ivashkiv blog 11

Smith details how empathy, what he calls sympathy, is rooted in selfish reasons in some way. Through sympathy, people gain happiness. Smith outlines this idea in his opening lines - “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him” (11). If this is true, then it is reasonable to assume some people may achieve the most amount of happiness by maximizing sympathy. This depends on the person’s preferences, but, if “nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow feeling with all the emotions of our own breast,” then many people should resort to sympathy to be as happy as possible (17).

As shown, happiness is rooted in feelings of similarity which are facilitated by sympathy. Relationships are one effective way to elicit these feelings of similarity. So, it seems like people would love to have as many relationships as possible if they want to be the happiest possible.


However, these premises assume that people live in a society in which maximizing the number of relationships one has does not erase a previous relationship. Some people in a society will not be able to get along with each other. Their opinions on a social or economic issue might be starkly different. These differences might be irreconcilable. This category of people might be a small part of the population, the extreme ends of a population set. In other cases, it could comprise a large portion of the population. This mutual hatred could be so strong that a person of one group might not only hate members of the second group but also anyone who associates with members of that group through relationships.


In this situation, the path to maximizing the number of relationships would be by joining a group with the largest number of people. So, sympathy as a key to happiness does not actually work in all societies. In this hypothetical, the person should align themselves with the majority in order to access the highest number of relationships as possible. In this way, it is wrong to conflate sympathy as a way to maximize happiness and as a vehicle to achieve “the perfection of human nature” in situations when the rest of the population is not operating on sympathy and is instead indulging selfish interests. In this way, sympathy as a vehicle towards happiness rests on the prerequisite that the entire population acknowledges this ability of sympathy. 

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