Looking for Love

love loved and lovely

 January 22, 2025

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, sang John Lennon. And it’s easy, he declared. But it’s not easy. Adam Smith may help you find and sustain love.

“ 'Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love' (TMS 113.1). Smith teaches that proper corresponds to the sentiments of the impartial spectator in the highest sense of that term. Further, that that spectator has a “representative” in the conscience (TMS 215.11), which Smith calls “the man within the breast.” And further, that the only approach to loveliness is with that companion."
Adam Smith says, “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved” (TMS 41.1). Also: “Man naturally desires… to be loved” (TMS 113.1). But where can love be found and sustained?
John Lennon sang in “All You Need Is Love”:
There's nothing you can do that can't be done
 Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
 Nothing you can say
 But you can learn how to play the game
 It's easy
Is it really easy for you to find and sustain love between you and a few among the billions of people alive today? Some songs suggest not, such as “Lookin’ for Love”—“in all the wrong places”—“in too many faces.”
Not only is love not easy to find and sustain, it is not easy to define. Smith uses “love” often in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s clear that sympathy is fundamental to love. But Smith never treats love generally; he never lays out its most essential features, nor exposits the various significations and connotations of love. On the topic of love, there is similarity between Smith and C.S. Lewis. In The Four Loves (1960), Lewis took the tack of disaggregating love into four types—affection, friendship, eros, and charity.
Let us say two things about love generally. First, love, archetypically, exists between two beings and involves a sharing of sentiments and hence of experience. Although we speak of our love for inanimate objects, it makes sense to regard that way of speaking as a limb to the trunk of a relational love between two beings.
Second, since the sharing of the sentiments depends on the sharing of experience, love needs to be about events and objects of life (see Lewis, 85). The objects may not be happy ones, but naturally we steer toward happier objects or benefits.
Here we offer suggestions on love generally and some of its incidents, drawing on Lewis and especially Smith. We consider only benefits (as opposed to sorrows, disappointments, or other negative experiences) as the objects of life which love is about. The focus on benefits leads us to categorize subsets of people who produce benefits. We also touch upon gratefulness, because it is an incident of a relational love. Gratefulness arises from benefit, but gratefulness is itself a benefit; it is one expression of love.

The fellow in the woolen coat
When you and another interact voluntarily with each other, both you and she presumptively gain. Your gain may be thought of as net benefit—‘net’ because the gain corresponds to a notional magnitude by which gross benefit exceeds cost. For simplicity, we call net benefits simply benefits.
No matter the nature of the interaction, a lot of history stands behind it. The benefits you enjoy derive from those with whom you directly engage, but they also derive from others. Many countless people contribute to the making of a pencil, as Leonard Read explained, or a woolen coat, as Adam Smith explains (WN 22–24.11). Smith notes that man “stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.”
We naturally know and love our friends. But what shall we feel toward the many others we stand in need of? And, as we benefit others, shall we expect gratitude or love from them?

Two fictitious societies
Smith considers the moral sentiments regarding the “assistance” we enjoy from others. He posits a fictitious society in which “the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem.” This society, he says, “flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices” (TMS 85.1).
The notion of a “common centre of mutual good offices” evokes an image of a small simple society. One might think of a rural community, as in the scene in the movie Witness in which Amish neighbors come together to raise a barn. One might think of a harmonious domestic society:
With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery and mutual kindness, shew that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rivalship of favour sets the sisters at variance, and where every thing presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment? (TMS 39.2)
Another image is the prelapsarian Garden of Eden. Yet another image is the primitive band of our ancestors, our so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness. We have certain instincts about the people for whom we produce benefits and the people who produce benefits for us—affectionate instincts. In “All You Need Is Love,” Paul McCartney chimes inAll together now!... Everybody!
Smith next posits a fictitious society in which affectionate instincts are frozen. A lonely person might feel it resembles modern society. Smith assumes that, although residents refrain from messing with one another’s person, property, or promises-due, the society is otherwise morally desolate: There is “no mutual love and affection.” This society, Smith says, may subsist, “as among different merchants.” Even though no person in it “should… be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation” (TMS 86.2).
Both societies, as drawn by Smith, are beyond possibility. Still, they hold a lesson. While the second is morally desolate, the first animates our affectionate instincts and presents something of an ideal. Banded together around the “common centre of mutual good offices,” each of us would see the human good of the activities we participate in. Our good works are appreciated by the beneficiaries. “Wouldn't it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?,” so sang The Beach Boys.
The modern world, however, is very different. There is no “common centre of mutual good offices.” Indeed, as years pass, the notion of a “common centre of mutual good offices” seems to become more fanciful. Must our affectionate and grateful feelings be limited to the few persons we gain the friendship of?
The modern predicament is instinctually disappointing, even heartbreaking. Modern political parties, movements, and outlooks often seem to find support rooted in resenting modern existence and promising to avoid the heartbreak by pretending to recreate a “common centre” within the nation, through the governmentalization of social affairs. And, following the 20th century’s rampant governmentalization, we sense further political transmogrifications—as though some, despairing of the flimflam about a common national center of mutual good offices, opt for a transnational skein of bad offices.

