## 1. Life and Background



Sidgwick was born on May 31, 1838, in the small Yorkshire town of
Skipton. The extended Sidgwick family was well-known in the area and
quite prosperous, with their cotton-spinning mills representing the
oldest manufacturing firms in the town (Dawson 1882; Schultz 2017).
But Henry was the second surviving son of Mary Crofts and the Reverend
William Sidgwick, the headmaster of the grammar school in Skipton, who
died when Henry was only three. Henry's older brother William
went on to become an Oxford don, as did his younger brother Arthur.
His sister Mary, known as Minnie, ended up marrying a second cousin,
Edward White Benson, who in addition to being an early mentor of
Henry's (and Rugby master) went on to become the archbishop of
Canterbury. The Sidgwick and Benson families would contribute much to
English letters and science over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, though their legacies have also been
controversial on some counts (Askwith 1971; Bolt 2011; Goldhill
2016).



Henry was educated at Rugby and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he took his degree in 1859. As an undergraduate, he excelled at both
mathematics and, especially, classics, in due course becoming Craven
Scholar, 33rd Wrangler, and Senior Classic, also winning the
Chancellor's Medal. He wound up staying at Cambridge his entire
life, first, beginning in October of 1859, as a Fellow of Trinity and
a lecturer in classics--a position that in the later sixties
evolved into a lectureship in the moral sciences--then, from
1875, as praelector in moral and political philosophy, and finally,
from 1883, as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. He resigned
his Fellowship in 1869 because he could no longer subscribe in good
conscience to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, as
the position required. This act helped inspire the successful
opposition to such requirements. In 1881 he was elected an honorary
Fellow, and in 1885, he regained a full Fellowship, remarking on the
changing times: 



> 
> 
> Last time I swore that I would drive away strange doctrine; this time
> I only pledged myself to restore any College property that might be in
> my possession when I ceased to be a Fellow. (*Memoir*: 400)
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick's Cambridge career was rich in reformist activity
(Rothblatt 1968; Harvie 1976; Todd 1999). As an undergraduate, he had
been elected to the "Apostles", the secret Cambridge
discussion society that did much to shape the intellectual direction
of modern Cambridge; Sidgwick's allegiance to this group was a
very significant feature of his life and work (Lubenow 1998). The
1860s, which he described as his years of "Storm and
Stress" over his religious views and commitments, were also the
years in which his identity as an academic liberal took shape, and he
got caught up in a range of causes emphasizing better and broader
educational opportunities, increased professionalism, and greater
religious freedom. He evolved into an educational reformer committed
to downplaying the influence of classics, introducing modern subjects,
and opening up higher education to women. Much influenced by the
writings of F. D. Maurice and J. S. Mill, he would become one of the
leading proponents of higher education for women and play a guiding
role in the foundation of Newnham College, Cambridge, one of the first
colleges for women in England (McWilliams Tullberg 1975 [1998];
Sutherland 2006). He was also active in the cause of university
reorganization generally, in due course serving on the General Board
of Studies, the Special Board for Moral Sciences, and the Indian Civil
Service Board, and he worked tirelessly to expand educational
opportunities and professionalize educational efforts through such
vehicles as correspondence courses, extension lectures, the Cambridge
Working Men's College, and the University Day Training College
for teachers (initiated by Oscar Browning). Such educational reforms
were, he held, also of political value in overcoming class conflict
and social strife. But Sidgwick's broader political commitments,
which ranged from academic liberal to Liberal Unionist--he joined
the breakaway faction of the Liberal Party opposing Gladstone's
policy of Home Rule for Ireland--to independent, were complex and
shifting; he was not able to rise above the marked imperialistic and
orientalist, racist tendencies of the late Victorian era (Schultz
2004; Bell 2007, 2016).



In 1876 Sidgwick married Eleanor Mildred Balfour, the sister of his
former student, Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister. An
accomplished and independent woman with serious scientific
interests--she collaborated with her brother-in-law Lord Rayleigh
on many scientific papers--Eleanor Sidgwick worked as an equal
partner with her husband on many fronts, particularly higher education
for women and parapsychology. She eventually took over as Principal of
Newnham in 1892, and was for many decades a mainstay of the Society
for Psychical Research, an organization that Henry had helped to found
(in 1882) and several times headed, though his interest in the
paranormal had been evident long before. The Sidgwicks hoped that
their psychical research might ultimately support some core religious
claims, particularly concerning the personal survival of physical
death, which they deemed a vital support for morality. Their extensive
and often quite methodologically sophisticated investigations were not
as conclusive as they had hoped, but following Henry's death
from cancer on August 28, 1900, Eleanor did become persuaded that he
had succeeded in communicating from "the other world". The
Sidgwicks' work in this field continues to this day to be
debated by academic parapsychologists (Gauld 1968; Braude 2003;
McLuhan & Gauld 2020
 [Other Internet Resources]).



Although Sidgwick published extensively in his lifetime, he is best
known for his first major book, *The Methods of Ethics*, which
first appeared in 1874 and went through five editions during his
lifetime. His second most widely read book would be his *Outlines
of the History of Ethics for English Readers*, which appeared in
1886 as an expanded version of the article on the subject that he had
contributed to the famous ninth edition of the *Encyclopedia
Britannica*. But he also published *The Principles of Political
Economy* (1883), *The Elements of Politics* (1891), and
*Practical Ethics, A Collection of Addresses and Essays*
(1898), and after his death, Eleanor Sidgwick worked with various of
his former colleagues to bring out *Lectures on the Ethics of T. H.
Green, H. Spencer, and J. Martineau* (1902), *Philosophy, Its
Scope and Relations* (1902), *The Development of European
Polity* (1903), *Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses*
(1904), *Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical
Lectures and Essays* (1905), and *Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir*
(1906), which Eleanor and Arthur Sidgwick assembled largely from his
correspondence and journal. These posthumous works are typically quite
polished and shed a great deal of light on the works that Sidgwick
himself saw through publication (Schneewind 1977).



