by Bart Schultz
Consensus versus Chaos
The dualism of practical reason aside, this orientation, which does
appear to resonate happily with recent formulations of “the normative
problem” that dogs anyone who reflects and acts, did not strike many of
Sidgwick’s contemporaries as obviously utilitarian. It was a very exas-
perated F. H. Hayward who complained that Sidgwick’s disciple E. E.
Constance Jones took all of Sidgwick’s departures from utilitarianism as
just so much common sense:
Sidgwick’s identification of “Right” with “Reasonable” and “Objective”; his view
of Rightness as an “ultimate and unanalysable notion” (however connected subse-
quently with Hedonism); and his admission that Reason is, in a sense, a motive to
the will, are due to the more or less “unconscious” influence of Kant. Miss Jones
appears to think that these are the common-places of every ethical system, and
that real divergences only arise when we make the next step in advance. I should
rather regard this Rationalistic terminology as somewhat foreign to Hedonism.
I do not think that Miss Jones will find, in Sidgwick’s Hedonistic predecessors,
any such emphasis on Reason (however interpreted).
For Hayward, the point was “not that Sidgwick should be classified as this
or that, but that it is extremely difficult to classify him at all.”
Plainly, Sidgwick does reject the empiricism, psychological egoism, and
reductionism of much of the earlier tradition, qualities especially evident in
the works of Bentham and James Mill, at least as commonly understood.
This comes through quite powerfully very early on – indeed, in the first
book, where, for example, he explains that
Experience can at most tell us that all men always do seek pleasure as their ultimate end. . . . it cannot tell us that any ought so to seek it. If this latter proposition is legitimately affirmed in respect either of private or of general happiness, it must
either be immediately known to be true, – and therefore, we may say, a moral
intution – or be inferred ultimately from premises which include at least one such
moral intuition. (ME )
However, as we shall see, Sidgwick does not prejudge the ultimate validity
of a proposition when he labels it an “intuition” – this is part of a complex,
multicriterial epistemological strategy.
Sidgwick maintains that the basic concept of morality – something
so fundamental that it is common to the terms “ought” and “right” – is
unique and irreducible. Morality, in short, is sui generis; in this Sidgwick
is as insistent as any twentieth-century critic of the so-called naturalistic
fallacy – most famously, his own student G. E. Moore, who at least did
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not include Sidgwick in the company of those who would reduce “ought”
to “is.” He is, to resort to a recent idiom, profoundly convinced of the
basic normativity of ethical judgments, how they concern what one should
do or seek, rather than simply some set of facts about the world or about
our feelings. Moral reasons are, after all, moral, not something that can
be translated away into, say, wholly naturalistic factors. But they are also
reasons – that is, prescribed or dictated by reason – and thus the kind
of thing that can be contradicted, or supported by argument. Indeed,
moral approbation is “inseparably bound up with the conviction, implicit
or explicit, that the conduct approved is ‘really’ right – that is, that it
cannot, without error, be disapproved by any other mind.” Furthermore,
the dictates of moral reason are “accompanied by a certain impulse to
do the acts recognized as right,” though Sidgwick recognizes that other
impulses may conflict with this one. (ME )
Given such remarks as this last, most have read Sidgwick as at least a
type of “internalist,” such that, in David Brink’s words, it “is not possible
to think that a method of ethics is true and still ask whether there is reason
to be moral, for the true method of ethics just states what it is ultimately
reasonable to do.” An externalist would deny any such internal or con-
ceptual connection between morality and rationality. Brink has suggested
some reasons for thinking of Sidgwick as sometimes vacillating between in-
ternalism and externalism, though his interpretation is admittedly more
of a philosophical reconstruction and might also require a too-narrow
construction of Sidgwick’s epistemology, as will be explained. At the
least, it would be hard to blink Sidgwick’s regular assertions that to have
a moral reason is to have at least some degree of motivation to behave
accordingly.
