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is of course controversial, though I think highly plausible, particularly if utilitarianism is understood in a broader way, with less of a fixation on “maximizing” as
opposed to “satisficing.” See, especially, T. D. Campbell’s excellent work Adam
Smith’s Science of Morals (London: Allen and Unwin, ); Ian Simpson Ross’s The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) gives a clear and concise statement of the view, and some helpful points of comparison with Hume – see,
e.g., p. .
. Mill, Utilitarianism, p. .
. J.B.Scheewind,“SidgwickandtheCambridgeMoralists,”inSchultz,ed., Essays,
p. .
. Interestingly, Skorupski has also noted how, from certain angles, Mill and
Sidgwick seem closer than has been supposed: “the difference between Mill and
Sidgwick is not great. Both think that fundamental principles of reasoning are
located by reflective scrutiny, which identifies what our most fundamental com-
mitments are. In both cases there is also an appeal to the systematic coherence a
principle can provide, and to the general agreement it can secure. Nor does Mill
deny that a fundamental principle, either of theoretical or of practical reasons, is
a requirement of reason. . . . his standpoint on reason is naturalistic, not sceptical.
And on the other hand Sidgwick does not put his self-evident rational intuitions
into an explicitly anti-naturalistic Kantian or Platonic setting.” See his English-Language Philosophy, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
Hurka, in “Moore in the Middle,” takes sharp issue with any such account of
the differences between Sidgwick and Moore, questioning “whether there is
a significant difference between non-naturalisms that do and do not posit non-
natural properties” (p. ). But he leaves it open how to draw the larger
moral: “that Moore’s metaethics were no more metaphysically suspect than
Sidgwick’s, or that Sidgwick’s were as hopelessly extravagant as Moore’s.”
Gibbard’s “Normative and Recognitional Concepts” is suggestive of how to push
the former line, though Gibbard’s own expressivist position is rather similar to
Russell’s noncognitivist appropriation of Sidgwick’s intuitionism in Human So-
ciety in Ethics and Politics. Sidgwick and Moore remained cognitivists, taking ethical claims as having truth value.
. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics, p. .
. Sidgwick, it must be admitted, did much to contribute to the unfortunate ten-
dency to seize on some of the less perspicuous passages of Mill’s Utilitarianism in order to demonstrate his supposed failings as a logician. See Crisp’s critical discussion of Mill in his edition of Utilitarinism and his Mill on Utilitarianism.That Mill did not suffer from many of the confusions critics have attributed to him
is plain. To assess the worth of Sidgwick’s argument, however, it is necessary
to ask why he was so persuaded that only intuitionism could afford a rational
justification of first principles.
. An especially helpful discussion, produced while work was proceeding on the
Methods, is to be found in Sidgwick’s “Verification of Beliefs,” Contemporary Review (July ), pp. –. The earlier and in some ways more revealing
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version of this, delivered to the Metaphysical Society, is reproduced for the first
time in CWC.
. See the excellent discussion in Shaver, Rational Egoism, pp. –.
. Sidgwick, “Utilitarianism,” p. .
. See, e.g., PSR.
. Thus, William Frankena, in “Henry Sidgwick,” in The Encyclopedia of Morals, ed. V. Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, ), finds eight; Schneewind,
in Sidgwick’s Ethics, ultimately settles on four. The latter seems the more helpful account.
. It is this gap, between what the axioms actually accomplish by way of crediting
the powers of pure practical reason, and the greater claims of utilitarianism on
the matter of the nature of the good and its maximization, that suggests how close
Skorupski’s “generic” or “philosophical” utilitarianism actually is to Sidgwick’s
position–see his Ethical Explorations for an extended account. The parallels are even more striking if one holds, as Shaver does, that Sidgwick’s account of the
justification of egoism is not on the same level or as compelling as his defense of
universal concern or impartiality; see the discussion in the following sections of
this chapter.
. Sidgwick in fact wrote extensively about the Kantian system as a whole, and
at the time of his death was contemplating a book on “Kant and Kantism in
England.” The drift of his larger interpretation, which is more cogent than the
Methods conveys, is given in the posthumous LPK. The best discussion of the
complex Kantian elements in Sidgwick’s ethics remains Schneewind, Sidgwick’s
Ethics, which is treated at greater length in the final section of this chapter. It is curious that the interest in Kantianism was another matter on which Moore
was apparently more indebted to Sidgwick than he allowed; the lecture course on
The Elements of Ethics that Moore gave in was to be followed by a series on Kant’s moral philosophy, and the original title of the first series was A Course of
Ten Lectures on The Elements of Ethics, with a View to the Appreciation of Kant’s Moral Philosophy. See Moore, The Elements of Ethics.
