Prying Eyes: The Moral Significance of Sentimental Curiosity in Adam Smith and Joanna Baillie

Prying Eyes: The Moral Significance of Sentimental Curiosity in Adam Smith and Joanna Baillie
-

This is a past event

RIISS Research Seminar

This paper examines sentimental curiosity, curiosity about what other people feel and desire. While sentimental curiosity is an important psychological principle in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759/90), explaining why we are motivated to do the often-arduous work of spectatorship, he has very little to say about what it is, how it functions, and what ethical significance it has. Fortunately, there is an under-appreciated resource that can help us fill in this account for Smith, Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” to her 1798 Plays on the Passions. This text is clearly indebted to Smith’s moral theory and offers a far more detailed analysis of “sympathetick curiosity” and how it functions. Baillie shows that sentimental curiosity can degenerate into prurient and intrusive prying, or a love of cruel spectacle. She explicitly argues for the educational powers of theater, and her plays are a testament to her conviction that staging spectacles and dramatizing curiosity and spectatorship can help to regulate and check sentimental curiosity. Bringing Baillie’s treatment of curiosity back to Smith, I argue that Smith can and should similarly admit the role of the theater in regulating curiosity. I also show that Smith’s brief remarks on “troublesome and impertinent curiosity” contain a promising account of how respect for the privacy of others can also be cultivated as a check on sentimental curiosity.

Bio: Lauren Kopajtic is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She specializes in moral philosophy and literature in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on emotion, emotion regulation, and moral education, especially in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. Her work has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and The Adam Smith Review.

Speaker
Dr Lauren Kopajtic (Fordham U)
Hosted by
Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies
Venue
Online
Contact

For the link to this talk please contact Professor Michael Brown (m.brown@abdn.ac.uk)