by Bart Schultz
hazardous for prudent persons in tolerably good circumstances. But even these,
though they will not assist in producing social disorder, are not likely to make
any great sacrifices to avert it: it will often be sufficient for them to defer it, and even when it is imminent prudence may counsel evasion rather than resistance.
In short, though a society composed entirely of rational egoists would, when once
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organized, be in a condition of stable internal equilibrium: it seems very doubtful
whether this would be the case with a community of pure egoists, among whom
the average degree of enlightenment and self-control was no greater than it is
among ourselves. (ME –)
Needless to say, Fitzjames Stephen was an admirer of Hobbes, and a
closer threat, in Sidgwick’s eyes. This Stephen was even more abhorrent
to Sidgwick than his younger brother Leslie, on the subject of the wicked
and the weak. No doubt part of Sidgwick’s worry about this harsh view
was its potential for molding the “irrational” impulses determining human
action, particularly in the event that the suspect foundations of religion and
ethics became more widely known. What can be said, in support of Brink’s
emphasis on an externalist interpretation, is that Sidgwick certainly was
concerned about molding character and motivation, and that he did, as
the passage just quoted indicates, seem to think that enlightened egoism
might all too easily collapse into unenlightened egoism – the sensualness
of the “sensual herd” – given the limitations of the age. Perhaps the spectre
of ancient Greece did have a hold on him after all. At any rate, Rashdall
was on to something when he observed that with Sidgwick, concern about
the dualism of practical reason was also a concern about reason period, as
a force for defending ethics.
It is, however, a delicate question to just what degree Sidgwick was
also persuaded that disagreeable forms of egoism could genuinely bear
the color of reason. By his own admission, his indirect arguments about
the good, the dictation of reason, and so on were less than conclusive, and
nothing in the axiomatic account of egoism could claim, on the basis of
self-evidence, to rule out such interpretations. He was even inclined to
admit that egoistic calculations were easier to make than utilitarian ones,
giving egoism the advantage of clarity.
Much of this case will need to be spelled out in connection with Sidg-
wick’s politics and practical ethics, the subjects of later chapters. And as
noted, the following chapter on Sidgwick’s psychical research is also cru-
cial for filling in his views on personal identity and the viability of the
theistic postulate, and for tracing the supposed evolution of these views.
My own view goes even further than Schneewind’s in stressing both how
seriously Sidgwick took egoism and how little his views on overcoming
the dualism of practical reason actually changed. Why else would his
chief intellectual investment have been in psychical research? Indeed, as
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remarked earlier, his Christian orientation and correlative longing for per-
sonal survival of physical death powerfully reinforced his conviction that
egoism was as rational as the alternative principles of practical reason.
For all that, he wanted reason to lead him somewhere. His faith in
“Things in General” was, as he painfully recognized, just another faith.
VI. Integrity at Government House
The truth is that the “Weltschmerz” really weighs on me for the first time in my life: mingled with egoistic humiliation. I am a curious mixture of
and : I cannot really care for anything little: and yet I do not feel
myself worthy of – or ever hope to attain – anything worthy of attainment.
Ethics is losing its interest for me rather, as the insolubility of its fundamental
problem is impressed on me. I think the contribution to the formal clearness & coherence of our ethical thought which I have to offer is just worth giving: for a
few speculatively-minded persons – very few. And as for all practical questions of
interest, I feel as if I had now to begin at the beginning and learn the A B C.
Why this letter has been so long in writing I do not know. Perhaps it is owing to
a peculiar hallucination under which I labour that I shall suddenly find my ideas
cleared up – say the day after tomorrow – on the subjects over which I brood
heavily.
Sidgwick to H. G. Dakyns, February (M )
My book drags on: but I think it will be done in a way by Easter, thrown aside for
the May Term and then revised in June and published in the Autumn. At least I
hope for this. It bores me very much, and I want to get it off my hands before it
makes me quite ill. . . . As for my inner life, it is hollowness, chaos and gloom.