. See Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics, pp. –.
. Schneewind’s early essay “First Principles and Common Sense Morality in
Sidgwick’s Ethics,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , no. (),
pp. –, might be seen as setting the stage for a Rawlsian interpretation,
as it was by Peter Singer in “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,” Monist
(), pp. –, who defends Sidgwick as closer to Hare in the rejection of
received opinion. A good summary is in Steven Sverdlik, “Sidgwick’s Method-
ology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (), pp. –, and as will be shown, the debate has been revisited more recently by Brink, “Common Sense and
First Principles in Sidgwick’s Methods,” and Shaver, Rational Egoism, especially pp. –.
. Again, on this see Shaver, “Sidgwick’s Minimal Metaethics,” and Darwall,
“Learning from Frankena.” It is noteworthy that intuitionism is also under-
going something of a revival. Robert Audi, though he scarcely recognizes the
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significance of Sidgwick as his intellectual godfather, has importantly w
orked out
a form of fallibilistic intuitionism that “is free of some often alleged defects of
intuitionism: arbitrariness, dogmatism, and an implausible philosophy of mind.”
See his Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York: Oxford University
Press, ), p. . Also important in this connection is Roger Crisp’s “Sidgwick
and the Boundaries of Intuitionism,” in Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations, ed.
Philip Stratton-Lake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –. Crisp suggests
that Sidgwick took a “step backwards” when he disparaged “aesthetic intuition-
ism,” or judgment in particular cases, and that this was left to Ross to develop.
Even so, “[F]reed of the mistaken emphasis on practical precision . . . Sidgwick’s
intutionism provides a powerful method for the resolution of debates in nor-
mative ethics, though much remains to be done in working out the details and
implications of his conditions for self-evidence” (p. ). For a sharply contrary
view about the “step backwards,” see the works by Donagan cited in note .
. Sidgwick’s Ethics, pp. –.
. Crisp, “Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism,” p. .
. Crisp, “Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism,” p. , p. . Crisp, like
Skorupski, takes a profoundly Sidgwickian approach to ethics and metaethics,
one far less anachronistic or opportunistic in its appropriation of the Methods than most such efforts. As remarked earlier, it remains an open question just how far
Sidgwick can be cast in “naturalistic” terms. There is something mildly peculiar
in the idea that he was deeply averse to postulating ghostly entities in metaethics,
when he was, after all, so receptive to the existence of ghosts generally.
. Brink, “Common Sense and First Principles,” pp. –. As Brink notes, the
dialectical method is common to Aristotle and Mill.
. Ibid., p. , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Schneewind’s Sidgwick’s Ethics demonstrates how progressivism was a distinctive feature of mid-nineteenth-century intuitionism; see also Alan Donagan,
“Sidgwick and Whewellian Intuitionism,” in Schultz, ed., Essays; “Whewell’s
Elements of Morality,” Journal of Philosophy (), pp. –; and “Justice and Variable Social Institutions,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. ,
Social and Political Philosophy, ed. P. French et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). Donagan was a distinguished defender of the Whewellian
project who argued, like Schneewind, that Sidgwick had treated it unfairly by
failing to appreciate how alternative, deontological fundamental principles could
succeed in systematizing commonsense morality. However, he did credit Sidgwick
for having resisted the move to an Aristotelian defense of “prima facie” reasons,
the course that Ross would later take.
. Sidgwick, “Utilitarianism,” p. .
. Shaver, Rational Egoism, pp. –. Shaver’s work provides an excellent defense of Sidgwick’s epistemology, avoiding many of the crudities of earlier interpretations,
though it does admittedly develop points made by Schneewind and Schultz in
defense of Sidgwick’s consistency.
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. See Rawls’s discussion in Political Liberalism, pp. –, though his (brief) characterization of Sidgwick as sharing the rational intuitionism of Clarke and Price
conceals more than it reveals. Again, see McMahan, “Moral Intuition”; Shaver,
Rational Egoism; and Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character.
