Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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scientific prevision from fanciful Utopian conjecture, the form of society
to which his practical conclusions relate will be one varying but little from
the actual, with its actually established code of moral rules and customary
judgments concerning virtue and vice” (ME ). Furthermore, both
took some pains to present utilitarianism in a form that preserved certain
commonsense notions – the difference between subjective and objective
rightness, acting with the proper intention, and so forth. The Methods
may even be said to outstrip Mill’s exposition of these topics. Consider,
for example, this summation, added in the second edition:
For no one, in considering what he ought himself to do in any particular case, can
distinguish what he believes to be right from what really is so: the necessity for
a practical choice between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ rightness can only present
itself in respect of the conduct of another person whom it is in our power to
influence. If another is about to do what we think wrong while he thinks it right,
and we cannot alter his belief but can bring other motives to bear on him that
may overbalance his sense of duty, it becomes necessary to decide whether we
ought thus to tempt him to realise what we believe to be objectively right against
his own convictions. I think that the moral sense of mankind would pronounce
against such temptation, – thus regarding the Subjective rightness of an action
as more important than the Objective, – unless the evil of the act prompted by a
mistaken sense of duty appeared to be very grave. But however essential it may be
that a moral agent should do what he believes to be right, this condition of right
conduct is too simple to admit of systematic development: it is, therefore, clear
that the details of our investigation must relate mainly to ‘objective’ rightness.
(ME –)
Thus, insofar as one is called upon to act directly with the intention
of maximizing expected utility, one’s action can rightly be assessed by
considerations of objective rightness, the utility actually achieved by one’s
action, and by how well one sought to bring the two into accord. In this
connection, mention might also be made of how Sidgwick construes the
notion of an “intention” as extending to cover all the foreseeable conse-
quences one’s action (a point that, while it does not trouble utilitarians,
has much provoked Catholic defenders of the so-called doctrine of the
“double-effect”).
But the larger point here is that Sidgwick and Mill were quite at one in
thinking that commonsense morality had evolved in a utilitarian direction
and was undergirded by the utilitarian principle – or at least, by principles
yielding utilitarian conclusions – even though the utilitarian must in turn
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make some resort to something like the rules of commonsense morality
while continuing to work for its reform. As Mill eloquently argued,
to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing; to pass over the
intermediate generalizations entirely, and endeavour to test each individual action
directly be the first principle, is another. It is a strange notion that the acknowl-
edgement of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones.
To inform a traveller respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to
forbid the use of landmarks and direction-posts on the way.
And besides, “the multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitar-
ian ethics, the object of virtue: the occasions on which any person (except
one in a thousand) has it in his power to do this on an extended scale, in
other words, to be a public benefactor, are but exceptional.”
Furthermore, in the revealing little essay on “Utilitarianism” that
Sidgwick delivered to the Metaphysical Society in December of ,
just at the time he was completing the Methods, he explained that
“Utilitarianism, as introduced by Cumberland, is too purely conservative;
it dwells entirely on the general conduciveness of moral rules to the general
good, and ignores the imperfections of these rules as commonly conceived.
On the other side, the Utilitarianism of Bentham is too purely destruc-
tive, and treats the morality of Common Sense with needless acrimony
and contempt.” The Millian space between these poles was precisely
what Sidgwick sought to occupy, and if this seems to be at least a partial
retreat to the “contemplative utilitarianism” of Hume and Smith, after
the Benthamite juggernaut, that is not a filiation to which he would have
objected, despite his very real differences from the cool, practical atheism
of those figures from the previous century.
Thus, if Sidgwick was carrying out a neo-Aristotelian research pro-
gram, he was nonetheless doing it under very Millian guidelines. And as
noted earlier, Christine Korsgaard has observed that Mill quite strikingly
anticipates even Sidgwick’s intuitionistic predelictions:
If there be anything innate in the matter, I see no reason why the feeling which
is innate should not be regard to the pleasures and pains of others. If there is any
principle of morality which is intuitively obligatory, I should say it must be that. If so, the intuitive ethics would coincide with the utilitarian, and there would be no
further quarrel between them. Even as it is, the intuitive moralists, though they
believe that there are other intuitive moral obligations, do already believe this to
be one.
