Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Official Report 1081KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Jonathan Ainslie, a school visitor from the Humanist Society Scotland.

Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.

On my way to Parliament this morning, I walked past the Canongate kirkyard, where Adam Smith lies buried. Just around the corner is the newly refurbished Panmure house, where Smith lived at the end of his life. In his lifetime, Smith witnessed industrial change, urban growth and an explosion of travel across national borders. Like many enlightenment writers, his work concerned how to live a good life in a changing world.

In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, Smith wrote that moral behaviour comes from our nature as sociable beings:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

For Smith, the key to the good life was “sympathy”: what we today would call empathy. He praised our ability to place ourselves in the situation of another man:

“we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him”.

The great challenge for sympathy was the remoteness of so much of the world’s suffering. If a man

“was to lose his little finger to-morrow”,

Smith wrote,

“he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren”.

The question is, therefore, how to extend our moral circle to those who are unfamiliar to us.

Smith’s answer came in two parts. The first part was conscience: a virtuous person is an impartial spectator of their own conduct as well as of the conduct of others. The second part was justice: we formulate general rules of moral conduct that every member of society agrees to abide by even if they disagree. Individual conscience and social justice reinforce each other; one cannot survive without the other. Together, they allow us to extend our sympathies to people we have never met, and perhaps even to people we have been taught to fear.

Today, we once again live in a changing world, but Scots are the lucky heirs not only of Smith but of all the men and women whose thought contributed to the enlightenment and can still guide us today. Thank you.