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Abstract In the last several years,some Western ethicists have been seeking for the theoretic meaning of Scottish Enlightenment from different aspects,especially the doctrines of″sympathy″ and″the spectator″promoted by those Scottish thinkers which enlighten the modern thinkers with their reconstruction of a theory of justice . Following Adam Smith's doctrines of spectator,Martha Nussbaum applied the imagination and sympathy in literary criticism to her construction of poetic justice . She proposed in her book that people should regard the imaginative and sympathetic poet as a judge of justice .Amatiya Sen also emphasized the significance of moral sentiments for justice in his book The Idea of Justice .The theory of justice based on passions and sentiments has gained approvals,but has also raised doubts about its″applicability″to the public life . In response to these doubts,the paper attempts to trace back to the theoretic origins of poetic justice,or in other words to the theories of moral sentiments in Scottish Enlightenment so as to analyze the principles of the theory of sentimental justice and its applicability to reality . There are two parts in this paper .The first is concerned with how David Hume and Adam Smith understood and used the notion of sympathy from the perspective of the theory of spectator . Hume regarded sympathy as a medium for the transfer of passions among mankind and analyzed the different interactions of passions while Smith believed that sympathy not only is a capability for human beings to communicate but also plays a role of approval or disapproval .Following the analysis of these two Scottish thinkers' doctrines of sympathy,the second part discusses their respective theories of economic,political and judicial justices .Hume linked justice to property and explained the emergence and the enforcement of justice upon people's sympathy for the interested passion,and illustrated how mankind performs justice in a political society .Smith more explicitly discussed economic and political justice in the historical context,and argued for the principles of justice,especially the principles of judicial justice based on the human nature and function of sympathy . It should be acknowledged that there are many differences between Hume's and Smith's sentimental doctrines based on 'their own systems,but it should also be acknowledged that there are many similarities and continuations between these two thinkers .It is these similarities and continuations to some extent that constitute a unified theory of sentimental justice in economic,political and judicial fields . There is a correspondence between this empirical sort of sentimental justice and the doctrines of sentiments in traditional Chinese ethics .Several years ago,Li Zehou,a very famous modern Chinese scholar,proposed emotion ontology,and conceived for the Chinese society a harmonized order with emotions as the base point .Compared with Li's broad philosophical framework,Hume's and Smith's theories of moral sentiments seem more concrete and practical,and are more compatible with China's situation . This paper introduces Hume's and Smith's reflections on economic,political and judicial justice by a textual analysis of their writings in order to show the probability of applying the theory of moral sentiments in China . That is why the author expects Chinese scholars and legislators to cast their eyes on the ideas in this paper .Limitation of space,however,prevents me from discussing the relationship between sentiments and the construction of societal orders,which is an equally important part of the theory of moral sentiments and is worthy of further discussion .
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