Ambiguity In Philippe Fontaine's Essay

In his 1997 essay, Philippe Fontaine addresses the issue of ambiguity in Smith’s account of sympathy. He notes how many commentators, such as Philip Mercer, have argued that Smith fails to clarify whether sympathy involves imagining oneself as another person or whether it involves imagining oneself in another person’s situation. Fontaine calls the first instance “empathetic identification” and the latter “partial empathetic identification.” While he notes that Smith did not have a term for the latter, he claims he nonetheless made the distinction between these two versions of sympathy clear in the TMS. To support this claim he cites a passage in which, indeed, Smith seems to make this distinction. In this passage Smith says the that if one …show more content…
It is not something that happens to one without their control, rather it is an active process that one engages in intentionally. Thus, it is unlike the “infection” or “contagion” characterization, which many commentators have given it. Sympathy, then, is heavily dependent on the faculty of imagination, through which the spectator tries to figure out what it is like to be another person in his or her circumstances. Like Hume, Smith considered sympathy to be more likely among friends and acquaintances than strangers. Using the “spheres of intimacy” argument, Fontaine follows Coase (1976) and Niel (1986) in interpreting Smith as distinguishing between the relationships of small communities and the interactions between people who belong to different groups. We sympathize more with those closer to us because we interact with them more often and are able to gain knowledge of their preferences and sympathize with them through “habituation.” Thus, while sympathy is a significant factor in family relationships and intimate-groups, self-interest prevails in the market place. Fontaine claims that the empathetic identification described above is absent from Wealth of Nations and instead Smith focuses on “self-love”, justice, and partial empathetic identification. To demonstrate how sympathy relates to the exchange relation in Smith’s analysis, Fontaine asks us to consider the exchange relation of a dishonest butcher and an honest …show more content…
Fontaine claims that the rule of justice dominates in the market place, which negates the need for empathetic identification in the exchange relation. As long as economic agents adhere to the principle of justice and refrain from hurting each other’s interests, there is no need for an imaginary change of personhood. However, Fontaine argues the partial empathetic identification outlined in TMS may help explain how self-love, or self-interest, factors into the exchange relation in WN. He notes how in Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith made it clear that the exchange relation is founded on one another’s self-love, which requires partial empathetic identification. When entering into a transaction, one must put oneself in the position of the other economic agent in order to clarify that they too are acting out of self-love in the exchange