As Sidgwick's publications attest, he was not only a pre-eminent
moral philosopher, with sophisticated views on both going
controversies in ethics and metaethics and the history of these
subjects, but also an accomplished epistemologist, classicist,
economist, political theorist, political historian, literary critic,
parapsychologist, and educational theorist. If he was a founder of the
Cambridge school of philosophy, he was also a founder of the Cambridge
school of economics (along with his colleague and sometimes nemesis
Alfred Marshall) and of the Cambridge school of political theory
(along with such colleagues as Browning and Sir John Seeley). If such
students as Moore and Russell owed him much, so too did such students
and admirers as Balfour, J. N. Keynes, F. W. Maitland, F. Y.
Edgeworth, James Ward, Frank Podmore, and E. E. Constance Jones. He
had serious interests in many areas of philosophy and theology, and
also wrote insightfully about poetry and literature, two of his great
loves (at Newnham, he lectured on Shakespeare, along with such
subjects as philosophy and economics). Indeed, Sidgwick was a force in
the larger cultural developments of his age, active in such
influential discussion societies as the Metaphysical Society and the
Synthetic Society. His friends included George Eliot, T. H. Green,
James Bryce, H. G. Dakyns, Roden Noel, and, of special importance,
John Addington Symonds, the erudite cultural historian, poet, and man
of letters who was a pioneer in the serious historical study (and
promotion) of same sex love (Schultz 2004). Sidgwick's versatile
and many-sided intellect--not to mention his keen wit--are
typically better displayed in his essays and letters than in his
best-known academic books. He was in fact much loved for his gentle
humor (or "Sidgwickedness") and sympathetic conversation,
and his philosophical students prized him for his candor. As Balfour
put it: 



> 
> 
> Of all the men I have known he was the readiest to consider every
> controversy and every controversialist on their merits. He never
> claimed authority; he never sought to impose his views; he never
> argued for victory; he never evaded an issue. (*Memoir*:
> 311)
> 
> 
> 


## 2. The Methods Of Ethics And Philosophy


### 2.1 Preliminaries



Sidgwick's *Methods* was long in the making. His
correspondence with his close friend H. G. Dakyns, a Clifton master
who had been a private tutor for the Tennyson family, reveals how long
and volatile the development of his ethical views was, particularly
during the 1860s when he was working himself free of Anglican
orthodoxy. As early as 1862, he wrote to Dakyns that he was
"revolving a Theory of Ethics" and working on "a
reconciliation between the moral sense and utilitarian theories"
(*Memoir*: 75). He started telling people that he was
"engaged on a Great Work", which would indeed turn out to
be the case. By 1867, much of the basic intellectual structure of the
*Methods* was clearly in place; according to Marshall, at the
faculty discussion group known as the "Grote Club",
Sidgwick 



> 
> 
> read a long & general sketch of the various systems of morality:
> I. Absolute right II. Make yourself noble III. Make yourself happy IV
> Increase the general happiness. In the course of it he committed
> himself to the statement that without appreciating the effect of our
> action on the happiness of ourselves or of others we could have no
> idea of right & wrong. (quoted in Schultz 2004: 142)
> 
> 
> 



It was also in 1867 that Sidgwick sent a draft of his pamphlet on
"The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription" to J. S. Mill,
inviting comments. This work, part of his efforts with the Free
Christian Union (an organization for promoting free and open religious
inquiry), reflected his casuistical struggles over whether he had a
right to keep his Fellowship, given his increasingly Theistic views.
He had been increasingly drawn to Theism, which then, as now, stressed
that "God's will and purpose, and God's assurance of
an ultimate fulfilment, are behind all that is happening"
(Polkinghorne 1998: 114), but without the orthodox commitments to
belief in the Trinity, miracles, eternal punishment, etc.. As Sidgwick
explained to his sister: 



> 
> 
> I have written a pamphlet ... on the text "Let every man be
> fully persuaded in his own mind". That is really the gist of the
> pamphlet--that if the preachers of religion wish to retain their
> hold over educated men they must show in their utterances on sacred
> occasions the same sincerity, exactness, unreserve, that men of
> science show in expounding the laws of nature. I do not think that
> much good is to be done by saying this, but I want to liberate my
> soul, and then ever after hold my peace. (*Memoir*: 226) 
> 
> 
> 



As he put it in the pamphlet, which appeared in 1870:



> 
> 
> What theology has to learn from the predominant studies of the age is
> something very different from advice as to its method or estimates of
> its utility; it is the imperative necessity of accepting unreservedly
> the conditions of life under which these studies live and flourish. It
> is sometimes said that we live in an age that rejects authority. The
> statement, thus qualified, seems misleading; probably there never was
> a time when the number of beliefs held by each individual,
> undemonstrated and unverified by himself, was greater. But it is true
> that we only accept authority of a particular sort; the authority,
> namely, that is formed and maintained by the unconstrained agreement
> of individual thinkers, each of whom we believe to be seeking truth
> with single-mindedness and sincerity, and declaring what he has found
> with scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exactness and
> precision. (Sidgwick 1870: 14-15)
> 
> 
> 



This was a vision of inquiry and even culture that Sidgwick would
promote throughout his life, though after this point he no longer
openly directed his criticisms at the church. Mill had replied to his
effort to address the question of subscription on
"objective" and "utilitarian" grounds: 



> 
> 
> What ought to be the exceptions ... to the general duty of truth?
> This large question has never yet been treated in a way at once
> rational and comprehensive, partly because people have been afraid to
> meddle with it, and partly because mankind have never yet generally
> admitted that the effect which actions tend to produce on human
> happiness is what constitutes them right or wrong. (Mill 1867)
> 
> 
> 



Mill urged Sidgwick to turn his "thoughts to this more
comprehensive subject", and apparently when the latter did, he
concluded that it would not be conducive to the general happiness to
continue his open attacks on organized religion. The reasons for this
larger conclusion are only partly evident from the *Methods*
itself.



