society to be safe and to continue. Yet the Author of nature did not leave us to work out by reason that certain punishments are the way to achieve that goal. Instead, he gave us an immediate, instinctive approval of the very punishments best suited to it. Nature follows the same pattern in many other cases. When an end is especially important, one of Nature's favorite ends, if I may call it that, she gives us a desire not only for the end but also for the means that can achieve it. We want those means for their own sake, quite apart from their usefulness in achieving the end. Self-preservation and the continuation of the species are the great ends Nature seems to have set in forming every animal. Humans desire these things and dislike their opposites. We love life and fear death; we want the species to continue and dread the thought of its complete extinction. Yet although we strongly desire these ends, Nature did not leave our slow, uncertain reason to discover how to achieve them. She directs us to most of the means through immediate, inborn instincts. Hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the love of pleasure, and the fear of pain move us to use those means for their own sake. We need not consider how they serve the good ends that Nature's great Director intended them to achieve.

Before ending this discussion, I must note a difference between approving of propriety and approving of merit or beneficence. To approve of someone's feelings as proper and suited to their objects, we must not only feel the same way but also recognize that our feelings match. For example, I might hear that something terrible has happened to my friend and feel exactly the same degree of concern he expresses. Yet until I learn how he behaves and see that his feelings match mine, I cannot say I approve of the feelings guiding his behavior. To approve of propriety, then, we must fully sympathize with the person acting and recognize the complete agreement between his feelings and ours. By contrast, if I hear that someone has helped another person, the recipient may feel anything he likes. If putting myself in his place makes me feel grateful, I necessarily approve of the benefactor's conduct. I see it as having merit and deserving reward. Whether the actual recipient feels gratitude plainly cannot change my judgment of the benefactor's merit in any way. Here the feelings do not actually have to match. It is enough that they would match if the recipient felt grateful. Our sense of merit often rests on one of those imagined sympathies that make us feel something when we put ourselves in another person's place, even though that person cannot feel it. A similar difference exists between our disapproval of demerit and our disapproval of impropriety.