by Bart Schultz
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had attended the Sidgwick lectures that were posthumously published as
Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, H. Spencer, and J. Martineau, and
many of the more philosophical reviewers of the first edition of Principia,
such as Bernard Bosanquet, noted how deeply indebted he was to
Sidgwick’s work. Moore’s Principia in fact shared much of its philo-
sophical orientation with earlier work by Sidgwick and Hastings Rashdall
and with developing work by H. A. Prichard, David Ross, A. C. Ewing,
and Broad. In later years, Russell, at least, readily admitted how unfairly
Sidgwick had been treated during this dawning of “the Age of Reason,”
though his own noncognitivist approach to ethics scarcely served to re-
new interest in the Methods, however indebted to that work he may have
been.
Getting beyond the caricatures of Sidgwick floating through the first
half of the twentieth century has been no easy task. If few commentaries
on Sidgwick have quite succeeded in doing this, perhaps part of the reason
is that they have failed to grasp how, ironically enough, Sidgwick was so
profoundly important in shaping the Bloomsbury circle itself, or at least the
better, more philosophical parts of it, those reflecting its Apostolic origins.
This latter refers to more than the academic commonalities binding, say,
Moore, Broad, and Ross, or what Keynes acknowledged as “the foot”
Moore had in Sidgwick. It refers, more comprehensively, to the Apostolic
ethic, linked to the Victorian Platonic revival, of molding character for
the wholehearted, high-minded, disinterested fellowship committed to
the pursuit of truth via intimate conversation – a dialogical ethic that in
Sidgwick, as in Moore, often resulted in creative tensions with elements
of the utilitarian tradition, though the utilitarian tradition itself has often
been much too narrowly read on this score. Of the Bloomsberries, Leonard
Woolf, at least, recognized this:
I am writing today just over a century after the year in which Sidgwick was
elected an Apostle, and looking back to the year I can say that our beliefs,
our discussions, our intellectual behaviour in were in every conceivable way
exactly the same as those described by Sidgwick. The beliefs ‘fantastically idealistic and remote from reality and real life’, the absurd arguments, ‘the extravagantly
scholastic’ method were not as simple or silly as they seemed.
For Woolf, what became Bloomsbury was shaped by Strachey’s genera-
tion of Apostles, who were all given over to Moorism and “the purification
of that divinely cathartic question which echoed through the Cambridge
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Courts of my youth as it had , years before echoed through the
streets of Socratic Athens: ‘What do you mean by that?’ ” But Moore’s
Platonism was but another reflection of that Apostolic ethic by which
Sidgwick had been philosophically turned, the one he would carry into
innumerable discussion societies and friendships devoted to the deepest
problems. This was education with the personal touch, putting one’s life
on the line and challenging convention and the common wisdom – the
form of education Sidgwick valued most.
At any rate, had he lived another decade, Sidgwick would have viewed
Bloomsbury as but one more vanguard Apostolic experiment – albeit a
rather naive and apolitical one – testing the limits of the human potential
and the horizons of happiness through unorthodox art and unorthodox sex.
Moore, Russell, Strachey, Keynes, and Virginia Woolf may have mocked
their Victorian predecessors, but to a surprising degree, in their uncon-
ventional explorations of the potential of friendship and art for building
a post-Christian ethic, they simply realized some – by no means all – of
Sidgwick’s hopes for future generations.
Yet if Bloomsbury would have carried little shock value for Sidgwick,
it might have dismayed him in some respects. For Sidgwick had a more
encompassing intellectual vision – a wider, deeper, more troubled, and
ultimately more troubling vision of things to come. Oddly enough, to un-
derstand this more fully, it is necessary to challenge not only his detractors,
but also many of his admirers.
Admittedly, despite lingering Bloomsbury prejudice, Sidgwick is today
a much-prized member of the philosophical canon, perhaps more highly
regarded among Anglo-American philosophers than at any time since his
death. The second half of the twentieth century was considerably kinder
to his reputation than the first half, albeit in a somewhat blinkered way.
Consider Alan Donagan’s instructive exaggeration, expressing something
of the outlook during the late s:
Most of Sidgwick’s contemporary rivals, Herbert Spencer and James Martineau,
for example, have long been unread. And those who are still referred to – T. H.