Sidgwick to H. G. Dakyns, February (CWC)
That was what was so remarkable in Henry Sidgwick – the perpetual hopefulness
of his inquiry. He always seemed to expect that some new turn of argument, some
new phase of thought, might arise and put a new aspect upon the intellectual
scenery, or give a new weight in the balance of argument. There was in him
an extraordinary belief in following reason – a belief and a hopefulness which continued up to the last.
Bishop Charles Gore (M )
Although the previous sections give only the barest sketch of the rich
argumentation of Sidgwick’s Methods, perhaps this is sufficient to indicate
how Sidgwick’s magnum opus, for all its vast reservoirs of close reasoning,
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failed to make the hoped-for contribution to the solution of “the deepest
problems of human life.” As far as it surely went in advancing independent,
secular moral theory, and in articulating the utilitarian program while
redirecting its energies, the Methods did not vindicate practical reason in
the way that Sidgwick thought best, both for philosophy and for purposes
of cultural advance. Indeed, he worried that it had not vindicated practical
reason at all.
Still, it has undeniably contributed much to more recent moral the-
ory. Since the revival of substantive ethical theory in the post-positivist
Anglo-American philosophical world, it has been impossible even for
critics – be they Aristotelian, Kantian, Nietzschean, or whatever – to
&nbs
p; ignore Sidgwick’s monumental volume. When Rawls, in A Theory of
Justice, famously drew out the supposedly counterintuitive implications
of Sidgwick’s utilitarianism with respect to questions of distributive jus-
tice and population growth, the better to advance his own theory of jus-
tice as fairness, he effectively put the Methods at the very heart of the
great expansion of substantive ethical theory that marked the last third of
the twentieth century. Rawls’s objection that “classical utilitarianism fails
to take seriously the distinction between persons” because the “principle
of rational choice for one man is taken as the principle of social choice as
well” was, above all, a challenge to Sidgwick, albeit one aimed at only
half of the dualism, that promoting the “impartial sympathetic spec-
tator” who represents “the conflation of all desires into one system of
desire.”
In responding to such objections, contemporary utilitarians have, ironi-
cally, been able to take considerable comfort in Sidgwick’s steadfast, honest
confrontation with the shortcomings of utilitarianism – and of every other
method of ethics. Certainly, as we have seen, with Sidgwick, utilitarianism
was presented in connection with nearly the whole extraordinary menu
of practical and theoretical difficulties that have dogged it ever since:
the problem of its rational grounding, especially as against egoism; the
problem of formulating “indirect” or “two-level” theories in order to ac-
commodate traditional or commonsense moral rules and/or dispositions;
the problem of accounting for friendship and integrity, and, relatedly, the
“demandingness” of utilitarianism, especially versus the personal point of
view; the problem of supererogation; the problem of universalizability and
the special demands of justice, which seem to pose alternative conceptions
of impartiality and equitable social arrangements (as opposed to utilitarian
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aggregation and maximization); the differences between total and average
utility calculations, as brought out by the question of optimal population
size; the complexities involved in drawing inter- and intrapersonal com-
parisons of utility; and, not least, the importance for utilitarianism of the
nature of personal identity over time. When one looks at the most serious
recent attempts to defend utilitarian ethical theory – works such as R. M.
Hare’s Moral Thinking, R. B. Brandt’s A Theory of the Good and the Right, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, John Skorupski’s Ethical Explorations, Brad Hooker’s Ideal Code, Real World, and Peter Singer’s How Are We to
Live? – one finds that they make constant reference to Sidgwick and the
agenda that he set.
However, although recent utilitarian theorizing has often reached a very
high level of sophistication, the appeal to Sidgwick in such work often
seems rather opportunistic. Even Rawls’s characterization of the Methods
scarcely does justice to, say, Sidgwick’s search for a harmonization of ego-
ism and utilitarianism, such that the practical overcoming of the dualism
would hardly have left individuals in the position of necessarily regretting
the “sacrifices” demanded of them. Schneewind was profoundly right to
stress, in Sidgwick’s Ethics, how crucial it is to read Sidgwick in the context of the religious debates of the mid-Victorian era. Of course, better historical readings of Sidgwick can make him look both more interesting and
less interesting, more probing and less probing. Marcus Singer has rightly
noted the strangeness of Sidgwick’s famous treatment of the population
question, his argument that “strictly conceived, the point up to which, on
Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is
not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible . . . but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living
into the amount of average happiness reaches it maximum” (ME –).
