13 - Ambiguous Rousseau’s Soul and ‘Moi’

Summary

Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith, in their different ways, thought that sympathy/empathy was the key which would free us not only from what they saw as the morally impotent rationalism of many of their predecessors but also from imprisonment in the obsessive self-serving on which Hobbes was convinced the honest man must rely to escape, by force or fraud, from the war of all against all in which he is otherwise trapped. Smith went so far as to claim that sympathy with others could be an engine by which to develop those powers of self-control which he judged the foundation-stone of the moral outlook