Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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moral theory in mind when he penned this passage, coming as it did in
the wake of Rawls’s Theory. And he had good reason for thinking that
Sidgwick would have welcomed such efforts; indeed, much of the analysis
in Sidgwick’s Ethics is devoted to bringing out the Kantian proclivities of
the Methods. For Schneewind, more than anyone, has stressed the ways in
which Sidgwick was indebted to moral theorists who were outside of and
hostile to the utilitarian tradition. Clarke, Butler, and Kant – Sidgwick
readily admitted that these figures were also his masters. But those critics
of utilitarianism closer to home – such as Maurice, Whewell, and John
Grote – also constantly pressed upon him the need to reconcile utilitar-
ianism with the perspective of agency and the requirements of rational
intuition. And of course, the view that ethics might somehow vindicate,
or at least warmly support, Christian faith was hardly part of the legacy
of Bentham and Mill, though it was a vital component of the ethics of
Kant and the “Cambridge Moralists.” Schneewind in fact insists (con-
tra Frankena, Darwall, and Shaver) that to “no major historical figure does
Sidgwick have closer affinities than to Bishop Butler,” though he “moves
well beyond Butler in the thoroughness with which he works out the view
that our moral beliefs are or can be rational. Where Butler refused to elab-
orate a theory, Sidgwick, like Whewell, holds that the development of a
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systematic understanding of our moral experience is the central task of
ethics.” Which brings us not only to Whewell, but also to Kant:
It is tempting to describe the dominant philosophical strategy which Sidgwick
uses to carry out this task as a Kantian attempt to work out the sole conditions
under which reason can be practical. Certainly his basic aim is similar to Kant’s,
but, as his many points of disagreement with Kant suggest, the Kantian aspect
of his thinking needs to be defined with some care. He detaches the issue of
how reason can be practical from the most distinctive aspects of Kantianism. He
rejects the methodological apparatus of the ‘critical philosophy’, the Kantian dis-
tinction of noumenal and phenomenal standpoints, and the association of the
issue with the problem of free will. He treats the question of the possibility
of rationally motivated action as answerable largely in terms of common place
facts; he does not attribute any special synthesizing powers to reason beyond
those assumed in ordinary logic; and he does not take morality to provide us
with support for religious beliefs. In refusing to base morality on pure reason
alone, moreover, he moves decisively away from Kant, as is shown by his very
un-Kantian hedonistic and teleological conclusions. These points make it clear
that the Kantian strain in Sidgwick’s thought is most marked in his central idea
about rationality of first principles. Substantive first principles of morality are
not the most basic embodiment of practical rationality. The rationality of these
principles is a consequence of requirements set by more formal principles which
themselves delineate the general activity of reasoning, when the formal princi-
ples are applied in the circumstances of human life. Intuition is then explicable
as the understanding a reasonable being has of the nature of his own activity as
reasonable. If this is Kantianism, then it is not inaccurate to think of Sidgwick as a Kantian.
In fact, in a variety of later works, Schneewind has developed this theme
somewhat, maintaining that Sidgwick’s emphasis on the “methods” of
ethics also reflected a very Kantian view of the ordinary person’s capac-
ity for moral knowledge and direction – like Mill, but unlike Bentham,
Sidgwick tried to show “how normal adults can see for themselves what
morality requires in daily life [and] how each person could be moved to
act morally, regardless of legislatively engineered sanctions.” The link
he finds involves the moral democracy of this form of self-direction.
That there is much that is profoundly right about Schneewind’s in-
terpretation is undeniable, for reasons that by this point ought to be
quite obvious. Schneewind is perfectly well aware of the novel features
of Sidgwick’s approach, but after all, Sidgwick himself was most anxious
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to identify his work with that of Butler and Kant, despite his differences on
the subjects of determinism, intention, and the ultimate nature of moral
knowledge. His interpretations of his “masters” may not have been the
most perspicuous, but his sense of indebtedness is plain. A brief recapit-
ulation of Sidgwick’s own account of his Kantian filiations may help to
put Schneewind’s reading in perspective and to throw into sharper relief
a number of the points made in earlier sections.
