by Bart Schultz
singularity.” In this, he sounded the note of toleration for difference more
often associated with the younger Mill, though Mill could scarcely have
written the line “It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be
sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined
that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and
that it is unnatural to scratch with any other.” As Louis Crompton has
demonstrated,
Bentham made himself the spokesman of a silent and invisible minority. First, he
rejects the silence taboo. ‘It seems rather too much,’ he remarks with dry irony, ‘to subscribe to men’s being hanged to save the indecency of enquiring whether they
deserve it.’ Then . . . he pleads from a more rational mode of debate, which would
scrutinize the purported social evils of forbidden sexual conduct rather than give
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rise to fervid rhetoric. . . . But, most of all, he insists that we should establish that an act really does cause social harm before we criminalize it.
Although John Stuart Mill did not apply his eloquence to this particular
Benthamite cause, he did of course advance the cause of feminism in ways
that were also concerned with countering the psychology of bigotry and
the unconscious hatred of pleasure, recognizing that legal reform was only
one element of reform. As Mary Lyndon Shanley has suggested:
Mill’s plea for an end to the subjection of women was not made, as critics such as
Gertrude Himmelfarb assert, in the name of “the absolute nature of the principle
of liberty, the exaltation of individuality whatever its particular form,” but in the name of the need of both men and women for community. . . . The Subjection of
Women was an eloquent brief for men and women and a devastating critique of the corruption of marital inequality. Beyond that it also expressed Mill’s profoundly
held belief that any “liberal” regime must promote the conditions under which
friendship, not only in marriage but in other associations as well, will take root
and flourish.
As Mill famously put it, when
each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are
attached to one another, and are not too much unlike to begin with; the constant
partaking in the same things, assisted by their sympathy, draws out the latent
capacities of each for being interested in the things which were at first interesting only to the other; and works a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters
to one another, partly by the insensible modifications of each, but more by a real
enriching of the two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the other
in addition to its own.
This, he observes, often happens “between two friends of the same sex, who
are much associated in daily life,” and it would be common in marriage, did
not the lopsided socialization process render it “next to an impossibility
to form a really well-assorted union.” No reform was more urgent than
that of rendering the family a school of sympathy rather than a school of
despotism. The capacity for authentic friendship was a core element of
the happiness to be maximized.
To be sure, Mill famously distanced himself from his Benthamite in-
heritance, proclaiming it “one-eyed” and insufficiently sensitive to the
internal culture of the individual, the feeling and caring side highlighted
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by the Romantic movement, which could and should be stimulated by
poetry and art. Wendy Donner has urged that
Mill’s utilitarian commitments require him to maintain that feelings are pivotal to
morality and that if we are to take pleasure in intellectual pursuits or in the good
of others we must be persons who feel deeply, who are in touch with our emotions,
and who are motivated by our concern for others. Cultivation of sympathy with
others is the foundation of moral development, and two widely held tenets of
feminism – a stress on the importance of feelings and of sympathetic attachments
to others – flow from this.
Indeed, Mill’s politics of friendship, which also reflected his debt to the
Platonic revival during the Victorian era, also put him at odds with the ear-
lier Benthamite views about laissez-faire. Mill and Harriet Taylor grew
increasingly committed to exploring decentralized socialist alternatives
to capitalism, forms of economic organization less hostile to the cultiva-
tion of sympathy and civic friendship. Happiness, for them, was not a
known quantity but something the frontiers of which needed to be ex-
plored through practical social experiments testing the human potential –
“experiments in living.”
Thus, it is astonishing how often the earlier, secular utilitarian tradition
was in fact busily engaging the very concerns that Keynes and Strachey
(not to mention Russell and Moore) thought it had entirely neglected:
the exploration of states of consciousness (or higher pleasures) defining
ultimate good, the cultivation of these and the sympathetic self through
friendship (and art), the perversities of the social intolerance of heterodox
sexual relations, hetero- and homo-, and, indeed, the challenges posed by
the unconscious roots of motivation. For both Bentham and Mill, the
deeper appeal of utilitarianism, and the deeper forms of resistance to it,
worked themselves out below the level of the conscious calculating ego.