As Singer observes,
Sidgwick is aware of what he calls the ‘grotesque . . . show of exactness’ exhibited by such reasoning. That is not the main problem. The main problem is that
Sidgwick rejects out of hand, without argument, the average happiness criterion in
favor of the total happiness criterion, and never even questions the appropriateness
of either criterion. And Sidgwick is not simply reporting on what the utilitarian
view is, he is actually supporting this view, and never asks whether the point made
is a point in its favor or against it. But this implication of the ‘strictly conceived’
utilitarian principle is surely paradoxical, even on Sidgwick’s own conception of
paradox.
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Singer goes on to remark insightfully on how the apparent corollary
of this view – Sidgwick’s claim that “a universal refusal to propagate
the human species would be the greatest of conceivable crimes from a
Utilitarian point of view” – would also appear to be related to his beliefs
about colonization and the duty of “civilized nations” to “civilize the
world.”
These are crucially important issues, to be discussed at length in later
chapters. The troubling point, however, is that they have scarcely been
discussed at all in the vast analytical philosophical literature devoted to
utilitarianism and the population question.
Now, given the influence of Rawls and Rawlsian debates over Sidg-
wickian utilitarianism, it is strange that the single most important work
on the Methods – Schneewind’s Sidgwick’s Ethics – is also the one most determined to downplay its utilitarianism. As we have seen, Schneewind
is fairly consistently puzzled over the gap between the axioms and the
substantive views of egoism and utilitarianism, and one aspect of his puz-
zlement concerns the central matter of maximization. In discussing the
filling out of the principle of benevolence, he asks: “Why, then, are we
to maximize goodness?” This, he observes, “seems to follow simply from
the definitions of rightness and goodness,” which might seem problem-
atically question-begging in itself. Moreover, the “definitional point that
rightness is conceptually tied to creating maximal goodness does not yield
the utilitarian principle just by itself. An ultimate principle must present
a characteristic that makes right acts right, and the definition does not
establish that maximizing goodness has this status.”
Of course, Schneewind recognizes that, by Sidgwick’s lights, what
“shows that maximizing goodness is what makes right acts right is . . . the
negative result of the examination o
f common-sense morality, that none of
the purely factual properties can serve as an ultimate right-making charac-
teristic.” Thus, it must be that “bringing about the most good is what makes
right acts right.” But as Schneewind argues at length, this is to treat com-
monsense morality as covertly teleological, rather than deontological.
Still, Schneewind does for the most part take Sidgwick at his word in
terms of his claims about setting aside the need to edify in the interests of
impartial inquiry, and his arguments are deeply supportive of the Rawlsian
reading of Sidgwick as a seminal figure in the growth of substantive,
academic moral theory, out to judiciously compare and contrast the leading
contenders in a very modern way. On this count, the assessment of the
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Methods is highly positive and somewhat surprising: “If in its attention to
detail as well as in its range of concern the Methods of Ethics challenges
comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy does, with Aristotle’s
Ethics, in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality and in
its architectonic coherence it rivals the work of Kant himself.” In his
concluding paragraph, Schneewind muses on how Sidgwick would have
reacted to future developments:
Most of all [Sidgwick] would have welcomed attempts to work out an alternative
to utilitarianism as systematic, as comprehensive, and as powerful as he himself
showed that utilitarianism could be. If one of the foundations of his own moral
position was a belief about the demands of rationality, the other was the convic-
tion that there is no alternative principle satisfying those demands as well as the
utilitarian principle. To this second claim no one in his lifetime offered a cogent
and compelling reply. Yet such a reply would have seemed to Sidgwick to present
the most desirable kind of challenge a philosopher could want. Whether it has yet
been provided or not is a matter still under discussion.
Presumably, Schneewind had the neo-Kantian, autonomist trend in
