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referees.Of course he was technologically premature. Oprah herself would have to wait until division of labor had gone so far that we had specialists to do our imagining for us.
    The Impartial Spectator produced a show for a more serious age: 'Today, utilitarian philosophers who suffer from Christian agape!'
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
is daytime TV if daytime TV were produced by PBS, featuring a host who is like Bill Moyers, except intelligent.
    The host would have to be at least as intelligent as Sigmund Freud. Smith also described the operation of the superego long before Freud did, and more astutely. Smith gave it a moniker that didn't sound like a comic book hero's. And Smith connected our conscience to human attributes more noble and reasonable than what drives a miniature schnauzer to hump our leg.
    We envision the Impartial Spectator as having perfect knowledge of everyone's circumstances, experience, and intentions. And since the Impartial Spectator is imaginary and has no self, it has no selfish interest in any judgment that it makes. Smith claimed that what we do, when we develop morality, is shape our natural sympathies into the thoughts and actions that we would expect from an Impartial Spectator who is sympathetic, but objective and all-knowing (and still sympathetic anyway).
    'When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it,' Smith asks, 'that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?' 11 The answer is 'the inhabitant of the breast … the great judge and arbiter of our conduct'. 12 Looking at things from the Impartial Spectator'spoint of view instructs us in the emotional self-discipline that we need to behave even tolerably well. Consider how toddlers and drunks behave, who haven't yet received, or who have temporarily forgotten, their instructions.
    Thanks to our imaginative sympathy, we are happy when other people are happy and sad when they're sad, and hope they feel the same way about us. But this emotional engagement is laborious. We have to prod our imagination to put ourselves in the place of someone who's feeling stronger sensations than we can feel – and mourn the death of a friend's ancient, stupid, leg-humping schnauzer. We have to control our own emotions when someone can't feel the sensations that we can – and laugh politely when we've taken the schnauzer's old chair and sat in the last mess it made.
    According to Adam Smith, the 'wise and virtuous man' uses his imagination to create 'the idea of exact propriety and perfection'. This is 'gradually formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of himself and of other people. It is the slow, gradual, and progressive work of the great demigod within.' 13 If, Smith wrote, the Impartial Spectator did not endeavor to teach us 'to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty', 14 then 'a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions'. 15 Or toddlers. Or drunks. Or as he enters the set of a daytime TV show, or sits in a dead schnauzer's chair.
    Adam Smith's recognition of the primary role of imagination in moral thinking reveals several things about morality. Morals are the result of effort. The proper course of moral behavior isnot some piece of arcane knowledge that can be acquired by reading esoteric texts such as
Who Moved My Cheese?
Morality can't be learned by a literal reading of the Bible, for that matter. Smith pointed out that 'In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers. No mention is made of the love of our children.' 16 God didn't put it in there, because God doesn't regard us as totally unimaginative numskulls. Our sympathy for our children should go without saying. Our sympathy for our parents, on the other hand … Did you visit Mom at Sundown Center? Or was this my week to go?
    Imagining things is work. The imagination that Adam Smith describes is not the easy, whimsical one that we