Sidgwick did always explicitly claim, however, that his struggles with
the ethics of subscription shaped the views set forth in the
*Methods*. These struggles had led him "back to
philosophy" from his more theological and philological
investigations--for which he had learned German and Hebrew and
struggled with biblical hermeneutics. He found the problem of whether
he ought to resign his Fellowship very 



> 
> 
> difficult, and I may say that it was while struggling with the
> difficulty thence arising that I went through a good deal of the
> thought that was ultimately systematised in the *The Methods of
> Ethics*. (*Memoir*: 38) 
> 
> 
> 



One of the ways in which this is evident has been highlighted in the
work of J. B. Schneewind, whose *Sidgwick's Ethics and
Victorian Moral Philosophy* (1977) was the most comprehensive and
sophisticated commentary on Sidgwick's ethics produced in the
twentieth century. As part of an extensive account of the historical
context of the *Methods*, underscoring how Sidgwick's
work was shaped by both the utilitarian tradition and its intuitionist
and religious opposition (represented in part by the "Cambridge
Moralists" William Whewell, Julius Hare, F. D. Maurice, and John
Grote), Schneewind argued that



> 
> 
> it is a mistake to view the book as primarily a defence of
> utilitarianism. It is true, of course, that a way of supporting
> utilitarianism is worked out in detail in the *Methods*, and
> that there are places in it where Sidgwick seems to be saying quite
> plainly that utilitarianism is the best available ethical theory. From
> his other writings we know also that he thinks of himself as committed
> to utilitarianism, and that he assumes it in analysing specific moral
> and political issues. Yet it does not follow that the *Methods*
> itself should be taken simply as an argument for that position. We
> must try to understand it in a way that makes sense of its
> author's own explicit account of it. (Schneewind 1977: 192)
> 
> 
> 



That account, as both Schneewind and Rawls have stressed, repeatedly
affirms that the aim of the book is less practice than knowledge, 



> 
> 
> to expound as clearly and as fully as my limits will allow the
> different methods of Ethics that I find implicit in our common moral
> reasoning; to point out their mutual relations; and where they seem to
> conflict, to define the issue as much as possible. 
> 
> 
> 



That is, echoing his views on theological inquiry, he confesses
that:



> 
> 
> I have thought that the predominance in the minds of moralists of a
> desire to edify has impeded the real progress of ethical science: and
> that this would be benefited by an application to it of the same
> disinterested curiosity to which we chiefly owe the great discoveries
> of physics. It is in this spirit that I have endeavoured to compose
> the present work: and with this view I have desired to concentrate the
> reader's attention, from first to last, not on the practical
> results to which our methods lead, but on the methods themselves. I
> have wished to put aside temporarily the urgent need which we all feel
> of finding and adopting the true method of determining what we ought
> to do; and to consider simply what conclusions will be rationally
> reached if we start with certain ethical premises, and with what
> degree of certainty and precision. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: vi])
> 
> 
> 



The model for such an approach is not Bentham or even J. S. Mill, but
Aristotle, whose *Ethics* gave us 



> 
> 
> the Common Sense Morality of Greece, reduced to consistency by careful
> comparison: given not as something external to him but as what
> "we"--he and others--think, ascertained by
> reflection. 
> 
> 
> 



This was really, in effect, "the Socratic induction, elicited by
interrogation" (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: xix]).



As Marcus Singer and others have observed (M. Singer 1974; Phillips
2022), Sidgwick's notion of a "method" of ethics is
not the same as that of an ethical principle, ethical theory, or
ethical decision-procedure. A "method" is a way of
"obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be
done" and thus it might reflect a commitment to one or more
ethical principles as the ultimate ground of one's determination
of what one has most reason to do, here and now, while allowing that
one might ordinarily be reasoning from such principles either directly
or indirectly. Thus, one might, on theological grounds, hold that the
moral order of the universe is utilitarian, with God willing the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, while also holding that the
appropriate guide for practical reason is enlightened self-interest,
since utilitarian calculations are God's business and God has
ordered the cosmos to insure that enlightened self-interest conduces
to the greatest happiness. In this case, one's "method of
ethics" would be rational egoism, but the ultimate philosophical
justification for this method would appeal to utilitarian principles.
Still, despite this emphasis on the reasoning process between
principles and practical conclusions--another reflection of his
struggles with subscription--Sidgwick obviously had quite a bit
to say in the *Methods* about the defense of the ultimate
principles of practical reason (Crisp 2014, 2015; de Lazari-Radek
& Singer 2014; Phillips 2022).



Many have felt that, in setting up the systematic comparison between
the main methods of ethics, Sidgwick was not nearly as neutral and
impartial as he thought, and in various ways slanted the discussion
against a wide range of alternatives, including Aristotelian and other
forms of perfectionism, Whewellian rationalism, Idealism, and more
(Donagan 1977, 1992; Irwin 1992, 2007, 2011; Hurka 2014a, 2014b). He
simply dismisses the traditional philosophical concern with the
"moral faculty", explaining that he is going to leave that
matter to psychologists. For Sidgwick, in any given situation, there
is something that it is right or that one ought to do, and this is the
proper sphere of ethics. The basic concept of morality is this unique,
highly general notion of "ought" or "right"
that is irreducible to naturalistic terms, *sui generis*,
though moral approbation is 



> 
> 
> inseparably bound up with the conviction, implicit or explicit, that
> the conduct approved is "really" right--that is, that
> it cannot without error, be disapproved by any other mind. (Sidgwick
> 1874 [1907: 27]) 
> 
> 
> 



On this count, at least, his student G. E. Moore was willing to
declare the *Methods* untainted by the "naturalistic
fallacy"--that is, the confusion of the "is" of
attribution and the "is" of identity that supposedly
infected much previous ethical theory, including that of Bentham and
the Mills. And indeed, it is plain that Sidgwick parted company from
classical utilitarianism in many ways, rejecting the empiricism,
psychological egoism, and associationism (supposedly) characteristic
of the earlier tradition. F.H. Hayward, who wrote one of the first
books on Sidgwick's ethics, famously complained that E. E.
Constance Jones had missed just how original Sidgwick was: 



