This chapter explores the ironic and contentious potential of sympathy, in particular the manner in which slight differences in earnest commitments can create polemic relationships just as charged as those that stem from deeper ideological rifts. I focus on Swift and his interactions with hack writer John Dunton. The two writers, I argue, do not disagree about what they dislike, but rather have slightly different, though equally genuine, commitments to the same religious and political institutions. Scholars have seen Swift and Dunton as writers who are representative of the ironic and earnest styles, respectively. While Dunton’s work often lacks the same level of irony or self-awareness as Swift’s, it was still often subversive or duplicitous in a way that was amenable to Swift and that first attracted Swift to his writing. Drawing on Adam Smith, I suggest that this relationship reveals how interests and affects are inseparable from communal relationships and social groupings that are inherently factional and fractious. In Smith's account, any affective state is a combination of a judgment and a social identification: it is always positional and partial.

While moral philosophers have traditionally distinguished between moral virtues like benevolence and talents like wit and eloquence, Hume blurred the line between the two, arguing that such talents indeed count as genuine moral virtues. His position was inspired by Cicero, and he defended it by arguing that there is no adequate criterion to distinguish talents from virtues. I argue that Hume’s view of talents is misguided, and the source of the problem is his conception of publicly agreeable qualities. Hume devised a four-pronged test designating that a moral actor’s mental quality is a genuine virtue if it proves either (1) useful to others, (2) useful to oneself, (3) agreeable to oneself, or (4) agreeable to others. Talents like wit and eloquence fall into the fourth category. The problem is that all of the agreeable mental qualities that Hume lists are also useful ones, and it is more reasonable to see utility as the sole source of a quality’s morality, and agreeableness as only an extra feeling of nonmoral admiration experienced by the spectator. I suggest that Hume could have avoided the problem of grouping talents with virtues if he dropped down to a two-pronged test.

Like his predecessors, Adam Smith saw the value of resentment as a motive for justice and an emotion that best captured our belief in the equality of others, but he offered the most comprehensive account of how the passion of resentment might be made into a moral (or proper) passion. Through his innovative impartial spectator theory, which explains how–and why–individuals refine their own emotions and learn to better recognize the emotions of many, varied others, Smith developed a theory of justice based on spectatorial resentment that avoided the pitfalls of partiality and while leveraging resentment's potency as a motive and intimate connection to injustice. More than any other thinker, Smith was also attuned to the psychological toll that the refinement of spectatorial resentment imposed on victims and spectators of injustice alike, however, casting his social and political theory in a somewhat tragic light. Smith thus offers a therapeutic view of religious belief as one means available to liberal citizens who must cope with lingering resentment in an unjust world.