Abstract

This paper argues that according to Adam Smith the workings of (anything but extremely simple) sympathetic judgment (s) presuppose and crucially depend on counterfactual causal reasoning in the sympathetic process. In particular it argues for four related claims: (i) that according to Smith that the sympathetic process depends on a type of causal reasoning that goes well beyond the kind of simulationist theory standardly attributed to him; (ii) that the Smithian imagination in the sympathetic process works by way of counterfactual reasoning and that even the feelings we ought to feel as a consequence of the sympathetic process need not be actual, but counterfactual; (iii) that Smithian agents are non-trivially understood as belonging to the causal order of nature; (iv) that Smitian judgments of propriety are intrinsically judgments about the proportionality of causal relations.