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at least, viewed it as more than an objection to utilitarianism. Besides, and
contra Shaver, the charge that one is “an individual essentially separate
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from other individuals” is not even a serious objection to utilitarianism
unless it carries the normative upshot that the unity of the personal point
of view ought somehow to be recognized. What would be the purpose
of asserting it, in either Sidgwick’s work or Rawls’s, if it merely meant
“here is a normatively tinged, metaphysically grounded view of the person
different from the utilitarian one”? As Samuel Scheffler has observed,
when Rawls makes the charge that classical utilitarianism “does not take
seriously the distinction between persons,” this is regarded as a “decisive
objection” provided that “we assume that the correct regulative principle
for anything depends on the nature of that thing, and that the plurality
of distinct persons with separate systems of ends is an essential feature of
human societies.” Moreover, Schneewind concludes his account of the
introduction of the distinction passage by stating “the conviction that the
egoist is not irrational in adopting a basic principle resting on the reality
and significance of the distinction between his own consciousness and the
consciousness belonging to others is one reason for Sidgwick’s concern
with the dualism of practical reason.”
In fact, Schneewind also provides a wealth of argument indicative of
just how Sidgwick regarded the separateness of persons as a very deep
truth – the “dualism comes from the same kind of consideration as the
axioms themselves. It represents the requirements action must satisfy if it
is to be reasonable, given the most basic facts of human life. Each of us is a
self-conscious possessor of a private consciousness.” The crucial point,
however, is that if “own-good is logically prior to universal-good, and P
to B, the inescapability of the egoistic aspect of practical rationality is
evident.” “P” refers to the axiom of temporal neutrality, and what it
“essentially involves is that there exists a plurality of times during which
a sentient or conscious being is aware of good or evil. It is thus the axiom
about what reason demands over time in one life, as B [that the good of
one is no more important than the good of another] is the axiom about
what reason demands over many lives.” Thus,
Logical priority, as Sidgwick understands it . . . is not a matter of more or less certainty. It is a matter of the order in which concepts must be explicated and
propositions proven if clarity and cogency are to be attained. If we look at the
axioms with this in mind, we shall find it helpful to suppose that Sidgwick thinks
P and its associated concept of own-good are logically prior to B and its concept
of univeral-good. This order of priority helps explain several points. For instance,
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it helps explain the way in which the definition of the concept of universal good
is developed. Sidgwick sees the concepts of right and good as representing the
demands of reason, the one on the active aspect, the other on the sentient aspect,
of our nature. He begins his account of good by considering the goods of an
individual, as determined by what the individual thinks desirable. The next step
is to develop the notion of what is ‘good on the whole’ for one individual, and
only after this notion is defined does he move to the concept ‘good on the whole’
simpliciter, without the limitation to ownership by one consciousness. (ME , pp. –) The same order, from the momentary goods of one individual to
the universal good, is followed when the axioms are obtained. After P is given
Sidgwick comments that in obtaining it we have been constructing a concept ‘by
comparison and integration of the different “goods” that succeed one another in
the series of our conscious states’, that is, in the time-series of a single life. In the same way, he says, we construct ‘the notion of Universal Good by comparison and
integration of the goods of all individual human – or sentient – existences’. (ME ,
p. ) In both cases, own-good is plainly treated as the logically prior concept,
the concept which must be explained before and in order that the others may be
clearly explicated.
The hypothesis of the logical priority of own-good also helps explain why
Sidgwick treats the egoist as building his theory with the concept of own-good
and refusing to move to the concept of universal-good, but never suggests that
by parity of reasoning we can see the utilitarian as starting with the concept of
universal-good and refusing to move to the concept of own-good. The concept of
own-good on the whole carries the concept of integration over time with it. It is
only because it does that the concept of universal-good, constructed by integrating
own-goods, includes the temporal condition under which reason must be applied
to practice. But without the temporal condition it is impossible to make sense of
the ideas of action and of rational demands on action. Thus own-good is logically
simpler than universal-good, and P must be presupposed if B is to generate a
requirement of practical rationality.