Green, F. H. Bradley, perhaps Bernard Bosanquet now and then – may safely be
neglected by a young philosopher aspiring to contribute to the main current of
analytic moral philosophy. Nor need he expend much labor even on Sidgwick’s
predecessor and master, John Stuart Mill, or on his pupil and critic, G. E. Moore.
Yet he cannot, in the principate of Rawls, omit to address himself to The Methods of Ethics.
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Donagan’s estimation is, of course, a product of the Rawlsian revolu-
tion, sparked by John Rawls’s hugely influential work A Theory of Justice
() and, more recently, by Political Liberalism (). Rawls long in-
sisted on the importance of Sidgwick’s Methods both as a seminal model
of how to do moral theory in general and as a fundamental challenge to
his own particular theory of “justice as fairness.” According to Rawls,
classical utilitarianism was a profoundly important theory of enduring
relevance, and Sidgwick was the most philosophically profound and in-
sightful representative of it; more philosophically acute than Bentham or
James Mill and more consistent than John Stuart Mill, he went beyond all
of them in providing an impartial, scholarly defense of the view that indi-
vidual actions and social institutions ought ultimately to be judged by how
well they serve the greatest happiness. Not only did Sidgwick power-
fully articulate just what was involved in the classical utilitarian approach
to ethics, economics, and politics, but he did so by using a method that
avoided the dead ends of premature metaethics: careful, comprehensive,
historically informed comparisons of the best of the competing substantive
views about how to determine what one ought to do – that is, the differ-
ent ways of plausibly systematizing the core ethical concepts of right,
good, and virtue. Sidgwick’s exhaustive comparison of the “methods”
of utilitarianism, egoism, and commonsense or dogmatic intuitional
morality – seeking to reconcile these views or at least to clarify their
differences, while pointing up the weak spots even in his own favored
positions – was a far cry from Bentham’s thunderous denunciations of
natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” Sidgwick worked assiduously to
do justice to the alternative views, and he went well beyond Mill in show-
ing how utilitarianism could do justice to many of our commonsense moral
rules.
Such claims on Sidgwick’s behalf no doubt reflected Rawls’s own early
struggles to shake free of both the positivistic and Wittgensteinian hostility
to substantive “theory” in ethics and appeals to the history of philosophy.
Clearly, Rawls himself brilliantly succeeded in doing this, playing a central
role in what has been called the “Great Expansion” of substantive ethical
theorizing in recent decades, as well as in the revitalization of histori-
cal work by philosophers. Of course, one of his weighty allies in bolstering
the history of philosophy was J. B. Schneewind, whose brilliant book
Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy was by far the most
important twentieth-century commentary on Sidgwick. On the more
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analytical side, Derek Parfit’s extraordinary Reasons and Persons was
clearly a direct outgrowth of the renewed interest in Sidgwick’s work.
In certain respects, this book began life as an effort to come to terms
with the ways in which Sidgwick figured in the conflicting arguments of,
on the one side, such neo-Kantian philosophers as Rawls and Schneewind
and, on the other, such neo-utilitarian philosophers as Parfit. Of special
importance here has been the issue of just how to interpret Sidgwick’s
methodology and his views on the meaning and justification of moral
claims, his metaethics. Oddly, Sidgwick has been praised both for his
Rawlsian avoidance of metaethical worries and for doing substantive ethical
theory from a developed metaethical standpoint, the theory of knowl-
edge called “philosophical” or “rational” intuitionism (which he con-
trasted with William Whewell’s “dogmatic” intuitionist defense of the
self-evidence of commonsense moral rules).
However, this effort to reconcile the different readings of Sidgwick led
only to a warmer appreciation for Sidgwick’s original and very sophisti-
cated position, a complex, fallibilistic intuitionism that also finds a place
for coherence and consensus as criteria for reducing the probability of
error. His intuitionism dovetailed with his Apostolic, dialogical inquiry,
and he wielded it in a decidedly skeptical fashion, deploying it in ways
that, far from endorsing the ethical status quo, tended to undermine the
notion of certain ethical truth – though without lapsing into relativism
or subjectivism – and avoided most of the metaphysical and metaethical
entanglements usually associated with intuitionism.