As Sidgwick explained the evolution of the Methods, he had been led
back to Kantism after the inadequacy of Mill’s treatment of egoism – and of
Mill’s reading of Kant – had been borne in on him, and he “was impressed
with the truth and importance of its fundamental principle. . . . That what-
ever is right for me must be right for all persons in similar circumstances –
which was the form in which I accepted the Kantian maxim – seemed
to me certainly fundamental, certainly true, and not without practical
importance.” (ME xix)
Of course, as we have seen, it is also important to appreciate just what
kind of use Sidgwick made of the autonomist tradition:
Kant’s resting of morality on Freedom did not indeed commend itself to me,
though I did not at first see, what I now seem to see clearly, that it involves
the fundamental confusion of using ‘freedom’ in two distinct senses – “free-
dom” that is realised only when we do right, when reason triumphs over incli-
nation, and “freedom” that is realised equally when we choose to do wrong, and
which is apparently implied in the notion of ill-desert. What commended itself
to me, in short, was Kant’s ethical principle rather than its metaphysical basis.
(ME xix)
Moreover, Sidgwick deemed Kant’s fundamental principle “inadequate
for the construction of a system of duties,” unable to really help with the
problem of the dualism of practical reason, the “subordination of Self-
Interest to Duty.”
For the Rational Egoist – a man who had learnt from Hobbes that Self-preservation
is the first law of Nature and Self-interest the only rational basis of social morality –
and in fact, its actual basis, so far as it is effective – such a
thinker might accept the Kantian principle and remain an Egoist.
He might say, “I quite admit that when the painful necessity comes for another
man to choose between his own happiness and the general happiness, he must as a
reasonable being prefer his own, i.e. it is right for him to do this on my principle.
No doubt, as I probably do not sympathise with him in particular any more than
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with other persons, I as a disengaged spectator should like him to sacrifice himself
to the general good: but I do not expect him to do it, any more than I should do
it myself in his place.”
It did not seem to me that this reasoning could be effectively confuted. No
doubt it was, from the point of view of the universe, reasonable to prefer the
greater good to the lesser, even though the lesser good was the private happiness
of the agent. Still, it seemed to me also undeniably reasonable for the individual to prefer his own. The rationality of self-regard seemed to me as undeniable as the
rationality of self-sacrifice. I could not give up this conviction, though neither of my masters, neither Kant nor Mill, seemed willing to admit it: in different ways,
each in his own way, they refused to admit it. (ME xix–xx)
Kant and most neo-Kantians have always emphatically denied that ego-
ism could be consistently willed as a universal law or defended as an inde-
pendent principle of practical reason, but Sidgwick, as we have seen, is not
impressed with such denials. This was the realization that left Sidgwick
“a disciple on the loose, in search of a master,” and in turn led him back
to Butler, in whom he claimed to find an anticipation of his own thinking
about the dualism of practical reason, as well as much effective criticism
of psychological hedonism. Thus, it was Butler who finally persuaded
him of the “existence of ‘disinterested’ or ‘extra-regarding’ impulses to
action, [impulses] not directed towards the agent’s pleasure,” and conse-
quently, Sidgwick found himself “much more in agreement with Butler
than Mill” concerning the “Psychological basis of Ethics,” not to mention
further confirmed in his intuitionistic tendencies:
And this led me to reconsider my relation to Intuitional Ethics. The strength
and vehemence of Butler’s condemnation of pure Utilitarianism, in so cautious a
writer, naturally impressed me much. And I had myself become, as I had to admit
to myself, an Intuitionist to a certain extent. For the supreme rule of aiming at
the general happiness, as I had come to see, must rest on a fundamental moral
intuition, if I was to recognise it as binding at all. And in reading the writings
of the earlier English Intuitionists, More and Clarke, I found the axiom I re-
quired for my Utilitarianism . . . in one form or another, holding a prominent place.
(ME xxi)
What is singularly interesting in this story of Sidgwick’s intellectual
wanderings, however, is the way in which he travels from Mill to Kant to
Butler to Clarke and then back to Aristotle, as though the pull of his classi-
cist background always proved irresistable. Thus, he had “theoretically as
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well as practically” accepted the “fundamental moral intuition” of rational
benevolence, along with the Kantian one, and “was then an ‘intuitional’
moralist to this extent: and if so, why not further?” That is to say, why not
go all the way with something like Whewell’s system, which after all found
a place for rational benevolence, or charity, as one principle alongside the
others? At this, though, Sidgwick balks: “The orthodox moralists such as
Whewell (then in vogue) said that there was a whole intelligible system
of intuitions: but how were they to be learnt? I could not accept Butler’s
view as to the sufficiency of a plain man’s conscience: for it appeared to me
that plain men agreed rather verbally than really.” (ME xxi) And it was in
this state of mind that he looked to “Aristotle again; and a light seemed to
dawn upon me as to the meaning and drift of his procedure – especially
in Books ii., iii., iv. of the Ethics.”
