Against Sympathy: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Regressive Politics of Likeness

Abstract

Reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments in dialog with civil rights struggles in the United States and with decolonial thinking more generally, this essay argues that sympathy constrains the conditions for social change by restricting the legibility of Black suffering. To demonstrate as much, this essay offers a close reading of Smith’s account of sympathy and of the impartial spectator, following which this essay reads #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag and social movement whose advocacy is counteracted by antisympathetic rhetorics of white universalism, Black respectability, and masculine supremacy. In response, this essay argues in favor of decolonial acts of listening that occur in the context of a societal project of restorative justice because it is the persistence of reified colonial sympathy-allocation patterns in the United States and elsewhere that are driving the disproportionate impacts of anthropogenic climate change, COVID-19, and other historic events on nonwhite, nonmale people around the world.