> 
> 
> Sidgwick's identification of "Right" with
> "Reasonable" and "Objective"; his view of
> Rightness as an "ultimate and unanalysable notion"
> (however connected subsequently with Hedonism); and his admission that
> Reason is, in a sense, a motive to the will, are due to the more or
> less "unconscious" influence of Kant. Miss Jones appears
> to think that these are the common-places of every ethical system, and
> that real divergences only arise when we make the next step in
> advance. I should rather regard this Rationalistic terminology as
> somewhat foreign to Hedonism. I do not think that Miss Jones will
> find, in Sidgwick's Hedonistic predecessors, any such emphasis
> on Reason (however interpreted). (Hayward 1901b: 361) 
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick himself allowed that Kant was one of his
"masters", and he was also quite familiar with the works
of Hegel. Schneewind's reading (1977) has stressed this
influence, along with the influence of Joseph Butler, whose works
persuaded Sidgwick of the falsity of psychological egoism and of the
reality of other than self-interested actions (Frankena 1992). Indeed,
the comparison between Sidgwick and Kant has proved to be a fertile
and ongoing source of academic work on Sidgwick, and one of increasing
significance (Parfit 2011-2017; Paytas 2018; Paytas &
Henning [eds] 2020; Phillips 2022)



However, despite the considerable influence Kant and
Kantianism--and the Cambridge Moralists--exercised on
Sidgwick, the *Methods* also deviated from some stock features
of such views, among other things rejecting the issue of free will as
largely irrelevant to ethical theory and failing to appreciate the
Kantian arguments about expressing one's autonomy and the
incompatibility of the categorical imperative and rational egoism. As
Schneewind allows, Sidgwick's



> 
> 
> 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 distinction 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
> commonplace 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 the rationality of first principles.
> (Schneewind 1977: 419-20)
> 
> 
> 



Naturally, a Sidgwickian position on the venerable free will issue is
bound to be controversial, and recent work on the Sidgwick/Kant
comparison has brought out just how divided commentators continue to
be on this matter (Crisp 2015; Skelton 2016; Paytas 2018, Paytas &
Henning [eds] 2020; Phillips 2022). Moreover, there has also been
significant controversy over just how internalist Sidgwick's
account of moral motivation actually was. On balance, he held that the
dictates or imperatives of reason were "accompanied by a certain
impulse to do the acts recognized as right", while admitting
that other impulses may conflict (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 34]). Brink
(1988, 1992) has urged that some of Sidgwick's chief arguments
make better sense if he is construed, in externalist fashion, as
allowing the possibility that one may have good reasons not to be
moral. But Sidgwick's moderate, qualified internalism seems
plain and plausible enough to most commentators (Schultz 2004; de
Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014; and Crisp 2015).



There has been perhaps even more controversy surrounding
Sidgwick's account of the "good". The
*Methods* is at least fairly clear in arguing that the
difference between "right" and "good" in part
concerns the way in which judgments of ultimate good do not
necessarily involve definite precepts to act or even the assumption
that the good in question is attainable or the best attainable good
under the circumstances. Rightness and goodness thus "represent
differentiations of the demands of our own rationality as it applies
to our sentient and our active powers" (Schneewind 1977: 493).
But Sidgwick offers an intricate account of ultimate good that has
struck some as highly naturalistic. In *A Theory of Justice*,
Rawls famously explained that Sidgwick 



> 
> 
> characterizes a person's future good on the whole as what he
> would now desire and seek if the consequences of all the various
> courses of conduct open to him were, at the present point of time,
> accurately foreseen by him and adequately realized in imagination. An
> individual's good is the hypothetical composition of impulsive
> forces that results from deliberative reflection meeting certain
> conditions. (Rawls 1971 [1999: 366]) 
> 
> 
> 



Some have followed the Rawlsian line in casting Sidgwick as a defender
of a naturalistic "full-information" account of the
"good" (for example, Sobel 1994; Rosati 1995), but the
balance of scholarly opinion has it that Sidgwick's account
adumbrates an "objective" view that allows that some
desires, however informed, may be rejected as irrational or
unreasonable (see especially Phillips 2022: 74-76; Schneewind
1977; de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014; and Parfit 1984, 2011a,b).
Crisp (2007, 2015) and Shaver (1997) provide helpful reviews of the
debates; although the former offers perhaps the best possible defense
of the interpretation of Sidgwick's view as a naturalistic
full-information account (with an experience requirement), it also
admits that the objective list reading is a more charitable one.



Some commentators have made much of the difference between Sidgwick
and Moore on the notion of ultimate good, urging that whereas Sidgwick
prioritizes an unanalysable notion of "right", Moore
prioritizes an unanalysable notion of "good", while adding
a suspect ontological claim about "goodness" involving a
non-natural property (Moore 1903; Shaver 2000). However, Hurka (2003)
has offered some forceful arguments against most such accounts:



> 
> 
> After defining the good as what we ought to desire, he [Sidgwick]
> added that "since irrational desires cannot always be dismissed
> at once by voluntary effort", the definition cannot use
> "ought" in "the strictly ethical sense", but
> only in "the wider sense in which it merely connotes an ideal or
> standard". But this raises the question of what this
> "wider sense" is, and in particular whether it is at all
> distinct from Moore's "good". If the claim that we
> "ought" to have a desire is only the claim that the desire
> is "an ideal", how does it differ from the claim that the
> desire is good? When "ought" is stripped of its connection
> with choice, its distinctive meaning seems to slip away. (Hurka 2003:
> 603-4)
> 
> 
> 



Moreover, as Hurka has developed the point, the 



> 
> 
> initial reviewers of *Principia* did not see it as altering
> Sidgwick's ontology but emphasized its continuity with Sidgwick,
> while Moore himself said little about his non-natural property and
> even tried to limit his metaphysical claims, saying that though
> goodness is an object and therefore "*is* somehow",
> it does not "exist", and in particular does not exist in a
> "supersensible reality". (Hurka 2014a: 90)
> 
> 
> 



