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to the happiness of the individual and to the wellbeing of the family, may
grow and flourish.” Still, he admits that the particulars are problematic,
even for the utilitarian. Thus,
[I]t is not necessary that the line between right and wrong in such matters should
be drawn with theoretical precision: it is sufficient for practical purposes if the
main central portion of the region of duty be strongly illuminated, while the
margin is left somewhat obscure. And, in fact, the detailed regulations which it is
important to society to maintain depend so much upon habit and association of
ideas, that they must vary to a great extent from age to age and from country to
country. (ME –)
In this region, the connections between ethics, law, and custom get par-
ticularly complicated.
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Read in the light of his relationship to Symonds, these passages take on a
peculiar significance. For what Sidgwick is so plainly allowing is that com-
monsense morality is a somewhat crude instrument on this matter, that it
may allow for practical guidance for common people but is inadequate for
special cases, and that any prescriptions on this count must remain flexible
and somewhat vague. Beyond procreation, the morality of sexual relations
involves fostering friendship and sympathy – a point that neatly admits
both Millian and Uranian interpretation. After all, procreation is not al-
ways the aim even in heterosexual relations, and what if friendship could
be fostered in other relationships and contexts? Besides, Symonds, Noel,
Dakyns, Arthur Sidgwick – all had done their duty by way of procreation.
The Greeks did their duty by way of procreation. Sidgwick’s reference
to Plato in this context, while guarded enough, is surely not coincidental.
Nor, given Symonds’s empirical and historical investigations, should this
call for sociological evidence seem at all strange. And it is noteworthy
that any discussion of how rational egoism might tackle these questions is
carefully avoided.
Interestingly, on this point, Sidgwick and Moore were rather similar in
being disposed to think that commonsense moral rules, mostly negative
and of limited range, left a great deal of room for maneuver for the reformer
trying to bring about as much goodness as possible. And despite Sidgwick’s
hedonism, in practice he would have approved of the pursuit of Moore’s
“unmixed goods” – “the love of beautiful things or of good persons.” Here,
of course, was the Bloomsbury religion, and a good deal of Symonds’s.
Curiously, however, one could urge that Principia Ethica was actually rather more puritanical than the Methods, what with Moore’s pronouncements
on lust:
With regard to the pleasures of lust, the nature of the cognition, by the presence
of which they are to be defined, is somewhat difficult to analyse. But it appears to
include both cognitions of organic sensations and perceptions of states of the body,
of which the enjoyment is certainly an evil in itself. So far as these are concerned, lasciviousness would, then, include in its essence an admiring contemplation of
what is ugly. But certainly one of its commonest ingredients, in its worst forms, is
an enjoyment of the same state of mind in other people: and in this case it would
therefore also include a love of what is evil.
Sidgwick was not so dogmatic. How curious that no one thought to apply to
the “inconclusive” Methods what Beatrice Webb said of Moore’s Principia,
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in condemnation of Bloomsbury – namely, that it was “a metaphysical
justification for doing what you like.”
