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has found with scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exactness and
precision. (CS –)
This careful statement, at once so sensitive to the complexities of large-
scale modern societies and so insistent on the Socratic virtues at work in
scientific practice and public debate, beautifully encapsulates Sidgwick’s
hopes for the direction of modern culture. The tone irresistibly recalls
Dewey’s claim that the “the traits of good method are straightforwardness,
flexible intellectual interest or open-minded will to learn, integrity of
purpose, and acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of one’s
activities including thought.” For Sidgwick, it is pointless for theologians
to dwell “on the imbecility of the inquisitive intellect” or “the inadequacy
of language to express profound mysteries” – for clearly, “the exceptional
protection that has been claimed for theological truth is a fatal privilege.”
It is a plain fact that “the divergence of religious beliefs, conscientiously
entertained by educated persons, is great, is increasing, and shows no
symptom of diminution.” The (highly Apostolic) question, then, is how
to feel that same security that we feel with respect to science in connection
with religious inquiry: namely, “that our teacher is declaring to us truth
precisely as it appears to him, without reserve or qualification.” And from
this, to ask: how are we to organize “religious instruction, and combine in
a common formula of worship?” (CS –)
Here, of course, we confront the specific problem of subscription, the
different grades of expected conformity, and so on, a problem made all the
more poignant by the demand for free and open inquiry. After all, Sidgwick
argues, consider the potentially excruciating position of an “intelligent and
promising young clergyman.” Suppose, in keeping with the standard of
modern inquiry, “we impress on him the need which the Church has
of a learned clergy; we bid him read, study, investigate; we encourage
him (as his better nature prompts him) to respect learning and sincerity
wherever he finds them, and to weigh arguments with the single desire to
be convinced of the truth.” But then, of course,
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we inform him, that if Truth should appear to him to lie anywhere below a certain
line drawn rather high up in the scale, honour and duty call upon him to withdraw
from his ministerial functions, resign the prospects of his career, uproot himself
from a position where he may feel that his means of exercising good are daily
growing, allow his acquired faculties of special work to become useless, and, amid
the distress of his friends and kindred, with his abandoned profession hanging
like a weight round his neck, endeavour, late in life, to learn some new work by
which he may live.
Even if such a person was quite thoroughly orthodox when ordained, how
could he be confident that further study would raise no doubts? Who
would go into the business on such conditions? As Sidgwick pointedly
remarks, “No one will venture to be ordained except those who are too
fanatical or too stupid to doubt that they will always believe exactly what
they believed at twenty-three” (CS –). And how much good will they
do the church or, for that matter, society? How can education be translated
into an ongoing process of educating?
Here lies the more specific difficulty that especially troubles Sidgwick:
what is
the duty which the persons who form the progressive – or, to use a neutral term, the
deviating – element in a religious community owe to the rest of that community;
the extent to which, and the manner in which, they ought to give expression
and effect to their opinions within the community; and the point at which the
higher interests of truth force them to the disruption of old ties and cherished
associations. (CS )
How, given his sympathetic portrayal of the plight of the intelligent
young clergyman, could Sidgwick take such a rigorist line concerning
the evils of hypocrisy and the degradation of popular religious and moral
feeling? After all, he had insisted that even those in his own position, those
taking definite religious oaths, ought to resign rather than serve under such
conditions. Would not the same standard, or an even more stringent one,
apply to the actual teachers of religion?