At any rate, for his part (and unlike Moore), Sidgwick goes on to
argue that, despite the serious problems with the views of previous
utilitarians (for example, the Millian account of the
"higher" pleasures), the best going account of ultimate
goodness is a hedonistic one, and that this is an informative,
non-tautological claim, though also a more controversial one than many
of the others that he defends. That was putting it mildly, and
commentators past and present have struggled to try to determine
whether Sidgwick regarded the hedonistic account of good as grounded
on another cognitive intuition, but one of a lower degree of certainty
than the others he endorses (Phillips 2022: 86-89). As Skelton
aptly observes, 



> 
> 
> Sidgwick is a hedonist: pain is the only non-instrumental evil;
> pleasure is the only non-instrumental good. His argument for hedonism
> in ME [Methods of Ethics] Book III, chapter xiv is a mess. (Skelton
> 2022)
> 
> 
> 



For one thing, as Irwin and Richardson have cogently argued,
Sidgwick's hedonistic commitments, and his criticisms of such
views as T. H. Green's, often reflected the (problematic)
conviction that practical reason simply must be fully clear and
determinate in its conclusions (Irwin 1992: 288-90; Richardson
1994). For Sidgwick, without some such metric as the hedonistic one,
it was hopelessly unclear how to weigh one virtue against another. But
whether or not that is actually the case, he advanced other arguments
as well, such as whether one can really recommend making people more
virtuous at the expense of their hedonistic happiness. What if the
virtuous life were conjoined to extreme pain, with no compensating
good to anyone? At many points, as Shaver observes, 



> 
> 
> Sidgwick works out what it is reasonable to desire, and so attaches
> moral to natural properties, by the ordinary gamut of
> philosopher's strategies--appeals to logical coherence,
> plausibility, and judgment after reflection. (Shaver 1997: 270) 
> 
> 
> 



But many problems remain, since Sidgwick's arguments about the
fundamental nature of pleasure and pain are far from perspicuous.
According to Rawls, 



> 
> 
> Sidgwick denies that pleasure is a measurable quality of feeling
> independent of its relation from volition. This is the view of some
> writers, he says, but one he cannot accept. He defines pleasure
> "as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is
> at least apprehended as desirable or--in cases of
> comparison--preferable". It would seem that the view he
> here rejects is the one he relies upon later as the final criterion to
> introduce coherence among ends. (Rawls 1971 [1999: 488]) 
> 
> 
> 



And Sumner, in an important treatment related to what is called the
"heterogeneity" of pleasures problem, has also urged that
Sidgwick and Mill, by contrast with Bentham,



> 
> 
> seemed to recognize that the mental states we call pleasures are a
> mixed bag as far as their phenomenal properties are concerned. On
> their view what pleasures have in common is not something internal to
> them--their peculiar feeling tone, or whatever--but
> something about us--the fact that we like them, enjoy them, value
> them, find them satisfying, seek them, wish to prolong them, and so
> on. (Sumner 1996: 86)
> 
> 
> 



Accepting the heterogeneity of pleasures objection to the feeling tone
account, along with a "resonance constraint" to the effect
that what is good for someone must somehow resonate with what they
care about, and the view that "what is ultimately good is
pleasure, understood as desirable consciousness", de
Lazari-Radek and Singer urge that Sidgwick takes a position that is
"intermediate between internalism and externalism" (de
Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014: 254). In their vigorous defense of
Sidgwickian hedonism against all rival accounts of ultimate good,
including the desire satisfaction view that Singer had previously
adopted, they explain that 



> 
> 
> the hedonist will not say that it is good for a person to be in a
> conscious state that she does not take to be desirable, and to this
> extent hedonism satisfies the resonance constraint and is internalist.
> On the other hand, hedonism does insist that what is good or bad for
> you is your states of consciousness, and nothing else, irrespective of
> whether what you desire is to have certain states of consciousness.
> (de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014: 253) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, satisfying a desire for posthumous fame, which if satisfied
would not resonate with any of conscious states one could possibly
have, would not be good for the person in question. Shaver (2016) has
also offered a subtle account and defense of Sidgwick's notion
of pleasure as feeling apprehended, perhaps wrongly, as desirable qua
feeling, rather than as feeling manifesting a special tone of
pleasantness. However, as Skelton warns, with accounts like these, the
wording is a very delicate matter: 



> 
> 
> At one point, Sidgwick says that if we accept his definition of
> pleasure, it is a tautology that pleasure is good ... But this would
> follow for him only if pleasure is defined as desirable feeling,
> since, for Sidgwick, desirable means good. But this would not be true
> if, for him, pleasure is defined as feelings apprehended to be
> desirable. It is not a tautology to say feelings apprehended to be
> desirable are in fact desirable. (Skelton 2022: 9) 
> 
> 
> 



And whether or how this apprehension is something only
"experienced by intelligent beings" also calls for
critical attention, since that stipulation would seem to implausibly
narrow the scope of sentience. 



But in contrast to the above accounts, Crisp, who defends an
internalist, feeling tone account of pleasure, argues persuasively
that Sidgwick's writings did not express his better inclinations
on the subject 



> 
> 
> Sidgwick is at heart an internalist about pleasure who was mislead by
> the heterogeneity argument into offering an externalist view which is
> open to serious objections. (Crisp 2007: 134; 2015 70) 
> 
> 
> 



For Crisp, 



> 
> 
> the heterogeneity objection moves in an unjustified way from the
> obviously true claim that the kinds of experience that are enjoyed are
> very various to the claim that the feeling of enjoyment is not some
> phenomenologically internal property common to all such experiences.
> On the face of it, it might appear that there is such a property: We
> can ask of any enjoyable experience whether it felt enjoyable, or
> whether it was more or less enjoyable than some other experience, and
> it is quite plausible to suggest that answers to these questions do
> not involve our attending to any attitude or other state external to
> the enjoyment or lack of it in question. (Crisp 2015: 67) 
> 
> 
> 



Enjoyment is a determinable, like color vision, with particular
enjoyments being determinates, like seeing particular colors. Crisp
concludes that some such account of enjoyment, or pleasure, would have
better served Sidgwick, as Sidgwick himself half realized.



