 Propriety and impropriety are based on a bilateral relation, between spectator and agent. Smith attends also to a trilateral relation, between a spectator, an agent who acts on someone, and the person who is acted on, the ‘recipient’ of the act. There are several kinds of response that the recipient may make to the agent’s act, and Smith focuses on two, gratitude and resentment. If the spectator judges the recipient’s gratitude proper or appropriate then he approves of the agent’s act and judges it meritorious, or worthy of reward. If he judges the recipient’s resentment proper or appropriate then he disapproves of the agent’s act and judges it demeritorious, or worthy of punishment. Judgments of merit or demerit concerning a person’s act are therefore made on the basis of an antecedent judgment concerning the propriety or impropriety of another person’s reaction to that act. Sympathy underlies all these judgments, for in the cases just mentioned the spectator sympathises with the recipient’s gratitude and with his resentment. He has direct sympathy with the affections and motives of the agent and indirect sympathy with the recipient’s gratitude; or in judging the agent’s behaviour improper the spectator has indirect sympathy with the agent’s resentment (Smith 1790, p. 74).