. Sidgwick, “The Establishment of Ethical First Principles,” pp. –.
. Sidgwick, “Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies,” p. .
. Sidgwick, “Utilitarianism,” pp. –.
. Stephen, “Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics,” p. .
. “Henry Sidgwick,” The Independent Review (June ), p. .
. See the letter from Sidgwick in Alexander Bain, Autobiography, ed. W. L.
Davidson (London: Longman, ).
. Seth Pringle–Pattison, “Critical Notice: Henry Sidgwick and Thomas Hill
Green,” Mind, new series, (), p. .
. Broad, Five Types, p. .
. See C. A. J. Coady’s helpful piece, “Henry Sidgwick,” in the Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. VII, The Nineteenth Century, ed. C. L. Ten (London: Routledge,
), p. . William Frankena had long urged the plausibility of this form of
response to Broad; see his “Sidgwick and the Dualism of Practical Reason,” and
other essays reprinted in Perspectives on Morality, ed. K. E. Goodpaster (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, ); and “Sidgwick and the History
of Ethical Dualism,” in Schultz, Essays.
. Shaver, Rational Egoism, p. .
. See, e.g., David Brink, “Sidgwick’s Dualism of Practical Reason,” pp. –,
and “Sidgwick and the Rationale for Rational Egoism,” in Schultz, ed., Essays, pp. –.
. Shaver, Rational Egoism, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. See Reasons and Persons, especially pp. –, where Parfit discusses the distinction passage.
. Parfit suggests that Sidgwick’s hedonism may have misled him here, making
him confuse the present-aim view with the (absurd) “hedonistic egoism of the
present” view that one should maximize one’s happiness now. See Reasons and
Persons, pp. –.
. In the first edition, p. , there is a similar suggestion: “If the unity of the Ego is really illusory, if the permanent identical ‘I’ is not a fact but a fiction . . .”
. Shaver, like most other philosophical commentators on Sidgwick, ignores it
entirely.
. See C. D. Broad, “Self and Others,” in Broad’s Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. D. Cheney (London: George Allen and Unwin, ), pp. –. It should
be noted that Broad concludes this essay with a sketch of an argument for the
Sidgwickian “neutralist”: “Even if Neutralism be true, and even if it be self-
evident to a philosopher who contemplates it in a cool hour in his study, there are
powerful historical causes which would tend to make certain forms of restricted
Altruism or qualified Egoism seem to be true to most unreflective persons at
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all times and even to many reflective ones at most times. Therefore the fact
that common-sense rejects Neutralism, and tends to accept this other type of
doctrine, is not a conclusive objection to the truth, or even to the necessary truth, of Neutralism” (p. ). See also Allan Gibbard’s “Inchoately Utilitarian Common
Sense: The Bearing of a Thesis of Sidgwick’s on Moral Theory,” in The Limits
of Utilitarianism, ed. H. B. Miller and W. H. Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), pp. –; and Crisp, “Sidgwick and Self Interest.”
. Shaver, Rational Egoism, pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. The passages are from “Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies,” p. .
. The passages are quoted by Shaver, Rational Egoism, p. .
. Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), p. , note .
. Stephen Darwall, “Reason, Norm, and Value,” in Reason, Ethics, and Society:
Themes from Kurt Baier, with His Responses, ed. J. B. Sehneewind (Chicago: Open Court, ), pp. –.
. William Frankena, “Sidgwick and the History of Ethical Dualism,” in Schultz,
ed., Essays, p. . Frankena’s work on Sidgwick rightly stressed the importance of comparing ME to OHE, which grew out of Sidgwick’s entry on “Ethics”
for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There are some interesting student notes on Sidgwick’s lectures on the history of ethics in the archives at
King’s College, Cambridge, mostly taken by John Neville Keynes.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Of course, Shaver does address these matters to a degree. But he is fairly impatient with the religious orientation that Sidgwick took so seriously, regarding it more
as a source of potential error that should have led Sidgwick to discount the
importance of consensus among the theologically inclined (see Rational Egoism, p. ). Sidgwick was at least slightly more receptive to the idea of enlightened,
Apostolic theological inquiry.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Review: J. Grote’s Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy,”
Cambridge University Reporter (February , ), pp. –.
. Popularinrecentneo-Hobbesian theory–onthis, see, e.g.,David Brink,“Rational