“Bene-” means good
“Bene-” means good or well and etymologically relates to “bon-” words such as bonus and bonbons (“goodies”). A rendered good is a benefit. In English, “bene-” words include benefit, benefice, benevolence, beneficence, beneficialness, beneficiary, benediction, and benefactor.
It seems that, over the course of centuries, “bene-” words in the English language have undergone something of a transition. It seems that, for centuries, “bene-” words had mainly connoted beneficence or gift-giving, where a benefit is something conferred upon the beneficiary. But, we speculate, “benefit” began to take on wider signification. The scandalous 1714 work by Bernard Mandeville The Fable of the Bees, subtitled Private Vices, Publick Benefits, caustically detached “benefit” from beneficence. Jumping ahead in time, we arrive to the staple trope of economics: “benefit” is the result of exchange, not gift. Economists leave beneficence on the sideline when they talk of total, net, or marginal benefits or cost-benefit analysis. And now we speak of compensation consisting of “salary plus benefits.”
The rendering of benefit can be thought of as a cause-and-effect event, arriving to a particularistic benefit enjoyed by a particular person. The causal factors are diffuse, but we consider those that again correspond to persons: producers of the benefit.
Our language, however, is rather unaccommodating when it comes to “bene-” words for the varieties of such persons. We have the words benefactor and beneficiary. These words suggest an intelligence between benefactor and beneficiary, of benefit conferred upon the beneficiary. They imply salience of a benevolent sentiment or impetus. A benefactor provides not merely benefit but benefice, i.e. concerted benevolent effort. The benefactor, in other words, is not merely beneficial but beneficent. Smith would not have called “benefactor” the workers involved in making the woolen coat. In Smith’s fictitious world of “mercenary exchange,” there are no benefactors, but there are certainly benefits.

Benefiter and benefitter
The dictionary also contains the little-used word benefiter. This word has two meanings: (1) the conferrer of the benefit; (2) the one upon whom benefit is conferred. The verb to benefit likewise works both ways: “Sally benefits Jim” and “Jim benefits from Sally” can describe the same event, whereas “Sally calls Jim” and “Jim calls Sally” cannot. Moreover, benefiter has two spellings (also with two Ts).
We shall use benefiter for one who contributes to producing a benefit, and benefitter for the person who enjoys the benefit. The double-t in benefitter may evoke the suffix -ette, a diminutive which signifies a smaller form of something, as in cigarette or diskette. Think of parents (benefiters) who provide coats to their children (benefitters).
But a benefiter is a contributor to producing the benefit irrespective of sentiment, motive, or intention. A parent or a benefactor is a benefiter, but so are the woolen coat’s “many thousands” of contributors (WN 23.11). Benefiter emphasizes the actor, the producing of benefit, and the benefitter, but it does not imply intelligence between benefiter and benefitter.
One problem with benefiter and benefitter is that they have the same pronunciation, and so, in oral communication, there might be some unclarity as to which is meant. But since benefiter and benefitter are on opposite ends of the production of a benefit, that unclarity problem can be managed well enough in oral communication.