Oddly, Shaver does not attempt any serious discussion of this all-
important passage, nor do other recent efforts to undercut Sidgwick’s
presentation of egoism. Admittedly, the notion of “logical priority”
would seem to make for additional complications to an already very compli-
cated analysis of Sidgwick’s methodology. But the points that Schneewind
makes about Sidgwick’s way of proceeding are well taken and go far to-
ward explaining how Sidgwick could have attached such importance to
rational egoism, even if they do not afford a full-fledged Sidgwickian jus-
tification of egoism along the lines that Shaver demands. Perhaps, as some
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have claimed, his hedonism reinforced such views, but that is surely not
obvious from the passages Schneewind cites. The force of this “logical
priority” will be further illustrated in later chapters.
Interestingly, and in line with Hurka’s views on the incompleteness of
the critique of perfectionism to be found in the Methods and its close ap-
proximation to Moore’s account of good, Sidgwick concludes his critique
of Rashdall with the confession “I am not prepared to deny that a con-
sistent system might be worked out on the basis of such a composite End
as Mr. Rashdall suggests, and I shall not attempt to prove, before seeing
it in a fully developed form, that it would be more open to attack on the
score of paradox than my own.” But he, Sidgwick, is still reluctant to “aim
at making my fellow-creatures more moral, if . . . as a consequence of this
they would become less happy,” and he would “make a similar choice as
regards my own future happiness,” which is why he finds it misleading “to
say that Virtue is an ultimate good to the individual as well as Happiness.”
Again, although the dictates of reason are always to be obeyed, it must
be “determined by empirical and utilitarian considerations” whether the
“dictation of Reason is always to be promoted.”
Thus, even as late as , Sidgwick is still calling the (nonegoistic)
perfectionist alternative a promising research program, in the very paper
presenting the explicit “defense” of egoism. It would, therefore, be
ill-advised to be dogmatic about just what he was really after in seeking
philosophical progress. Still, when he discusses “the inevitable twofold
conception of a human individual as a whole in himself, and a part of a
larger whole,” and urges that there “is something that it is reasonable for
him to desire, when he considers himself as an independent unit,” it is
very hard to think that he was terribly hopeful about the defeat of the
egoistic alternative.
Thus, Schneewind’s account would seem to remain, on key points, the
better reading of Sidgwick on the force of rational egoism. And this ac-
count helps to explain not only the Methods, but much else in Sidgwick’s
life and work. Yet perhaps the chief flaw running through all these interpre-
tations is that they approach the issue of the dualism from a too narrowly
analytical perspective. In a word, they cannot render comprehensible the
urgency of Sidgwick’s struggles with the dualism, or his insistence on the
theistic alternative, harmonization, and the unsatisfactoriness of mundane
experience. For him the dualism was as fraught, culturally speaking, as
Nietzsche’s death of God.
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Recall Sidgwick’s own worries about the consequences of failing to
overcome the dualism:
I do not mean that if we gave up the hope of attaining a practical solution of
this fundamental contradiction, through any legitimately obtained conclusion or
postulate as to the moral order of the world, it would become reasonable for us to
abandon morality altogether: but it would seem necessary to abandon the idea of
rationalising it completely. We should doubtless still, not only from self-interest,
but also through sympathy and sentiments protective of social wellbeing, imparted
by education and sustained by communication with other men, feel a desire for
the general observance of rules conducive to general happiness; and practical
reason would still impel us decisively to the performance of duty in the more
ordinary cases in which what is recognised as duty is in harmony with self-interest
properly understood. But in the rarer cases of a recognised conflict between self-
interest and duty, practical reason, being divided against itself, would cease to be
a motive on either side; the conflict would have to be decided by the comparative
preponderance of one or other of two groups of non-rational impulses. (ME )
This scenario is described purely in terms of the failure of the effort at
harmonization – through, for example, the theistic postulate, or a Bud-
dhist metaphysic – and the concern is that should practical reason be
unable in itself to direct action one way or the other, nonrational impulses
will step in to do the job. No doubt this helps to explain why Sidgwick
was so passionately interested in moral development and education, the
shaping of nonrational impulses. Obviously, he was not unconcerned
with the problem of just which nonrational impulses would be performing
this function in the future. The texture of emotional life would, on his
prognosis, likely prove decisive for the fate of future generations. In due
course, perhaps the psychologist and the sociologist would be doing the
work of the church.