Sidgwick does deny, however, that the question of free will has the
importance that some, notably Kant, have attributed to it in connection
with this question of acting morally. It is, he holds, usually impossible
in practical deliberation to regard the mere absence of adequate motive
as “a reason for not doing what I otherwise judge to be reasonable,” and
this suggests the general irrelevance of the topic of free will to much that
passes under the rubric of ethics, with the possible exception of questions of
responsibility and punishment. Determinism might well be true, but that
would make little difference to the way most people set about determining
what they ought to do, especially since the truth of determinism would not,
according to Sidgwick, help the case for psychological hedonism or other
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Consensus versus Chaos
such controversial doctrines. At best, or worst, it might undermine purely
retributive views of punishment, but no utilitarian, at least, should be much
upset about that, since purely retributive views are better undermined,
given their celebration of useless suffering, suffering with no deterrence
value.
This rough handling of such long-standing topics as the nature of the
moral faculty and the reality of free will is characteristic of Sidgwick’s
treatment of a number of other matters as well. Much of the controversy
provoked by the Methods actually stems from the way in which Sidgwick’s
policy is to just steer clear of the metaphysical and psychological entangle-
ments that such venerable topics carry with them. Oddly, in this respect,
the argument of the Methods is conducted at arm’s length from some of
both Mill’s and Sidgwick’s basic intellectual commitments; for just as Mill
took psychological investigation to be central to any work on the founda-
tions of ethics, so too Sidgwick took his investigations into parapsychology
and intuitive thei
sm – investigations that were admittedly often of a highly
personal nature, a kind of self-analysis – to be part and parcel of his re-
search into ethics. What he apparently sought to do in the Methods was to
see just what ethics might bring to this research from its own resources,
independently of other disciplines and other areas of philosophy.
Although one could read Sidgwick’s general avoidance of metaphysical
issues in the Methods as a form of proto-Rawlsian independent moral
theory, such that ethics is treated as a discipline with its own distinctive
problems and methods rather than as derived from or grounded upon more
fundamental areas of philosophy, the danger of anachronism in any such
reading is very great. Sidgwick did practice a certain limited form of the
so-called method of avoidance, but as Schneewind has argued at length,
in his Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, his purpose is
most plausibly reconstructed in terms of the religious concerns of such
figures as Whewell, Grote, and Maurice – that is, as an effort to test their
common claim that the moral realm provided independent grounds for
religious belief of some sort. Of course, as already suggested, Sidgwick
himself did not end up believing that he had vindicated any such vision of
a morally well-ordered world, which points up the need to reconsider just
what alternatives he had in mind, by way of metaphysical commitments,
and just where he might have been a little hasty or question-begging in
his treatment of the views he was testing. After all, belief in free will is a
common feature of the religious philosophies he was addressing.
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Whether he also moves rather too quickly on certain ethical theoretical
issues – for example, in reducing the number of methods to three (confus-
ingly linking perfectionism to dogmatic intuitionism) and in collapsing
egoism and utilitarianism into variants of hedonism – is a matter that
has worried even those sympathetic to his commitment to independent
ethical theory (and of course, Sidgwick himself ). The remainder of this
section will analyze in more detail some of the ways in which Sidgwick’s
constructions of the “right” and the “good” shape his formulation of the
various methods and thus complement the famous arguments about the
relations between the methods, described in the following two sections.
Here it is particularly important to bring out the themes of the final chap-
ter of Book I and the final chapter of Book III, which in all editions served
as Sidgwick’s main engagements with the question of how to understand
“ultimate good.” Also important, however, is the recognition that to sur-
vey the Methods from this perspective is (quite often, anyway) to survey the claims that Sidgwick found most debatable, the arguments that he allowed
were “indirect” and less than fully compelling – in the ever-increasing
realm of the “incalculable.”
The themes discussed here, which often seem to involve indirect ar-
guments about indirect strategies for achieving happiness, will reemerge
in later sections, after Sidgwick’s more direct epistemological claims are
considered. Hopefully, the recapitulation at that point will clear up some
of the obscurities of this preliminary treatment.