Types of benefiters 
Benefiters are innumerable, and in that sense it’s raining benefiters, but, contrary to the racy spirit of the song “It’s Raining Men!,” few are prospective associates.
For benefiters with whom you have some kind of personal relationship, we say benesociates. You are associates, in that there is society—shared sentiment, shared experiences—between you. These include family, friends, partners, neighbors, companions, ‘-mates’ (workmates, housemates, teammates, schoolmates), and so on. A benesociate may be a benefactor—one’s parents are, in a manner of speaking, one’s greatest benefactors. And a benefactor would, normally, be some kind of benesociate. But parent means more than benefactor. A beneficent or affectionate element is already built into parent, friend, companion, comrade, lover, and many other kinds of benesociates. All such persons present prospects for finding and sustaining love.
As for benefiters with whom you do not have a personal relationship, we have from economics a lexicon for many of them, such as producer, supplier, and salesperson. Those words evoke the output produced, such as woolen coats, rather than the benefits from the coats. We define benemercer as a person who, motivated mainly to earn honest income, contributes to the production of the benefit. (As for ‘honest income,’ see page 229 here.) The benemercer, in negotiating to become a contributor to the producing of the woolen coat, candidly declares his purpose—to earn honest income; he contributes in the transactional manner of commerce. With respect to the woolen-coat benefit, the benemercers would include pretty much all of the dramatis personae that economists consider on the supply side of a market—not just merchants and entrepreneurs but all employers, employees (workers), traders, investors, landlords, and so on. All benemercers pursue honest income, but not all contribute by ‘doing their job,’ since some, like investors or landlords, might not think of their contribution in terms of job performance.
The Latin word merces means “pay, wages, reward” and relates to commerce, merchant, merchandize, market, and, indeed, mercer. Smith calls modern society commercial society. Another word derived from merces is mercenary. Smith writes of “a mercenary exchange of good offices.” Does ‘benemercer’ suffer because it connotes ‘mercenary’? Perhaps, but on the other hand, ‘benemercer’ highlights benefit and confronts the mercenary suspicion against people in commerce.
A benemercer is not necessarily devoid of affection or benevolence, but he does not feel any lively benevolence toward the eventual owner of the coat. Still, a person may be both a benemercer and a benesociate. Suppose a friend both works at the woolen-coat factory, and hence is a benemercer, and gifts you money to buy a woolen coat, and hence is a benesociate with respect to that benefit. The overlap is much more common and pronounced within the workplace, if we think of your own honest income as the benefit in question. Your workmates are both benemercers and benesociates. Smith (TMS 224.15) wrote about the importance of habitual sympathy—affection—among coworkers (see also the fourth chapter here).
The final subset of benefiters are people who produce benefit for us but neither have any personal relationship with us and hence are not benesociates nor produce those benefits chiefly in their pursuit of honest income and hence are not benemercers. Consider our ancestors who are now deceased. We may feel grateful for the benefit of life, and that is a benefit they had a hand in producing. Love of life is one of the broadest and most basic of loves. Also, we may feel grateful for literary benefits produced by magnanimous souls such as Plato, Cicero, Shakespeare, and Adam Smith, as well as for institutional benefits produced by George Mason, George Washington, and James Madison. Another benefit they might provide is a model of living and understanding. Call this type of benefiter benemovers.
Thus, the set of benefiters consists of three subsets (which may sometimes overlap):
                    {Benefiters} = {benesociates} ∪ {benemercers} ∪ {benemovers}.

Before moving on, we clarify a couple of things. The first is about our definition of benefiter. We said a benefiter is one who is a benefit producer. We have noted that a benefiter may now be deceased, but not whether a benefiter is necessarily a human being. We now add that, yes, a benefiter is a human. Hence he or she is not a horse or a dog, although a genuine connection between souls and mutual sympathy can exist between a human and a horse or dog. Nor is the benefiter a fictional being such as Shrek, nor an ethereal deity. We define benefiter as a human.
Christians should regard Jesus as a benefiter. Further, it probably is not right to lump Jesus in with other benemovers. He is of His own category. Christians would add {Jesus} to the set-theoretic expression just shown.
Second, though we confine the set of beings counted as benefiter to human beings, we do not confine the set of other beings with whom you find and sustain love to human beings. We mentioned C.S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves; Lewis’s fourth—and highest—love is charity, which is a relationship between a human and God or a God-like being. A love may exist between you and a divine being, between you and an imaginary being, or, as it were, between you and a being with within you. Smith says people suffer from self-deceit (TMS 156–159), which implies a deceiver. If that being stopped deceiving us, maybe, instead, he would be a friend. We all know that our conscience sometimes nags us. Smith speaks often of the approval of “the man within” and teaches that approval corresponds to a sympathy (TMS 16–21). Habitual sympathy he calls affection (220.7), a kind of love.