At any rate, Sidgwick’s arguments on the topic of purity are present in all
editions of the Methods, from the first to the last, though in the first edition the two arguments are distinguished as “external” and “internal.” But
there is another argument in this section that seems to have materialized
at a time especially suggestive of the influence of Symonds. Section of
Chapter of Book III deals with how “even the prohibition of Suicide,
so far as rational, seems to rest ultimately on utilitarian grounds.” As in
the case of purity, the emotion surrounding the issue is no indication of
the clarity of the moral principles involved:
[I]t is true that among what are commonly called ‘duties to self’ we find the duty
of self-preservation prescribed with apparent absoluteness, – at least so far as the
sacrifice of one’s life is not imperatively required for the preservation of the lives of others, or for the attainment of some result conceived to be very important to
society. I think, however, that when confronted with the question of preserving
a life which we can foresee will be both miserable and burdensome to others –
e.g. the life of a man stricken with a fatal disease which precludes the possibility
of work of any kind, during the weeks or months of agony that remain to him, –
though Common Sense would still deny the legitimacy of suicide, even under
these conditions, it would also admit the necessity of finding reasons for the
denial. This admission would imply that the universal wrongness of suicide is at
any rate not self-evident. And the reasons that would be found – so far as they
did not ultimately depend upon premises drawn from Revelational Theology –
would, I think, turn out to be utilitarian, in a broad sense of the term: it would
be urged that if any exceptions to the rule prohibiting suicide were allowed,
dangerous encouragement would be given to the suicidal impulse in other cases
in which suicide would really be a weak and cowardly dereliction of social duty: it
would also probably be urged that the toleration of suicide would facilitate secret
murders. In short, the independent axiom of which we are in search seems to
disappear on close examination in this case no less than in others. (ME )
Suicide had of course long been one of the most provocative issues
in moral theory. David Hume had shocked the religious world when he
defended, on a utilitarian basis, the possibility of permissible suicide, and it
is perhaps not surprising that Sidgwick steered clear of this issue in earlier
editions of the Methods. He had, as early as –, given the issue some
(rather glib) thought; in connection with the candid exchanges fostered
by the Initial Society, he observed that “the real reason why a virtuous
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which a man so unselfish as to kill himself for the sake of humanity would
not benefit humanity more by living.” For public purposes, however, the
issue begins to appear only in the third edition of , in the form of a
note appended to Chapter of Book II that reads:
It is sometimes thought to be a necessary assumption of Hedonists that a surplus
of pleasure over pain is actually attainable by human beings: a proposition which
an extreme pessimist would deny. But the conclusion that life is always on the
whole painful would not prove it to be unreasonable for a man to aim ultimately at
minimizing pain, if this is still admitted to be possible; though it would, no doubt, drive a rational egoist to immediate suicide. (ME )
The fuller discussion materializes in the fourth edition, of , without
any attention being called to it in the new Preface, although Sidgwick
regularly indicated any important changes in that place. But the point is
that he seems to have first felt compelled to address the topic in print at the
very time when he was again discussing it with Symonds. In the summer of
, Symonds had had another collapse, was growing pessimistic about
Davos, and had been getting bad news about Janet’s condition. Sidgwick
visited him during that period, and in a letter written to him afterwards
explained:
I do not like to answer the question you put to me about prolongation of life
except in an absolutely sincere way; and, speaking quite unreservedly I must say
that there are cases in which it does not seem to me that any one is morally bound
to prolong his life, – supposing he can avoid causing to those dear to him the
pain which anything recognised as suicide would cause, and the moral shock and
painful stigma which anything publicly known to be such involves. For instance if I
could foresee with approximate certainty that the last two years of my life would be
what my poor mother’s were, a long gradually intensified lethargy both of faculties
and of emotional susceptibilities, I should think it right to cut these two years of
my life in any latent manner that I could. I mention this because I believe my physical constitution to be very like my mother’s, and so habitually contemplate
this termination as a possibility – though of course not yet near enough for any
practical considerations as to how to avoid it. But I cannot apply this general view
to your case: for I cannot doubt that any three years you may be able to add to your
life by wise management will be years of thoroughly effective human existence, –
even if your power of literary work should become less vigorous and sustained.
(CWC)
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The letter is incomplete, and breaks off with Sidgwick explaining how
he is at work on “the third edition of his . . . ” – but this could only be a reference to the third edition of the Methods.
Evidently, sex and suicide, coupled with Symondsish pessimism, pro-
vided Sidgwick with some additional cases where the egoist and the utili-
tarian might differ, and where the dualism of practical reason would carry
serious force. Despite the guarded statement in the Methods, it is plain
from his correspondence what Sidgwick really thinks: as in the case of
hypocrisy and veracity, he allows the possibility of a more or less esoteric
approach, allowing suicide but not the publicizing of it. And he also urges
that he would resort to “latent” means – negative inaction rather than pos-
itive action, as in the case of the expression of his religious views. But the
exact meaning of “thoroughly effective human existence” is left unclear –
the phrase does not, on the face of it, settle the difference between the
egoist and the utilitarian. Here Sidgwick’s esotericism seems to be of the
utilitarian sort, but as in the case of sex, he avoids an extended confronta-
tion with the rational egoist, even while admitting in passing that here
would be a more provocative challenge that he could not meet. After all,
the challenge of the egoist on suicide is simply the flip side of the egoist on
immortality: absent belief in the latter, what becomes of the prohibition
of the former?