And the cause of Greek love had been better served by Bentham than by
Byron and Shelley, and it would be better served still by Sidgwick and
his friends, for whom friendship, in many different varieties, was both a
crucial element of the happiness to be aimed at and a vital aspect of the
inquiries needed to explore the human potential for happiness.
At any rate, the hidden history of utilitarianism – especially in relation
to and in contrast with visions of human nature as basically (and narrowly)
self-interested or egoistic – forms another broad theme of this book, for
Sidgwick’s contributions on this matter are of singular importance. To
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be sure, Sidgwick was rather uncannily in line with many of the more
compelling features of Mill’s moral and social philosophy, and it is useful
to read him as carrying on that eclectic legacy (even more useful than to
link him, as Rawls does, to the more
purely hedonistic Benthamite one).
On a great raft of issues, he picked up where Mill – the real Mill – left
off. Thus, Mill reworked utilitarianism: to reconcile it somewhat with
commonsense moral rules and traditions; to recognize the complexity
of individual psychology and the force of Romantic notions of human
emotions, character, and happiness; to appraise the potential utility of
religious belief; to explore the possibilities for some form of socialism
(ethical if not economic); to make it a force for the liberation of women and
the vitality and progress of a truly open society; and even (very tentatively,
and despite his antipathy to Whewell) to suggest grounding it on intuition.
On all of these counts and others, Sidgwick took his point of departure
from Mill, the Mill who was at once a great liberal, a great reformer, a
great socialist, and a great utilitarian. And behind the particular concerns,
there was always the overriding obsession with the growth of “sympathy,”
of “friendship,” so crucial for the future post-Christian era, so crucial
for experiments in living. Sidgwick’s feminism, evident in the work for
women’s higher education that he undertook in collaboration with his
wife, Eleanor, effectively continued the efforts of Mill and Taylor. And
this sheds further light on the continuity of their conceptions of reform
and social equality, culture and civilization.
Thus, if Sidgwick was a type of utilitarian, he was one who reflected the
real complexity of that tradition rather than the stock view of it, so much
so that later opponents of utilitarianism often look mild in comparison.
As his friend James Bryce remarked:
Sidgwick’s attitude toward the Benthamite system of Utilitarianism illustrates the
cautiously discriminative habit of mind I have sought to describe. If he had been
required to call himself by any name, he would not have refused that of Utilitarian,
just as in mental philosophy he leaned to the type of thought represented by the two
Mills rather than to the Kantian idealism of his friend and school contemporary,
the Oxford professor T. H. Green. But the system of Utility takes in his hands
a form so much more refined and delicate than was given to it by Bentham and
James Mill, and is expounded with so many qualifications unknown to them, that
it has become a very different thing, and is scarcely, if at all, assailable by the
arguments which moralists of the idealistic type have brought against the older
doctrine.
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Indeed, in seeking to ground the “Great Hap” principle on an intu-
itionist epistemology more often associated with the critics of utilitarian-
ism (such as Whewell), Sidgwick, as Moore admitted, remained quite free
of any taint of the “naturalistic fallacy” that supposedly undercut Mill’s
justificatory efforts. Moreover, Sidgwick sought to appropriate Kantian
universalizability for his own purposes, and if he criticized idealism at
length, he also brought out many of the problems involved in trying to de-
fend utilitarianism against commonsense and other objections, clarifying
such matters as the difference between total and average utility calcula-
tions, in connection with the question of optimal population growth. Most
important, however, Sidgwick did not think that utilitarianism could be
reconciled with egoism or self-interest; without a theistic postulate that the
universe has a friendly moral order, there was ever the potential for a basic
conflict between acting for one’s own greatest happiness and acting for
the greatest happiness of all, each option presenting itself as what one has
most reason to do. The gloomy last line of the first edition of the Methods
rang out like an English version of the “crisis of the Enlightenment,”
warning that practical reason might be reduced to a “chaos.”
