Continued from my previous post:

Is Adam Smith’s impartial spectator a deity or just a heuristic device? To recap, my colleagues Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young claim that this imaginary entity is a “universal, super-knowledgeable, and benevolent beholder” (Klein et al. 2025, p. 297), and in support of their theistic interpretation of the impartial spectator, they pluck three specific passages from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: (i) 294.49, i.e. page 294, paragraph 49 of TMS, (ii) 225.19 (page 225, para. 19), and (iii) 215.11 (page 215, para. 11). (See Klein et al. 2025, pp. 304-305)

But as we saw in my previous post, the first two of their selected snippets (TMS 294.49 and TMS 225.19) are somewhat equivocal: on the one hand, those two passages imply that the impartial spectator is infallible, but on the other hand, there is no explicit reference whatsoever to a deity, let alone God, in either of those excerpts. That leaves “Passage #3” (TMS 215.11). To say that Klein, Swanson, and Young “put all of their argumentative eggs in this one basket” (as I wrote in my previous post) is no exaggeration: they cite this passage over 40 times in their paper! So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at Klein et al.’s holy grail, Passage #3. Since this pivotal passage consists of five sentences, let’s break it down sentence-by-sentence:

Sentence #1. The first sentence of Passage #3 tells us that the impartial spectator is not a lone wolf or solitary actor: he also has a “representative” — a presumably lower-level agent who presumably acts on his behalf — and this representative has a name: “the man within the breast”:

In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the probable expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast.

This first sentence poses more questions than it answers, however. To begin, isn’t the lower-level “man within the breast” a totally superfluous entity, i.e. excess moral baggage given the existence of the higher-level impartial spectator? If not, how was this representative or agent chosen, and what is the scope of his authority? And most importantly, what happens when the man within the breast and the impartial spectator disagree with each other? In short, what happens when the agent goes rogue or acts ultra vires?

Sentence #2. The very next sentence describes two of the impartial spectator’s godlike “superpowers” — he has a long time horizon, and he never gets tired:

The impartial spectator does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites.

Again, we have another sentence that poses more questions than it answers. What, for example, is the vigilance level of the impartial spectator: is he always on “high alert” or is he just “on call”, available when needed? And what is the vigilance level of his agent, the man within the breast?

Sentence #3: The third sentence expands on the nature of the impartial spectator’s temporal or time-horizon superpower:

To him [the impartial spectator] their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same: he sees them nearly at the same distance, and is affected by them very nearly in the same manner.

In other words, the impartial spectator is not a hyberbolic discounter; i.e. he does not prefer immediate rewards over delayed rewards. Instead, he is an exponential discounter: he applies a constant discount rate to future rewards, regardless of the length of the delay. Okay, but how does Adam Smith know this about the impartial spectator? And what about the impartial spectator’s agent, “the man within the breast”? Does this agent have this same superpower as well?

Sentence #4: The fourth sentence is the most mysterious of all. Read it carefully and tell me, to whom do the words “they” and “them” refer to in this sentence?

He [the impartial spectator] knows, however, that to the person principally concerned, they are very far from being the same, and that they naturally affect them in a very different manner.

Sentence #5: The last sentence in this passage reads:

He [the impartial spectator] cannot therefore but approve, and even applaud, that proper exertion of self-command, which enables them to act as if their present and future situation affected them nearly in the same manner in which they affect him.

Same question as before: Can you tell me to whom the word “them” refers to in this sentence?

* * *

To recap our discussion thus far: it is from these scanty sentences that Klein, Swanson, and Young erect their shaky theoretical edifice. But do these few sparse sentences really support their theistic interpretation of Smith’s impartial spectator? Alas, the last two sentences are ambiguous at best, and all five sentences pose more questions than they answer. To make matters worse, nowhere else in TMS does Adam Smith elaborate on this distinction between a higher-level or godlike impartial spectator and a lower-level agent, the man within the breast. (To be continued …)