Some suggestions along these lines have been made by James
Kloppenberg, in Uncertain Victory, but unfortunately his effort to link
Sidgwick to pragmatist and progressivist movements fails to capture the
tensions and shifts within Sidgwick’s epistemological trajectory, or to deal
with the particulars of the history of intuitionism. Sidgwick came to
have a vivid appreciation for the social nature of inquiry and the disap-
pointments of the philosophical “quest for certainty,” the quest for the
ultimate, final truth about the universe shared by Plato and Descartes,
but he learned the hard way. His Apostolic conscience remained highly
Platonic, however frustrated.
Furthermore, like the works of Rawls, Parfit, Schneewind, and others,
Kloppenberg’s account is silent on, among other things, all questions of
sexuality and race, questions so central to both the late Victorians and
Bloomsbury, and so relevant to matters epistemological. Despite various
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abstract concerns with the nature of the knowing self and personal identity,
recent authors concerned with Sidgwick have been largely oblivious to
these proto-Bloomsbury priorities of Sidgwick and his circle. Perversely,
the positive academic reception of Sidgwick’s work still reflects various
prejudicial Bloomsbury readings of him.
Indeed, curiously enough, Sidgwick’s Bloomsbury critics and analytical
admirers have all tended to be blinded by a too-narrow view of the classical
utilitarian backdrop to Sidgwick’s work. Utilitarianism has, of course,
come in for an extraordinary amount of criticism from a great many quar-
ters during the past century, much of it astonishingly dim. Even Rawls’s
generous acknowledgment of the significance of this tradition was part
of a sustained effort to demonstrate its inferiority to the theory of justice
as fairness. But all too often the historical reading of this tradition has
suffered from a too-hasty equation of it with classical and neoclassical
economic theory and practice, or with rational choice theory generally, or,
worse, some vision of purely administrative rationality.
Thus, in some disciplines, Bentham and his followers, the Philosophical
Radicals of the early nineteenth century, continue to go down in history
as the zealous champions of classical liberal reformism, the authors of
endless proclamations on behalf of institutions productive of the great-
est happiness of the greatest number. Panoptical prisons run by invisible
authorities, a market economy guided by an invisible hand, subterranean
sewers flushing away microscopic germs, a trim and efficient political and
legal system kept in line by an omnipresent public eye, and Lancastrian
schools drilling the scrutinizing conscience of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind
into ever-improving pupils – these were the means by which human-
ity would progress and flourish, find happiness as well as pursue it.
Facts, free markets, self-help, and clear law – yes; lawyers, politicians,
and priests – no, or at least in sharply limited numbers. Poets were also
dispensable, being mere purveyors of falsehood.
Hard facts to unmask
sinister interests – that was the war cry. The cultivation of one’s soul did
not signify.
But as both a philosophy and a fighting creed, utilitarianism was a wild,
conflicted current of history, figuring in everything from early women’s
liberation to the attempt to decriminalize same-sex behavior. The actual
history of utilitarianism was a strange affair, absorbing and assimilating
everything from the Platonic revival to Romanticism to Darwinism to
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parapsychology. It deserves to be reread from some different perspec-
tives, both positive and negative, that bring out the complexity of its
reformism and of the psychological analyses grounding its reformism.
After all, Bentham allowed that by
the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of their lives men
in general embrace this principle, without thinking of it: if not for the ordering
of their own actions, yet for the trying of their own actions, as well as of those of other men. . . . There are even few who have not taken some occasion or other to quarrel with it, either on account of their not understanding always how to apply
it, or on account of some prejudice or other which they were afraid to examine
into, or could not bear to part with. For such is the stuff that man is made of:
in principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all
human qualities is consistency.
The effort to show how ordinary practical reasoning is often inconsistent,
incoherent, or hypocritical, masking the true sources of the self, would
seem to be one that animated Mill and Sidgwick as well, even if they were
less iconoclastic than Bentham.
Of particular importance here is the way in which the utilitarian tra-
dition of Bentham and Mill was much more concerned with – and quite
radical about – matters of sex and gender than has typically been recog-
nized. Bentham produced, though he did not publish, the very first call
for the decriminalization of “paederasty” in the English language. And
his “Offenses Against One’s Self: Paederasty” was remarkably eloquent
in condemning the (often unconscious) “hatred of pleasure and horror of
