The Man Within the Breast: Sympathy and Deformity in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In this essay, I explore a mode of experience that is an abiding concern in both eighteenth-century British moral philosophy and contemporary disability studies: the intersubjective bonds of sympathy. There is no question that considerable differences—historical, cultural, and discursive—separate the forms of thought that characterize moral philosophy and disability studies. Nevertheless, when read by one another’s lights, significant cross-historical relays emerge between the moral-philosophical speculations of the eighteenth century and the relatively recent critiques of ableist ideology. Moreover, while disability studies generally has tended to focus on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century contexts, groundbreaking work by scholars such as Lennard J. Davis, Felicity Nussbaum, Helen Deutsch, and David M. Turner, among others, has revealed the eighteenth century to be an important chapter—perhaps even a decisive turning point—in the history of disability.¹ Scholarship on eighteenth-century disability has interrogated how a society ostensibly devoted to “enlightenment” represented, taxonomized, judged, excluded, and (too often) brutalized disabled individuals and populations. More recently, there has been an effort to recover and to theorize the lived, subjective experience of the disabled in the eighteenth century—and more broadly still, to understand what Deutsch refers to as “the history of the link between disability and subjectivity” as such.² It will be my contention that eighteenth-century moral philosophy’s sustained inquiry into the process of sympathy—how it works, why it often fails, and who does and does not deserve the balm of fellow-feeling—played a vital, but little examined, role in fashioning both disabled and non-disabled forms of subjectivity.

Although my analyses largely focus on the eighteenth century, I draw inspiration from contemporary critiques of sympathy’s impact on the lives of the disabled. For instance, Joseph P. Shapiro’s trenchant history of the disability rights movement, No Pity, makes clear that the lived experience of disability is intertwined—often painfully and oppressively—with the experience of being pitied. Shapiro stresses that when the disabled claim forms of socio-political agency and power, or undertake acts of culture-building predicated on positively inflected notions of disabled identity, the first order of business is calling into question the historically overdetermined relationship between disability and pity (and pity’s seemingly less patronizing counterparts, such as sympathy, compassion, and empathy). In addition to intervening in the arenas of legislation and policy-making, politicizing disability requires us to challenge the cultural politics of the “poster child,” the spectacularized image-parade of Tiny Tims and “supercrips” who are offered up respectively as objects of pity and sources of “inspiration”—but who embody the non-disabled population’s fear of atypical mental and bodily states.³ Lennard J. Davis reinforces this point, and broadens its theoretical import, in his editor’s introduction to the ground-breaking volume, The Disability Studies Reader (1997). Most “normals,” Davis suggests, assume they can intuitively understand what disability entails, and he ventriloquizes their attitude thus: “What could be simpler to understand? One simply has to imagine the loss of the limb, the absent sense, and one is half-way there. Just the addition of a liberal dose of sympathy and pity along with a generous acceptance of ramps and voice-synthesized computers allows the average person to speak with knowledge on the subject.”⁴ However, in Davis’s reckoning, if sympathy seemingly affords the “normal” individual spontaneous and immediate access to the life experience of the disabled, this promise of intersubjective connection across the divide of difference is an illusion at best and a disguised form of discrimination at worst. “Pity and empathy do not lend themselves to philosophy, philology, or theoretical considerations in general”; indeed, as Davis stresses, those working in...