# II: Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion Upon Moral Sentiments explained — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

> Chapter companion for The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith.

## What happens

Smith examines how custom and fashion influence moral sentiments, arguing that while they affect our judgments of beauty and conduct, they cannot entirely pervert our fundamental moral sense. He explores how different professions, ranks, and nations develop varying standards of propriety, and how customs can sometimes authorize actions that shock natural moral principles, such as the exposure of infants in ancient Greece.

## Themes in this chapter

### Influence of Custom and Fashion on Morality

Smith argues that custom and fashion shape our moral sentiments, though they cannot entirely overturn our natural sense of right and wrong. He illustrates this with examples from different professions, nations, and historical periods.

## Character check-ins

### Charles I

Referenced in the context of the reign of Charles II, where licentiousness was deemed characteristic of a liberal education.

## Key lines

> The principles of the imagination, upon which our sense of beauty depends, are of a very nice and delicate nature, and may easily be altered by habit and education: but the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation, are founded on the strongest and most vigorous passions of human nature; and though they may be warped, cannot be entirely perverted.

Our sense of beauty is easily changed by habit and learning, but our moral feelings are rooted in the strongest human passions and can be bent but not completely corrupted.

_Smith distinguishes between the malleability of aesthetic judgments and the resilience of moral sentiments._

> Can there be greater barbarity, for example, than to hurt an infant? Its helplessness, its innocence, its amiableness, call forth the compassion, even of an enemy, and not to spare that tender age is regarded as the most furious effort of an enraged and cruel conqueror. What then should we imagine must be the heart of a parent who could injure that weakness which even a furious enemy is afraid to violate? Yet the exposition, that is, the murder of newborn infants, was a practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the polite and civilized Athenians; and whenever the circumstances of the parent rendered it inconvenient to bring up the child, to abandon it to hunger or to wild beasts was regarded without blame or censure.

Even an enemy feels compassion for an infant, yet the ancient Greeks, including the civilized Athenians, commonly practiced infant exposure without moral condemnation, showing how custom can override natural sentiments.

_Smith uses the example of infant exposure to demonstrate the powerful perverting influence of custom on moral judgment._

## Links

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