And besides, if natural theology, in the form of psychical research,
might eventually be able to demonstrate that the dualism did not involve
even the indeterminacy of conflicting permissive reasons, why should
not other (partly naturalistic, empirical) arguments – for example, about
indirection – turn up similarly hopeful prospects, however unlikely that
might seem? Perhaps the further developments of philosophical argument
might also help in rendering mundane experience at least somewhat less
unsatisfactory. The failure of perfectionist and Idealist attempts in this
direction did not permanently settle the matter. Poor as such a substi-
tute may be, for lost faith in a cosmic guarantee, it could provide some
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consolation. At least, mundane experience could help, and could not be
ruled out a priori as involving some form of category mistake about what
a solution must entail.
Clearly, however, Sidgwick was not sanguine about the alternative of
simply asserting the force of agent-neutral reasons. Even if he doubted that
egoism and utilitarianism were either ultimately self-evident or certain,
and gave egoism only cryptic support, he nonetheless took his task – as
Baier observed – to be demonstrating their harmonization (along with
the cultivation of nonrational utilitarian impulses), at least in very large
measure. The degree to which he did so indicates the degree to which
he refused to admit the weakness of the case for egoism, and not simply
the degree to which he recognized the mundane force – rational or not –
of egoistic tendencies. Sidgwick wanted it all: a rational, orderly universe
that unfailingly maximized both collective and individual happiness. He
wanted the philosopher to be armed with a cognitivist defense of the moral
order of the universe that could substitute for the theologian’s and convert
both the clerisy and the “sensual herd.”
This is crucial. It is perishingly difficult to make sense of Sidgwick’s
many remarks to both friends and critics about the challenge of egoism –
how he came to feel so strongly “this opposition” between own and other
happiness, and the paradox of its denial – without the supposition that
he at
least took it to be an extremely plausible “apparent intuition.” In
one of his most explicit statements on the subject, a response (in )
to an essay on the Methods by Alfred Barratt, Sidgwick charges Barratt
with holding “a fundamental misapprehension of the drift of my treatise.”
Allowing that he had avoided “stating explicitly” his own “ethical view,”
Sidgwick insists that it should have been “pretty clear to the reader that
it is not what Mr. Barratt controverts as the ‘Suppression of Egoism’, but
rather what, in No. V. of Mind, I attributed to Butler, describing it as ‘the Dualism of Practical Reason.’ ” After quoting Butler’s “Third Sermon on
Human Nature,” Sidgwick continues:
My difference begins when we come to consider what among the precepts of
conscience we really do see to be reasonable. Here my view may be briefly given
by saying, that I identify a modification of Kantism with the missing rational basis
of the ethical utilitarianism of Bentham, as expounded by J. S. Mill. I consider the
fundamental formula of conscience to be that one ought not to prefer one’s own
good to the greater good of another: this (like Kant’s Categorical Imperative) is
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a purely formal principle, and is evolved immediately out of the notion of ‘good’
or ‘desirable’, if this notion is used absolutely; as it then must mean ‘desirable
from a universal point of view’, or ‘what all rational beings, as such, ought to aim
at realising’. The substantial difference between me and Mr. Barratt is that he
rejects this notion, at least as applied to concrete results. On this point I confidently appeal to the common moral consciousness of mankind: (e.g.) it is certainly the
common belief that the design of the Creator of the world is to realise Good:
and in this belief the notion ‘good’ must be used absolutely. But I should admit
Mr. Barratt’s objection to the reasoning by which (see p. ), I endeavour to
exhibit the self-evidence of this formula, if that reasoning were intended – as
Mr. Barratt has taken it – as a confutation of the principle of Rational Egoism.