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Naturally, Mill puts this forward merely as a pregnant suggestion, since
his own belief is that the moral feelings are acquired rather than innate.
Yet the distance between Mill and Sidgwick might be further reduced by
stressing again that Sidgwick’s version of intuitionism was not committed
to claims about the “innateness” of moral principles; this he thought a
confusion foisted on intuitionism by its critics. As Schneewind has put it,
Sidgwick “takes ‘intuitive’ to be opposed, not, as the empiricists think, to
‘innate,’ but to ‘discursive’ or to ‘demonstrative.’” Besides, the
empiricists themselves accept particular judgments as in this sense intuitively
evident: Why do they reject universal intuitions? The reason they give is that
the latter are sometimes mistaken.
Sidgwick does not deny this. . . . But errors may be found even in apparent particular intuitions, if by this phrase we refer to more than the barest experiencing of feelings, for any cognitive claim
about experience implies comparison and contrast and may go wrong. Moreover,
it is impossible to see how ‘he can establish upon his foundation the conclu-
sions of science. . . . individual premises, however manipulated, cannot establish a universal conclusion,’ and yet we all agree that such conclusions can be
established.
Thus, intuition “is simply a requirement for any sort of knowledge or
reasoning at all – not a special mark of our moral insight or divine nature.
It is needed for matter-of-fact knowledge, for mathematics, for logic, and
for science as well as for morality.”
But what did Sidgwick’s “philosophical intuitionism” then amount to?
How distant was he, really, from the fallibilism of Mill’s empiricism and
naturalism? And correspondingly, how free was he from the temptation
to commit the “naturalistic fallacy”? If, as Schneewind, Shaver, and Crisp
have all urged, Sidgwick’s “antinaturalism” is of the most minimal kind,
then perhaps he really is more properly situated in the line of descent from
Mill to Dewey than in that from Mill to Moore, given the Platonic over-
tones of the latter’s view of good as an independently existing property.
Did Moore’s metaethics represent something of a metaphysical or on-
tological turn, when compared to Sidgwick’s? As Schneewind remarks,
although Sidgwick does “occasionally speak, especially in the earlier edi-
tions, of ‘qualities’ of rightness or goodness,” which might suggest “a
theory of the sort later put forth by Moore or Ross about the ontological
status of what is known when we know that an act is right or good,” any
theory he might have “on this matter remains implicit.”
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Although satisfactory answers to these questions would require a full-
fledged account of “naturalism” and of how far Sidgwick’s account really
differed from Moore’s, a few remarks might provide some helpful guid-
ance. Obviously, Sidgwick was working with certain critical epistemolog-
ical standards for assessing the success of the claims of systems such as
Whewell’s. He appreciates the difference, one of considerable historical
importance, of “ethical writers . . . who have confined themselves mainly
to the definition and arrangement of the Morality of Common Sense, from
those who have aimed at a more philosophical treatment of the content
of moral intuition” (ME n). Samuel Clarke, for instance, was one of
the latter, but, useful as his early efforts were, “by degrees the attempt
to exhibit morality as a body of scientific truth fell into discredit, and
the disposition to dwell on the emotional side of the moral conscious-
ness became prevalent.” Until, that is, the noncognitivism of Hutcheson
yielded the skepticism of Hume, at which point the defenders of morality
grew alarmed and sought to show (with Reid and Hamilton, for example)
that Hume was employing a mistaken view of the nature of empirical
experience and morality. Even so, this school, with which Sidgwick has
no little sympathy, “was led rather to expound and reaffirm the moral-
ity of Common Sense, than to offer any profounder principles which
could not be so easily supported by an appeal to common experience”
(ME ).
