At the age of Fifteen, Adam Smith attended Glasgow University. There he studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson. In 1740, Adam Smith entered Balliol College, Oxford. Six years later Adam Smith would leave Oxford.
In 1751 Adam Smith was appointed professor of Logic at Glasgow University. One year later he transferred to the chair of Moral Philosophy. His lectures covered fields of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and political economy.
In 1759, Adam Smith published his book called Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book established Smith's reputation, in his day. This work was about those standards of ethical conduct that hold society together, with emphasis on the general harmony of human motives and activities under a beneficent Providence. Adam Smith's central notion in this work is that moral principles have social feeling or sympathy as their basis. It was his view that the essence of moral sensibility was that which came about through sympathy, but sympathy as an impartial and well informed spectator. Sympathy is a common feeling that an individual may have with the affections or feelings of another person. The source of this feeling is not so much one's observation of the expressed emotion of another person as one's thought of the situation that the other person confronts. Sympathy usually requires knowledge of the cause of the emotion to be shared. If one approves of another's passion as suitable to their object, he thereby sympathizes with that person. .
Sympathy is the basis for one's judging of the appropriateness and merit of the feeling and behavior. Well aware of the human tendency to overlook one's own moral failings and the self-deceit in which individuals often engage, Adam Smith argues that each person must scrutinize his own feelings and behavior with the same strictness he employs when considering those of others. Such an impartial appraisal is possible because a person's conscience enables him to compare his own feelings with those of others.