Now, again, the delineation of the three methods and their relations
to such things as happiness is a crucial and controversial bit of agenda
setting on Sidgwick’s part. Much of this work is done in conjunction with
his highly convoluted analysis of the “attractive” notions of “good” and
“ultimate good,” as contrasted with the “imperative” notions of what it
is “right” to do or what one “ought” to do. The general contrast between
the (characteristically ancient) concern with the ultimate, highest good or
summum bonum – that which is good finally and in itself rather than as
a means to something else – and the (characteristically modern) concern
with what is right – the imperatives of duty concerning what one ought
or ought not to do – is of course a fixture of much historically aware moral
theory, as Sidgwick very well realized. In a wide range of writings, he
made reference to the distinctive “quasi-jural” nature of modern moral
thought, running from Grotius and Pufendorf down to the present, though
with some distant antecedents in the Stoics. This was obviously a general
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orientation that he shared, what with his focus on the fundamental moral
notion at play in such terms as “ought” and “right.”
On Sidgwick’s analysis of the “Right and the Good,” judgments of
ultimate good differ from judgments of right mainly in that they do not
involve definite precepts to act or the assumption that we are capable of
acting accordingly; they leave it open “whether this particular kind of good
is the greatest good that we can under the circumstances obtain,” whereas
a judgment that one “ought” to do such and such implies that one can do
such and such. That is, in “the recognition of conduct as ‘right’ is involved
an authoritative prescription to do it: but when we have judged conduct
to be good, it is not yet clear that we ought to prefer this kind of good to
all other good things: some standard for estimating the relative values of
different ‘goods’ has still to be sought” (ME ). Furthermore, “good
or excellent actions are not implied to be in our power in the same strict
sense as ‘right’ actions – any more than any other good things: and in fact
there are many excellences of behaviour which we cannot attain by any
effort of will, at least directly and at the moment” (ME ).
It would appear that on Sidgwick’s line of argument, with its determined
effort to avoid the naturalistic confusions of Mill’s seeming equation of
“what is good” with “what is desired,” the notion of “good” is tied not
to the merely desired, but to that which is desirable – or better, to what
one ought to desire or generally seek to promote. There has been some
controversy over this because some of his remarks on the subject could
be construed as defending a naturalistic “full-information” view of the
“good” to the effect that the good is simply what one would desire if
one actually had all relevant information available to one and so on.
Thus, his discussion takes its point of departure from Hobbes’s view that
one calls good whatever is the object of one’s desires, and by successive
qualifications and refinements reaches the position that
Indeed,
we commonly reckon it among the worst consequences of some kinds of
conduct that they alter men’s tendencies to desire, and make them desire their
lesser good more than their greater: and we think it all the worse for a man – even
in this world – if he is never roused out of such a condition and lives till death
the life of a contented pig, when he might have been something better. To avoid
this objection, it would have to be said that a man’s future good on the whole is
what he would now desire and seek on the whole if all the consequences of all the
different lines of conduct open to him were accurately foreseen and adequately
realised in the imagination at the present point of time.
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This hypothetical composition of impulsive forces involves so elaborate and
complex a conception, that it is somewhat paradoxical to say that this is what
we commonly mean when we talk of a man’s ‘good on the whole.’ Still, I cannot deny that this hypothetical object of a resultant desire supplies an intelligible
and admissible interpretation of the terms ‘good’ (substantive) and ‘desirable,’ as
giving philosophical precision to the vaguer meaning with which they are used in
ordinary discourse: and it would seem that a calm comprehensive desire for ‘good’
conceived somewhat in this way, though more vaguely, is normally produced by
intellectual comparison and experience in a reflective mind. The notion of ‘Good’
thus attained has an ideal element: it is something that is not always actually desired and aimed at by human beings: but the ideal element is entirely interpretable in
terms of fact, actual or hypothetical, and does not introduce any judgment of value, fundamentally distinct from judgments relating to existence; – still less any
‘dictate of Reason.’ (ME –)
This sounds naturalistic, so much so that Tom Baldwin could even
suggest that it is “not so clear why Moore exempted Sidgwick from the
charge of committing the Naturalistic Fallacy,” at least with respect to
“good.” However, Sidgwick immediately proceeds to admit that to him
it is “more in accordance with common sense to recognise – as Butler