Given the suicide craze that hit England in the s, and the fate of
various Bloomsberries, it is ironic that Sidgwick’s discussion of suicide
was more forthright than anything in Moore. The “Yen,” as Strachey
had dubbed Moore, apparently lacked a certain penetration when it came
to this problem. But for Sidgwick the issues of egoism, immortality, and
suicide were intertwined, were in fact the recurrent matter of his relation-
ship with Symonds, clearly lending additional force to the urgency he felt
about the reconciliation project. His depressive periods, like Symonds’s,
invariably brought thoughts of suicide, kept in check largely by that all-
too-thin theistic hope. Living out of a sense of duty alone could be very
hard.
At any rate, these two issues, like the issue of veracity, illuminate the
artful evasions at work in the Methods – the dry way in which Sidgwick
leads the reader only so far down the road of honest questioning on matters
that he is personally struggling with day in and day out, and that he clearly
regards as of supreme ethical significance. And it is only an interpretive
effort of this form that can effectively bring out the various ways in which
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Sidgwick’s project, for all his skeptical reticence, did betray many of the
same elitist and Eurocentric prejudices evident in the work of Jowett and
Green. Like his Oxford comrades, Sidgwick was a reformer concerned
about the increasing “Philistinism” of democratic market society; if he
was “the last of the Benthamites,” he nonetheless went far toward burying
the “Benthamite” defense of laissez-faire, and he was certainly not as
complacent or conservative as the term “Government House” utilitarian
suggests. Still, his esotericism was quite real, and, again like his Oxford
comrades, he had a vision of a revitalized civilization that could take some
very disturbing turns. The Balliol of Jowett and Green had, after all,
inspired Lord Curzon and Alfred Milner, as well as Mary Ward and Jane
Addams. The tensions at work in such groups as the Apostles and Old
Mortality did not always have a satisfactory resolution.
II. Socialisms
In the opening chapters of the Methods, Sidgwick carefully delineates how
his study relates to politics and speculation about ideal societies. He notes
how some thinkers, such as Spencer, hold that theoretical ethi
cs ought to
take the form of “Absolute Ethics,”
. . . an investigation not of what ought to be done here and now, but of what ought to be the rules of behaviour in a society of ideally perfect human beings. Thus the
subject-matter of our study would be doubly ideal: as it would not only prescribe
what ought to be done as distinct from what is, but what ought to be done in a
society that itself is not, but only ought to be. (ME )
For Sidgwick, however, “it is too paradoxical to say that the whole duty of
man is summed up in the effort to attain an ideal state of social relations;
and unless we say this, we must determine our duties to existing men in
view of existing circumstances: and this is what the student of Ethics seeks
to do in a systematic manner” (ME ).
To be sure, Sidgwick allows that ethics and politics are both departments
of practical philosophy, and that both are to be distinguished from the
sphere of the positive sciences by their concern with “the determination
of ends to be sought, or rules to be unconditionally obeyed.” And of course,
insofar as politics is concerned with ideal rather than positive law, the links
with ethics will be important. A view that the law of property is unjust,
for example, will affect one’s deliberations concerning moral duty.
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Still, for Sidgwick, “the extent of this influence is vague and uncertain.”
Suppose I am a slave-owner in a society in which slavery is established, and
become convinced that private property in human beings should be abolished by
law: it does not therefore follow that I shall regard it as my moral duty to set free my slaves at once. I may think immediate general abolition of slavery not only
hopeless, but even inexpedient for the slaves themselves, who require a gradual
education for freedom: so that it is better for the present to aim at legal changes
that would cut off the worst evils of slavery, and meanwhile to set an example
of humane and considerate treatment of bondsmen. Similar reasonings might be
applied to the abolition of private property in the instruments of production, or
