Pity, Gratitude, and the Poor in Rousseau and Adam Smith

Pity and gratitude are moral emotions—or “moral sentiments,” as Adam Smith calls them—because they respond to perceived goods or ills. Pity recognizes that an undeserved ill has befallen another, or simply that another is in pain. Conversely, the sentiment of gratitude affirms as good something given to us, as well as the agent who grants it. These two emotions are often conjoined in eighteenth-century narratives: I take pity on someone, often someone who is acutely or chronically poor; I seek to alleviate his suffering or privation through word or alms; my feelings or actions are met with a feeling and/or expression of gratitude. Take, for example, the following episode from Henry Mackenzie’s sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling (1771), in which the protagonist Harley takes pity on an impoverished prostitute who faints from hunger in his presence:

“I am sorry, sir,” said she, “that I should have given you so much trouble; but you will pity me when I tell you that till now I have not tasted a morsel these two days past.”—He fixed his eyes on hers—every circumstance but the last was forgotten; and he took her hand with as much respect as if she had been a duchess. It was ever the privilege of misfortune to be revered by him. … He had one half-guinea left. “I am sorry,” he said, “that at present I should be able to make you an offer of no more than this paltry sum.”—She burst into tears: “Your generosity, sir, is abused; to bestow it on me is to take it from the virtuous …” “No more of that,” answered Harley; “there is virtue in these tears; let the fruit of them be virtue.”—He rung, and ordered a chair.—“Though I am the vilest of beings,” said she, “I have not forgotten every virtue; gratitude, I hope, I shall still have left, did I but know who is my benefactor.”—“My name is Harley.”¹

In this exchange, pity or compassion motivates Harley to treat a socially degraded woman with respect, indeed reverence; in his eyes, suffering ennobles her. She responds with a verbal sophistication indicative of the relative gentility from which she has fallen, and she responds with gratitude for the relief he offers.

The sentimental narrative of well-placed pity met with virtuous gratitude is not so simple for Rousseau or for his Scottish interlocutor, Adam Smith. Yet the complexity of their attitudes towards pity, gratitude, and the poor has not been fully appreciated. Each author seems, at first glance, more sentimental than he is. Rousseau presents pity as the ur-virtue in his highly influential Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755), and Smith in turn appears to endorse it at the outset of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 6^th ed. 1790). Smith’s apparent endorsement of pity leads one critic to link Smith’s work to Mackenzie’s: “Smith’s first paragraph … urges (what Mackenzie’s novel dramatizes) the moral import of one man’s ‘pity or compassion’ for another man, and allies it with the dynamics of sympathetic reading: ‘By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him …’”² Upon closer inspection, however, neither Smith nor Rousseau treats pity—or gratitude—as an unqualified ethical or political good. Both teach us, rather, to be suspicious of the type of scenario illustrated in Mackenzie’s novel, and in similar examples throughout eighteenth-century British and French sentimental literature.³ For Rousseau, pity is as apt to avoid suffering as to alleviate it, and in his ideal, relatively egalitarian society, pitiable poverty would be eliminated. For Smith, pity is not only generally inefficacious, but potentially unjust—indeed, we’re most apt to pity those, including criminals and the majority of the poor, who do not (Smith argues) deserve pity or relief. Conversely, for Smith as for Rousseau, not all benefactors deserve gratitude. Gratitude is rightly bestowed...