This paper critiques Jesse Prinz’s rejection of Adam Smith’s model of impartial spectatorship as a viable corrective to empathic bias. I argue that Prinz’s case is unconvincing, insofar as it rests on an underdeveloped account of Smith’s view of critical self-regulation. By presenting a more detailed and attentive reading of Smithean impartial spectatorship, and exploring Smith’s compelling account of structural supports for sympathetic engagement, this paper demonstrates how Smith’s work is able to constructively engage with contemporary concerns regarding empathy’s role (...) in guiding moral behaviour. (shrink)

The idea that the phenomenon of morality and, consequently, our ability to distinguish between vice and virtue can be explained by sympathy has been challenged as a highly controversial hypothesis, since sympathy appears to be easily influenced by proximity and selective, and would therefore seem incompatible with the possibility of taking an impartial, objective point of view. We intend to show that even a sentimentalist moral perspective such as the ‘Humean’ one, which places empathy (or ‘sympathy’, as Hume calls it) (...) at the core of morality, is capable of accounting for and justifying moral responsibility to future generations. Moreover, if we consider things from a Humean perspective, it is immoral not only to harm future generations, but also not to care at all about the extinction of the human species. For in the former case, we perform actions that cause misery, pain and suffering, whilst in the latter, we are not at all concerned about the welfare (i.e., happiness) of possible people who may, in the near future, come into the world and have a life worth or very much worth living. That is, in both cases, we show no ability to empathize with the possible people who will or may be born tomorrow. (shrink)