Clearly, recent years have witnessed some remarkable rehabilitations
of Sidgwick's ethical hedonism, particularly in the works of
Crisp (2007, 2015), Feldman (2004, 2010), and de Lazari-Radek and
Singer (2014, 2016). And clearly, the forms of hedonism being defended
usually reconfigure or qualify the Sidgwickian approach in important
ways, in part out of necessity, because of the obscurity of
Sidgwick's position on the fundamental issues. These
rehabilitations of Sidgwickian hedonism have also involved, for some,
a recognition of the importance of the hedonimetrics of F. Y.
Edgeworth, the brilliant economist who was a slightly junior
contemporary of Sidgwick's and one of his most enthusiastic
philosophical disciples, though one whose work has until recently been
largely ignored in philosophical commentary on Sidgwick (Edgeworth
1877, 1881 [2003]). Edgeworth's approach has been revived in
economics by such figures as Kahneman (2011), and the convergence of
economic and philosophical, and neurobiological, interests on this
point suggests that hedonism remains a live option in ethics, though
in key respects Sidgwick's account, obscure as it is, remains
superior to these more recent developments, which rely on a rather too
crude claim about pleasurable consciousness as a state that a subject
wishes to prolong. Indeed, despite philosophical hedonism being a core
commitment of classical utilitarianism past and present, no account of
it, whether Sidgwick's or anyone else's, is problem free
and uncertainty abounds. For example, de Lazari-Radek and Singer,
while initially impressed by the heterogenity objection, are now no
longer sure that it is decisive: 



> 
> 
> As Crisp notes, in our book we approve of this "heterogeneity
> objection", and cite the work of the neuroscientists Kent
> Berridge and Morten Kringelbach in support of the view that pleasure
> is not a sensation, but rather is a kind of "hedonic
> gloss" that our hedonic brain systems paint on certain
> sensations. Crisp thinks that it is better to interpret Berridge and
> Kringelbach as saying that pleasure is not merely a sensation, but
> allowing that the hedonic gloss may itself be a sensation, or a single
> type of feeling. We are now willing to concede that Crisp may be right
> on this If so, the heterogeneity objection can be met, to the extent
> that we can say that the hedonic systems of the brain put the same
> kind of hedonic gloss on various different sensations. (Singer &
> de Lazari-Radek 2016: 205-6)
> 
> 
> 



But as de Lazari-Radek and Singer admit, this might not prove to be
much of a victory:



> 
> 
> The question is, however, whether this does not simply transfer the
> problem of saying what pleasure is to the problem of saying what the
> hedonic gloss is. How is it to be distinguished from other feelings?
> If we answer this question by saying that it is just a particular kind
> of feeling, in the way that sweetness is a particular kind of taste,
> then anyone who thinks that pleasure is intrinsically good needs to
> explain why just this kind of feeling has intrinsic value. If some
> people do not desire this kind of feeling, even qua feeling, then
> hedonistic theories of the good will fail to satisfy what, following
> Peter Railton, we have called "the resonance
> requirement"--we will be telling such people that pleasure
> is good for them, but this will not resonate with anything they desire
> or value. Obviously, the same problem recurs if we describe the
> hedonic gloss in terms of certain brain states. If, on the other hand,
> we say that the hedonic gloss is to be distinguished from other
> feelings by the fact that we do desire it, qua feeling, we are back to
> where we started, with pleasure being whatever mental state we desire,
> qua mental state. These problems remain in need of more work. (Singer
> & de Lazari-Radek 2016: 206)
> 
> 
> 



Without getting into the problematic conflation here of
"desired" and "desirable", or
"apprehended as desirable", it should be plain enough that
the controversies Sidgwick sparked are ongoing. To make matters worse,
Nozick's venerable "Experience Machine" objection to
hedonism--to the effect that for hedonism a virtual, or Matrix
like programmed world is as good as the real one--has received
new life with the growth of concerns over developments with AI and the
metaverse, which seem to exert a disturbing pressure on people,
especially young people, to assume that their good or well-being just
is what goes on in their heads, however undesirable that may be
(Mulgan 2020: 26-28).



### 2.2 Reconstruction and Reconciliation



For better or worse, Sidgwick uses the language of hedonism to label
two out of the three methods with which he will be chiefly
concerned--namely, egoistic hedonism (or rational egoism) and
universal hedonism (or utilitarianism). The third method is variously
called dogmatic or intuitional morality, which is somewhat ambiguously
construed as either the (mostly negative) precepts of common-sense
morality or the somewhat more refined version of these set out in the
theories of such moral theorists as Whewell, T. R. Birks, or Henry
Calderwood (Whewell 1864; Birks 1874; Calderwood 1876; Donagan 1977,
1992). The main point of such views is that conformity to such moral
duties as truth-telling, promise-keeping, temperance etc. is held to
be "the practically ultimate end of moral actions" and
these duties are "unconditionally prescribed" and
discernible with "really clear and finally valid
intuition", though it is the job of the moral theorist to set
them out with proper precision and "to arrange the results as
systematically as possible, and by proper definitions and explanations
to remove vagueness and prevent conflict". (Sidgwick 1874 [1907:
101]). Indeed, the plain person is apt to be rather confused about the
differences between the methods of ethics, arbitrarily deploying one
or another without recognizing any inconsistency.