The firm Cloughian was clear that it did, hard as such self-sacrifice
was to live with. His main point is that it is damaging in the extreme to
pretend that the clergy should maintain an esoteric standard, different
from the common understandings, that would leave them open to the
charge of “solemn imposture.” Thus, “we look to the clergy to maintain
the standard of, at any rate, the peaceful virtues; and . . . it is a serious
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blow to the spiritual interests of the country, that any considerable and
respectable section of them should be charged with habitual unveracity
and be unable to refute the charge.” Admittedly, given the state of society,
it would be painful to always insist on such veracity, but the solution is to
proceed “by openly relaxing the engagements, not by secretly tampering
with their obligation” – and it is essential to do this openly, since no one will
“take a strong interest in grievances by which no one will declare himself
aggrieved.” (CS , ) Still, the clergy must meet a higher standard than
the laity. Consider again the problem of the Virgin Birth:
A man may certainly be a sincere Christian in the strictest sense – that is, he
may believe that Jesus was God – without holding this belief. Many persons
now take an intermediate view of miracles between accepting and rejecting them
en bloc. They hold that miracles may occur, and that some recorded in the Gospels undoubtedly did occur; but that also legends may have been mixed up with the
evangelical narrations, and that some probably have been. A man who holds this
general view is very likely to reject the miraculous conception of Jesus. . . . Now,
to him, this rejection may appear of no religious importance; it may even seem
to him unreasonable that men should make their view of Christ’s character and
function to depend upon the nature of his conception. Still, to the majority of
Christians, the belief is so important – the gulf that divides those who hold it from those who reject it seems so great, that the confidence of a congregation in the
veracity of their minister would be entirely ruined, if he avowed his disbelief in
this doctrine and still continued to recite the Creed. And it seems to me, that a
man who acts thus, can only justify himself by proving the most grave and urgent
social necessity for his conduct. (CS )
Clearly, this is what Sidgwick had in mind by way of the dangerous
degradation of moral and religious feeling that lax subscription fostered –
even the lax subscription of someone such as himself, a mere taker of
definite oaths. In fact, even as regards the laity, he goes so far as to suggest
that it is important to strive to approximate the ideal of a national ministry
and form of genuine worship, and that the only way this could possibly
be accomplished is through “the frank and firm avowal, on all proper
occasions, on the part of the laity, of all serious and deliberate doctrinal
disagreement with any portion of the service” (CS –). This, however,
seems to have been a standard from which he exempted himself, as we
shall see in due course.
One might forgive Sidgwick for worrying, as he did, that the calculation
of consequences that he carried out in the case of subscription was indeed
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rather “shadowy.” (As it would transpire, the vast uncertainty attending
such calculations would be another major theme of the Methods, much to
Sidgwick’s chagrin.) But in a famous article, “Sidgwick and Whewellian
Intuitionism: Some Dilemmas,” Alan Donagan went so far as to deny
that Sidgwick’s words and deeds were at all genuinely utilitarian, or even
effective on behalf of his cause. Thus,
In none of these transactions is there the slightest breath of utilitarianism. In The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription, Sidgwick closely followed Whewell’s application of the nonutilitarian principle of truth. And, to judge by the reasons he gave in his correspondence, he likewise acted on Whewellian grounds in resigning his
fellowship. Both in acting, and in defending his action, utilitarian considerations
appear to have entered his mind only to be dismissed. Yet of none of this are there
any traces in The Methods of Ethics.
Donagan was himself a true Whewellian, and one is tempted to say that
that may help to explain why he was wrong on all counts. Sidgwick himself
was quite clear, in writing to Mill, that he wanted to solve the problem
of subscription in a utilitarian way, and if one misses the way in which
his solution is in keeping with his utilitarianism, that may be because
one is working with an inadequate notion of utilitarianism – as, it seems,
was Donagan. For as Schneewind has explained, Sidgwick’s pamphlet
anticipates his later views in several ways. First, he “insists on answering
questions about practice in terms of realistic appraisals of the facts and the
probabilities. He does not sketch an ideal church or an ideal society and
ask how we can obtain guidance from considering it.” Second, he “fails to
find any clear common-sense maxims which both relate specifically to the
ethical issue concerning him and direct us to a definite solution to it. There
is a duty of veracity; there are duties of fidelity to one’s chosen church; but
there is no principle of similar scope which tells us what to do when these
two sets of duties conflict.” And finally, the “difficulties are resolved, in
each case, by an appeal to what is expedient or useful or least harmful –
by an appeal, in short, to some form of the utilitarian principle.”
