Natural Self-correction and Human Beings

This chapter focuses on a particular kind of education in Smith’s moral philosophy. Specifically, it describes in what sense Smith’s understanding of human beings would be based on an idea of harmony between oneself and others that mature through natural education. In Smith, ‘natural education’ consists of those natural educational consequences of the sympathetic consideration and emulation of others and their judgments by human beings, since childhood. This natural education concerns both the self-correction of the human being in the sense of a spontaneous self-command in infancy, and the condition of possibility of the moral conscience in the sense of an impartial spectator. For Smith, natural education is the basis of the first stage of the formation of moral conscience, which underlies the moral development of the self and the emotional expression associated with the moral judgment by the internal and external spectators on human conduct. In this context, for Smith, sympathetic human beings would correct themselves in order to be deservedly approved by others and by their own internal impartial spectator.