The three methods of ethics--egoism, intuitional morality, and
utilitarianism--respectively form the subject matter of books two
through four of the *Methods*, which brackets them with an
opening book reviewing the whole work and a concluding chapter on
"The Mutual Relations of the Three Methods". Each of these
books represents in itself a classic treatment of the view at issue,
though it is the chapter on utilitarianism that has perhaps most often
been treated as such. This architectonic can, however, make it
somewhat difficult to follow the thread of Sidgwick's thought,
particularly on the more philosophical points having to do with
intuitionism. Indeed, intuitionism figures in both the second method
of ethics, and, in a more philosophical form, in the treatment of all
the methods of ethics, particularly when it comes to the discussion of
fundamental principles. As Sidgwick explains, although some might
think that conscience delivers immediate judgments on particular
acts--a view he variously calls aesthetic, perceptional or ultra
intuitionism--"reflective persons, in proportion to their
reflectiveness, come to rely rather on abstract universal intuitions
relating to classes of cases conceived under general notions".
Hence, dogmatic intuitional morality, which in the *Methods* is
rather awkwardly taken to cover both more deontological views and
non-hedonistic teleological ones, on the ground that the latter tend
to construe virtue in the same fashion as the simply the done thing,
whatever the consequences. But the process of reflection should not
stop there: there is another, more sophisticated phase of
intuitionism. Without 



> 
> 
> being disposed to deny that conduct commonly judged to be right is so,
> we may yet require some deeper explanation *why* it is so. 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, philosophical intuitionism, 



> 
> 
> while accepting the morality of common sense as in the main sound,
> still attempts to find for it a philosophic basis which it does not
> itself offer: to get one or more principles more absolutely and
> undeniably true and evident, from which the current rules might be
> deduced, either just as they are commonly received or with slight
> modifications and rectifications. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 102])
> 
> 
> 



The ascent to this philosophical intuitionism is especially evident in
the treatment of common-sense or intuitional morality. As Sidgwick
explained in reply to Calderwood's critical review of the
*Methods*, which asked why he had not simply confined himself
"to the consideration of Intuitionism in its most philosophical
form", that tactic 



> 
> 
> would have led me at once to Utilitarianism: because I hold that the
> only moral intuitions which sound philosophy can accept as ultimately
> valid are those which at the same time provide the only possible
> philosophical basis of the Utilitarian creed. I thus necessarily
> regard Prof. Calderwood's Intuitionism as a phase in the
> development of the Intuitional method, which comes naturally between
> the crude thought of Butler's "plain man" and the
> Rational Utilitarianism to which I ultimately endeavor to lead my
> reader. 
> 
> 
> 



That is, allowing that the morality of common sense is his as well, he
must as a philosopher nonetheless



> 
> 
> ask myself whether I see clearly and distinctly the self-evidence of
> any particular maxims of duty, as I see that of the formal principles
> "that what is right for me must be right for all persons in
> precisely similar circumstances" and "that I ought to
> prefer the greater good of another to my own lesser good": I
> have no doubt whatever that I do not. I am conscious of a strong
> impression, an opinion on which I habitually act without hesitation,
> that I ought to speak truth, to perform promises, to requite benefits,
> & c., and also of powerful moral sentiments prompting me to the
> observance of these rules; but on reflection I can now clearly
> distinguish such opinions and sentiments from the apparently immediate
> and certain cognition that I have of the formal principles above
> mentioned. But I could not always have made this distinction; and I
> believe that the majority of moral persons do not make it: most
> "plain men" would probably say, at any rate on the first
> consideration of the matter, that they saw the obligations of Veracity
> and Good Faith as clearly and immediately as they saw those of Equity
> and Rational Benevolence. How then am I to argue with such persons? It
> will not settle the matter to tell them that they have observed their
> own mental processes wrongly, and that more careful introspection will
> show them the non-intuitive character of what they took for
> intuitions; especially as in many cases I do not believe that the
> error is one of misobservation. Still less am I inclined to dispute
> the "primitiveness" or "spontaneousness" or
> "originality" of these apparent intuitions. On the
> contrary, I hold that here, as in other departments of thought, the
> primitive spontaneous processes of the mind are mixed with error,
> which is only to be removed gradually by comprehensive reflection upon
> the results of these processes. Through such a course of reflection I
> have endeavored to lead my readers in chaps. 2-10 of Book III of
> my treatise: in the hope that after they have gone through it they may
> find their original apprehension of the self-evidence of moral maxims
> importantly modified. (Sidgwick 1876: 564)
> 
> 
> 



And as he explained in another important commentary on the
*Methods*, "The Establishment of Ethical First
Principles", he accepts Aristotle's distinction between
logical priority and priority in the knowledge of a particular person,
such that we 



> 
> 
> are thus enabled to see that a proposition may be self-evident, i.e.,
> may be properly cognisable without being viewed in connexion with any
> other propositions; though in order that its truth may be apparent to
> some particular mind, there is still required some rational process
> connecting it with propositions previously accepted by that mind. 
> 
> 
> 



This latter can be done in two ways: by showing how "some
limited and qualified statement" supposed to be self-evident is
only part of a "simpler and wider proposition", on which
the limitations turn out to be arbitrary, and by establishing some
general criteria "for distinguishing true first
principles" that are then used to 



> 
> 
> construct a strictly logical deduction by which, applying their
> general criteria to the special case of ethics, we establish the true
> first principles of this latter subject. (Sidgwick 1879: 106-7)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Truth being one, both tactics should ultimately converge on the same
conclusions.



Whether Sidgwick succeeded in avoiding mere "hostile criticism
from the outside" in his analysis of common-sense morality is
open to debate; certainly, the critical reflection can seem quite
remorseless, with the utilitarian repeatedly demonstrating to the
dogmatic intuitionist



> 
> 
> that the principles of Truth, Justice, etc. have only a dependent and
> subordinate validity: arguing either that the principle is really only
> affirmed by Common-Sense as a general rule admitting of exceptions and
> qualifications, as in the case of Truth, and that we require some
> further principle for systematising these exceptions and
> qualifications; or that the fundamental notion is vague and needs
> further determination, as in the case of Justice; and further, that
> the different rules are liable to conflict with each other, and that
> we require some higher principle to decide the issue thus raised; and
> again, that the rules are differently formulated by different persons,
> and that these differences admit of no Intuitional solution, while
> they show the vagueness and ambiguity of the common moral notions to
> which the Intuitionist appeals. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 421])
> 
> 
> 