Indeed, as we have seen, the light of Aristotle proved to be brilliantly
illuminating, and crucial to the assembling of the Methods, with Sidgwick
seeking, like Aristotle and Socrates, to reduce “to consistency by careful
comparison” commonsense morality, what “we” think, “ascertained by
reflection.” (ME xxii–xxiii)
Obviously, the result of this Aristotelian examination of common sense
only succeeded in bringing out “with fresh force and vividness” the dif-
ferences between the “maxims of Common Sense Morality” and the in-
tuitions associated with utilitarianism and the Kantian principle, though
it had “continually brought home” how commonsense morality is a sys-
tem of rules “tending to the promotion of general happiness” (ME xxii).
Indeed, there was “no real opposition between Intuitionism and Utilitari-
anism,” because the “Utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham seemed to me to
want a basis: that basis could only be supplied by a fundamental intuition;
on the other hand the best examination I could make of the Morality of
Common Sense showed me no clear and self-evident principles except
such as were perfectly consistent with Utilitarianism.” To be sure, given
how the “merely empirical examination of the consequences of actions is
unsatisfactory” and how practically imperfect is the “guidance of the Util-
itarian calculus,” it was crucial to “treat with respect, and make use of, the
guidance afforded by Common Sense in these cases, on the ground of the
general presumption which evolution afforded that moral sentiments and
opinions would point to conduct conducive to general happiness.” Still,
this could be overruled by “a strong probability of the opposite, derived
from utilitarian calculations.” (ME xxii–xxiii)
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Given the account in earlier chapters of Sidgwick’s Apostolic truth
seeking, this invocation of Aristotle on common sense, as the figure car-
rying on the true work of the Socratic elenchus, should seem remarkably
apt, as should the suggestion that the project was carried on by Mill. The
Methods effectively provided the formal philosophical underpinnings for
Sidgwick’s Apostolic love of philosophical conversation that was intense
and
personal, a matter of individual self-revelation, fellowship, growth,
and experimentation as much as abstract truth. Recall his Mauricean in-
sistence that all three methods gave expression to some enduring features
of his own being. Here are the social dimensions of his epistemology.
Now, this recapitulation of the genesis of the Methods is meant to sug-
gest just how much care must be taken when applying to such a book
broad labels like “Millian” or “Kantian” or “Aristotelian” (etc.). Even
Schneewind’s extremely sensitive Kantian interpretation may underesti-
mate other influences, such as the Aristotelian one. Yes, Sidgwick accepted
the universalizability principle and, in a general way, agreed with Kant –
and with Whewell, for that matter – that morality is a matter of practical
reason and that the moral theorist must determine the preconditions for
applying reason to practice in human life. But he did not, as Schneewind
would admit, quite capture the essence of the Kantian orientation, whether
expressed by Kant or by Green.
Thus, as Darwall has observed, intuitionists and autonomists from
Butler to Kant to the present do share a certain normative idea of the will,
of “an agent who can step back from her various desires – for example,
from her desires for her own good or the goods of others, or of all con-
ceived impartially – and ask which she should act on.” However, whereas
“the intuitionists take practical reasoning and action to have an implicit
material aim, namely, to track independent normative facts, autonomist
internalists take the implicit aim of practical reasoning to be entirely
formal – guidance by considerations that we can reflectively endorse,
thereby realizing autonomy.” Arguably, Sidgwick’s complex philosoph-
ical intuitionism actually falls midway between these poles, since it places
such weight on being guided by a certain kind of authority, achieved via
free, critical inquiry, etc. It is neither a pure practical reason theory nor a
pure intuitionist one (on the older models), and that is just what makes it
hard to classify.
To be sure, one might feel that the popular contrasts between the
pure Kantian view and rational intuitionism are somewhat stylized and
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