精选英语鉴赏美文
Economist and moral philosopher. Born June 5, 1723, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. Smith抯 father had died two months before his birth, and a strong and lifelong attachment developed between Smith and his mother. As an infant, Smith was kidnapped, but he was soon rescued. At the age of 14, he enrolled in the University of Glasgow, where he remained for three years. The lectures of Francis Hutcheson exerted a strong influence on him. In 1740, he transferred to Balliol College, Oxford, where he remained for almost seven years, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1744. Returning then to Kirkcaldy, he devoted himself to his studies and gave a series of lectures on English literature. In 1748, he moved to Edinburgh, where he became a friend of David Hume, whose skepticism he did not share.
Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1751, Smith started working as a professor of logic at the University of Glasgow; the following year he became a professor of moral philosophy. Eight years later, he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smiths central notion in this work is that moral principles have social feeling or sympathy as their basis. Sympathy is a common or analogous feeling that an individual may have with the affections or feelings of another person. The source of this feeling is not so much ones observation of the expressed emotion of another person as ones thought of the situation that the other person confronts. Sympathy usually requires knowledge of the cause of the emotion to be shared. If one approves of anothers passions as suitable to their objects, he thereby sympathizes with that person. Sympathy is the basis for ones judging of the appropriateness and merit of the feelings and actions issuing from these feelings. If the affections of the person involved in a situation are analogous to the emotions of the spectator, then those affections are appropriate. The merit of a feeling or an action flowing from a feeling is its worthiness of reward. If a feeling or an action is worthy of reward, it has moral merit. Ones awareness of merit derives from ones sympathy with the gratitude of the person benefited by the action. Ones sense of merit, then, is a derivative of the feeling of gratitude that is manifested in the situation by the person who has been helped.
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