Gratefulness and gratitude
We noted that love is about things. Thus, love consists in part in grateful feelings for benefits enjoyed. Finding and sustaining love consists in part in recurrently finding gratefulness.
Gratefulness is itself a good; there is abundant research showing that gratefulness improves the lives of those who feel grateful and of those around them (see the eleventh chapter here). Also, researchers and thinkers distinguish gratefulness from gratitude (ibid). Gratitude is a sentiment felt toward a benefactor, for benefits conferred. Gratitude prompts us to return benefit for benefit. It is the sentiment, Smith says (68.2), “which most immediately and directly prompts us to reward.” Gratefulness is a weaker concept; it implies only a thankful feeling for a benefit. We may say “I feel grateful for the warm sunshine,” without there being any particular benefactor to whom we direct gratitude or reward. Gratitude implies gratefulness, but gratefulness does not imply gratitude.
Smith pointed out conditions for someone’s being “a complete and proper object of gratitude”: the person “must be the cause of pleasure,” “must be capable of feeling those sensations,” and “must not only have produced those sensations, but… must have produced them from design, and from a design that is approved of” (TMS 96.6).
For our very distant ancestors who lived in small band, we can imagine how these features marked their social existence and how gratitude prompted mutual reward. Today, however, it is neither sensible nor practical to feel gratitude toward the “many thousands” benefiters behind the woolen coat. You pay the cashier and say thank you, without a thought to all of the benefiters. You do not know who they are, much less direct reward to them for a beneficence.
Our very distant ancestors tended, by our standards, to categorize others as either friend or foe. If one was not a friend, he was not from our group, our band, and posed danger—if only because he would regard you as a danger. It took centuries of civilization to add more neutral categories of neither friend nor foe, and to build a culture of maintaining good-will toward those who are not friends. The new categories would include benemercers who are not our benesociates. Smith says that “nature” has not “marked” the pursuit of honest income as anything “amiable,” Whereas it “is always generous and noble” to give any thing, without a reward… to barter one thing for another is mean” (LJ 527). Smith continues:
In rude ages this contempt rises to the highest pitch… In this country a small retailer is even in some degree odious at this day [1763]. When the trade of a merchant or mechanic was thus depreciated in the beginings of society, no wonder that it was confined to the lowest ranks of people… This mean and despicable idea which they had of merchants greatly obstructed the progress of commerce. (LJ 527)
Smith understood that gratitude is not an apt sentiment toward those who are, to us, mere benemercers. Unless they graduate individually to becoming a benesociate of ours, they, at most, could inspire gratefulness. And it would be well if the benefits to which they contribute do move the benefitter to feelings of gratefulness. Smith, as benemover, contributed to a cultural development to nurture such gratefulness.

Looking for love
C.S. Lewis calls affection, friendship, and eros “human loves” (pages 8–11); they are loves between human beings. To find and sustain the human loves, look to your benesociates.
In The Four Loves, Lewis says repeatedly that “the highest does not stand without the lowest” (4, 11, 13, 21, 114, 130). At the same time, he teaches that the lowest stands best with the highest. At the outset, we quoted Smith saying that man desires to be loved. Smith’s full sentence is: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love” (TMS 113.1). Smith teaches that proper corresponds to the sentiments of the impartial spectator in the highest sense of that term. Further, that that spectator has a “representative” in the conscience (TMS 215.11), which Smith calls “the man within the breast.” And further, that the only approach to loveliness is with that companion.
Alice Zhang is a third-year undergraduate student at George Mason University, majoring in economics. She serves as President of the GMU Economics Society. Alice is a fellow of the Adam Smith Program and the Mercatus Undergraduate Program at GMU Economics.
Daniel Klein is professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of Smithian Morals and Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism.

This essay is part of the AdamSmithWorks series Just Sentiments curated by Daniel B. Klein and Erik Matson. New essays will be published on the fourth Wednesday of most months. You can read more about the series in this Speaking of Smith post, "Just Sentiments- Welcome!". Klein and Matson lead the Adam Smith Program in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, in association with the Mercatus Center. In the program, they study big ideas in jurisprudence, politics, ethics, and economics as they were pursued during the original arc of liberalism, especially in the 18th century in Britain.