This seems right. Schneewind is of course happy to concede – indeed,
even to argue at length – that Sidgwick learned a tremendous amount from
Whewell, who was the master of Trinity when Sidgwick arrived there, and
whose work on moral philosophy was – much to Sidgwick’s dismay – part
of the established curriculum. But the dual conviction that all “our rules
are imperfect” and that even so “we must not discard the props which
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we have in our conceptions . . . of Truth, Justice &c.” had been, through the sixties, as close to a constant as Sidgwick could muster. Sidgwick
would have been the first to agree that the calculation of consequences in
cases such as this is a very hard thing to carry off with any plausibility;
but, as with Mill, he would have denied that there was any real alterna-
tive to trying, or that Whewell himself had effectively circumvented the
problem.
However, these are arguments that quickly lead to the heart of
Sidgwick’s ethical theory, and they are better considered in connection
with the Methods, the subject of the following chapter. At this juncture,
the foregoing sketch of the common ground between Sidgwick’s pamphlet
and his magnum opus should be sufficient to suggest how he could have
worked out the lines of the latter in connection with the problem posed
in the former. Those who doubt the connection between these works, or
the utilitarian nature of that connection, ought to be given some pause by
the fact that Mill himself weighed in on Sidgwick’s side, and this even
though he was well known for advising dissenting young clergymen to
reform the church from within, rather than leaving it in the hands of the
more reactionary elements. Although Sidgwick expressed a certain dis-
appointment with Mill’s response to his pamphlet, apparently thinking it
a little too perfunctory in light of his great crisis, the truth is that Mill
was warmly appreciative of Sidgwick’s efforts, even giving him a bit of
sage advice that tacitly suggested considerable confidence in Sidgwick’s
utilitarian potential:
What ought to be the exceptions (for that there ought to be some, however few,
exceptions seems to be admitted) to the general duty of truth? This large question
has never yet been treated in a way at once rational and comprehensive, partly
because people have been afraid to meddle with it, and partly because mankind
have never yet generally admitted that the effect which actions tend to produce on
human happiness is what constitutes them right or wrong. I would suggest that
you should turn your thoughts to this more comprehensive subject.
This Sidgwick did, and the result was The Methods of Ethics and what
would turn out to be a lifelong engagement with matters of hypocrisy and
integrity. The destiny that awaited him was an eternal struggle with the
problems of this turbulent decade: self-cultivation versus self-sacrifice,
skepticism versus belief, sympathetic unity versus conflictual difference,
and the private versus the public.
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Before moving on to the Methods, however, mention should be made of
a few other consequences that flowed from the Cloughian act of Sidgwick’s
utilitarian conscience. Against Donagan, it must be said that there are ex-
cellent reasons for sharing the view of so many of Sidgwick’s peers – that
his resignation, the action of a high-minded man of spotless reputation and
academic credentials, did have an important effect in speeding the aboli-
tion of the educational tests. Donagan too hastily follows the somewhat
dismissive account in Winstanley’s Later Victorian Cambridge, suggesting
that, as Sidgwick himself insisted, change was already very much in the
air and the elimination of the tests inevitable. But what Sidgwick’s more
knowing champions appear to have recognized was that Sidgwick’s act had
a disproportionate impact on Prime Minister Gladstone, who, although
he had already unsuccessfully opposed the tests, would have been given
a considerable boost in his efforts by Sidgwick’s example. Gladstone had
for some time held Sidgwick in very high esteem.
Another, somewhat personalized consequence of Sidgwick’s resigna-
tion is recorded in the Memoir:
Sidgwick threw himself heartily into the establishment by the University of an
examination for women. The examination was first held in the summer of ,
and he was one of the examiners. The establishment of this examination was
an outcome of the active movement going on at the time in different parts of
the country for providing women with improved educational opportunities –
a movement the crying need for which was emphasised by the report of the
Schools Inquiry Commission in , and the very unsatisfactory state of girls’
and women’s education therein revealed. The demand was not for examination
only, and schemes for instruction by course of lectures and classes were being
tried in various places. Sidgwick had had his thoughts turned in a general way to
the subject of the education of women by the writings of J. S. Mill, and doubtless
also by F. D. Maurice, whose interest in it is well known, and who was . . . at this
time Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. But his taking it up actively