Sidgwick clearly thinks that we must take a lesson from both Clarke and
Reid, but with an admixture of Descartes and Kant. “Is there,” he asks,
“no possibility of attaining, by a more profound and discriminating exam-
ination of our common moral thought, to real ethical axioms – intuitive
propositions of real clearness and certainty?” (ME ) This is to ask, in
other words, whether the philosopher might not aspire to rather more than
the work of Reid and Whewell and seek “to do somewhat more than define
and formulate the common moral opinions of mankind.” Perhaps, indeed,
the function of the philosopher is “to tell men what they ought to think,
rather than what they do think,” and thus to “transcend Common Sense
in his premises” (ME ). Perhaps “we should expect that the history of
Moral Philosophy – so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox
thinkers are concerned – would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in
full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the sci-
entific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may
be at once systematised and corrected” (ME –).
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In this, Sidgwick seems to be sounding a call to philosophize meant
to round up figures as far from each other as Clarke and Bentham, or
Descartes and Bacon, who for all their differences were nonetheless at
one in thinking it possible to improve on the mass of vague general-
ity and superstition by which most people sought to guide their lives.
Although he shows none of Bentham’s nastiness and vituperation in at-
tacking the received morality and politics, and goes beyond even Mill
in casting utilitarianism as something both reasonable and respectable,
a creed for decent people who are not mentally inert, he is at great
pains not to confuse the true philosopher with the plain person, who
mixes up different methods without even realizing it. This is, to be sure,
a difficult (and highly Mauricean) balancing act, though a crucial one.
Sidgwick’s point, after all, is to present utilitarianism “as the final form
into which Intuitionism tends to pass, when the demand for really self-
evident first principles is rigorously pressed” – which is something that
even Mill did not do, thus leaving the famous supposed gap in his ar-
gument between the factual claim that people desire happiness and the
normative one that the general happiness is what they ought to pursue
(ME ). Again, Sidgwick demands that his reader ask, when consider-
ing common sense, “() whether he can state a clear, precise, self-evident
first principle, according to which he is prepared to judge conduct under
each head: and () if so, whether this principle is really that commonly
applied in practice, by those whom he takes to represent Common Sense”
(ME ).
What would it take to meet the first condition? According to Sidgwick,
there “seem to be four conditions, the complete fulfilment of which would
establish a significant proposition, apparently self-evident, in the highest
degree of certainty attainable: and
which must be approximately realised
by the premises of our reasoning in any inquiry, if that reasoning is to lead
us cogently to trustworthy conclusions” (ME ). The careful phrasing
here is, as we shall see, an essential part of Sidgwick’s fallibilism, for he
generally stops short of claiming, in the Methods and in his other writings, that humanity has at last got beyond “apparently self-evident” propositions and achieved absolute and final certainty. On balance, Sidgwick
is clear enough that principles or axioms of the “highest certainty” are
still being sought in ethics. At times, he does sound less doubtful – for
example, in “Utilitarianism,” which opens with the proclamation that it
has been his object “to avoid all but incontrovertible propositions” and
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that he has been “careful not to dogmatize upon any point where scientific
certainty did not appear to be attainable.” But as he immediately ex-
plains, “in most discussions on Utilitarianism I find one or more of these
propositions, at important points of the argument, implicitly ignored;
and . . . a wide experience shows that an ethical or metaphysical proposi-
tion is not the less likely to provoke controversy because it is put forward
as incontrovertible.”
The four conditions are as follows. The first, which he often refers to
as the “Cartesian Criterion,” is that the “terms of the proposition must be
clear and precise. The rival originators of modern Methodology, Descartes
and Bacon, vie with each other in the stress that they lay on this point:
and the latter’s warning against the ‘notiones male terminatae’ of ordinary
thought is peculiarly needed in ethical discussion.” Second, the
self-evidence of the proposition must be ascertained by careful reflection. . . . A rigorous demand for self-evidence in our premises is a valuable protection against
the misleading influence of our own irrational impulses on our judgements: while
at the same time it not only distinguishes as inadequate the mere external support
of authority and tradition, but also excludes the more subtle and latent effect of