This was the infamous “dualism of practical reason,” and the attempt
to get beyond it – to effect some form of “harmonization” – was for
Sidgwick another element of the deepest problems of human life, one that
arose with special urgency with the decline of orthodox religion. He had
none of that Humean insouciance that could take up skepticism toward
such matters as the coincidence of duty and interest – or the worth of the-
istic claims – with imperturbible good cheer. Sidgwick could not bear the
thought of a universe so fundamentally perverse as to allow that the wages
of virtue might “be dust,” and he endlessly explored every possible means
of harmonization, including the perfectionist path of achieving reconcil-
iation via cultivation of the self. In this, he was also more sophisticated
than his predecessors on the problems involved in defining happiness,
the limitations of construing it in terms of pleasure or desirable con-
sciousness, and the uncertainties involved in seeking to maximize it. With
him, Benthamite clarity had an extremely ironic denouement, highlight-
ing the vast realm of the incalculable in human affairs, how much had to be
left to uncertain judgment, and how deeply problematic egoistic reasons
could be.
Clearly, as much as Sidgwick was obsessed with egoism, he had noth-
ing like the confidence of past or present libertarians in the ability of
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markets and governmental institutions to mobilize self-interest to further
the general happiness. A society cannot long hold together with such weak
cement, and in society as it stood, egoistic concern was too apt to take a
narrow and singularly self-defeating form. Indeed, Sidgwick thought that
it was crucial to foster, among other things, the “spirit of justice,” and “to
develop the elements from which the moral habit of justice springs – on
the one hand, sympathy, and the readiness to imagine oneself in another’s
place and look at things from his point of view; and on the other hand,
the intelligent apprehension of common interests” (PE ). And when
it came to praising attempts to build more cooperative, beneficent social
relations, in which work is its own reward or done for the sake of the
community, he could sound like his mentor Mill on socialism.
But Sidgwick carried these concerns to new limits, places the older
utilitarians had never envisioned. Fretful about the viability of traditional
religious belief, and about the conclusiveness of the reasons for acting to
advance the greatest happiness, he was intensely interested in the possi-
bility that psychical research might provide some new evidence for the
moral order of the universe, for the
reality of the afterlife. Thus, the ag-
gressive secular utilitarianism of Bentham, who was morbidly afraid of
ghosts, eventually produced the eclectic utilitarianism of Sidgwick, who
chased ghosts with a passion, convinced that they might reveal to him the
“secret of the Universe.”
Moreover, Sidgwick’s explorations of the Other World were inextricably
linked to his explorations of the Inner World, the world of depth psychol-
ogy that Freud would shortly be entering, partly courtesy of Sidgwick’s
Society for Psychical Research. In his dealings with psychics and mediums,
or with ordinary people who had had extraordinary experiences, he was
exposed to the vast range of unconscious mental processes: trance states,
premonitions, hallucinations, dreams, visions, channelling, split and mul-
tiple personalities. This was unlike anything Mill had ever dealt with, in
his efforts to marry utilitarianism to Romantic celebrations of individual
genius and powerful emotion. If Mill had called for a new science of indi-
vidual psychology – ethology – Sidgwick answered the call by delving into
depth psychology and parapsychology, playing a key role in what has mis-
leadingly been called the “discovery of the unconscious.” Studied religious
introspection, the Platonic revival, Romantic self-expression, Apostolic
friendship, parapsychology, and the utilitarian investigation of the nature
of pleasure all ended up pushing Sidgwick in the same direction – to
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make of himself an experiment in living, to test the limits defining his
“true self,” when the true self was turning out to be difficult to decipher.
Should psychical research fail to provide evidence for the afterlife, much
would depend on how far sentiment could be reshaped to foster sympathy
without such foundations.
What is more, this search for the truth about self-identity was of-
ten tied to questions of sexual identity. It is a remarkable and revealing
fact that nearly all of Sidgwick’s closest friends were champions of male
love: H. G. Dakyns, Roden Noel, Oscar Browning, F. W. Myers, Arthur