Time and again, common sense collapses into utilitarian thinking, or
is shown to presuppose it, or is at least revealed as requiring
something very like it. This effort to criticize and assimilate
common-sense moral rules went far beyond the efforts of J. S. Mill and
has served as a template for the utilitarian or consequentialist work
of Smart (1973), Brandt (1979), Hare (1981), Parfit (1984,
2011-2017), Hardin (1988), Gibbard (1982, 1990), de Lazari-Radek
and Singer (2014, 2016, 2021), and Woodard (2019). Like so many in the
utilitarian tradition, Sidgwick ended up recognizing the moral
standing of non-human animals, puzzling over questions of suicide,
defending a notion of intention covering all foreseen consequences,
rejecting purely retributive accounts of punishment, embracing a
cosmopolitan (rather than nationalistic) outlook, and
thinking--though not public insisting--that orthodox
religion and its morality were often dogmatic and superstitious. More
originally, he initiated the (modern) philosophical discussion of the
problem of future generations and optimal population growth, arguing
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 its maximum. (Sidgwick 1874
> [1907: 415-16]) 
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick was not always consistent in his treatment of this issue of
average versus total utility, but even so, had he done nothing more
than formulate this issue, his philosophical fame would have been
secured. The flourishing fields of population ethics and justice for
future generations, which received an enormous boost from Parfit,
especially his *Reasons and Persons* (1984), reflect the
seminal Sidgwickian influence at many, many points, though as with
hedonism, the controversies have often deepened rather than dissipated
(McMahan, Campbell, Goodrich, & Ramakrishnan [eds] 2022).



Sidgwick made other original contributions as well. Although it can
seem strained and anachronistic to apply the classification of
"act" or "rule" utilitarianism to him, the
scholarly consensus does for the most part classify him as an act
utilitarian (Gray 1984; Williams 1995; Hooker 2000a,b; de Lazari-Radek
& Singer 2014, 2021; Crisp 2015). But he does not fit the stock
stereotype of that position. Among other things, it is quite clear
that he defended a very "indirect" form of utilitarianism,
going so far as to defend the possibility of utilitarianism entailing
a self-effacing, even esoteric morality:



> 
> 
> Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately
> recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to
> advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons
> what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right
> to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be
> wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can
> be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private
> advice or example. These conclusions are all of a paradoxical
> character: there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain
> man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality,
> differing from the one popularly taught; and it would be commonly
> agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not
> rendered good by secrecy. We may observe, however, that there are
> strong utilitarian reasons for maintaining generally this latter
> common opinion.... Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully
> stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may
> render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself
> be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that
> the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept
> esoteric. ... a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian
> principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind
> generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system
> as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity
> of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their
> hands. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 489-90])
> 
> 
> 



Such provocative remarks, which flatly contradict any Kantian
insistence on the necessary publicity of fundamental moral principles,
may reflect a consistent interpretation of the different
"levels" of moral thinking, critical versus everyday, but
they have generated much criticism, with Williams insinuating that
Sidgwick was a "Government House" utilitarian whose views
comported well with colonialism (Williams 1995). Yet even on the count
of esoteric morality, Sidgwick's views have attracted some
forceful recent defenders (de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2010, 2014,
2016) who strike at the very heart of the Kantian and neo-Kantian
publicity requirement. Their argument owes much to Parfit's
demonstration that an ethical theory could be self-effacing without
being self-defeating, incoherent or untrue (Parfit 1984).



As noted, however, for all his originality, Sidgwick has often been
charged with slanting his discussion against a wide range of
alternatives (Donagan 1977, 1992; Irwin 1992, 2007, 2011; Hurka
2014b). And at times it is very far from clear whose views he is
criticizing. Thus, his account of "aesthetic intuitionism"
would seem to be trained on a certain form of Aristotelianism
stressing the contextual and particularist nature of practical wisdom
(McDowell 1979; Irwin 1992), but, in a curiously neglected work on the
history of ethics that was in some ways a successor to
Sidgwick's own *Outlines* (and contained an extended
treatment of Sidgwick's views), Reginald A. P. Rogers identified
aesthetic intuitionism with the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury
(Rogers 1911). Furthermore, of special concern to recent intuitionists
has been the effort to combine Sidgwick's views with those of
Ross on *prima facie* intuitions, acknowledging that
Sidgwick's account of intuitional morality did not address such
an option (Hurka 2014a, 2014b; Crisp 2015). Hurka has developed this
critique forcefully, expanding on his claim that Sidgwick's
framing of ethical theory was slanted from the start: Sidgwick



> 
> 
> took it to be a serious objection to a pluralist deontology that it
> cannot always judge acts determinately because it cannot weigh duties
> precisely, but no objection to hedonistic theories that they cannot
> compare pleasures precisely. He tested deotontological principles
> rigorously with his four conditions but barely applied those
> conditions to his own principles. And though one of his main
> objections to deontological principles turned on the difference
> between their other-things-equal and all-things-considered forms, his
> defence of his axioms equivocated on the same point and involved the
> same ambiguity. In arguing against deontology and for consequentialism
> he applied, and not just once, a double standard. (Hurka 2014b:
> 151-2)
> 
> 
> 



For others, however, it is clear enough that Sidgwick's
hedonistic utilitarianism does not require any Rossian apparatus for
recognizing apparent conflicts of duties. De Lazari-Radek and Singer,
in response to Crisp's defense of Rossian *prima facie*
intuitions, argue that 



> 
> 
> Ross starts by assuming that, as he puts it, "the main moral
> convictions of the plain man" are "not opinions which it
> is for philosophy to prove or disprove, but knowledge from the
> start". As we have already indicated both in our book and in
> this response, we are skeptical about the validity of most of our
> moral intuitions. (Singer & de Lazari-Radek 2016) 
> 
> 
> 



As Crisp allows, Sidgwick would probably not have deemed the Rossian
gambit to the point for purposes of dealing with the problems that
most troubled him.



More generally, it must be said that Sidgwick, under the influence of
Hegel and other historically-minded philosophers, did not claim that
he was impartially addressing all historically important methods of
ethics, but only those that in his estimate had become the live
options as humanity had progressed (Schultz 2013; Phillips 2022). He
may have been somewhat misguided in identifying those, but that is not
the same as being blind to the content of the alternatives.



At any rate, fair or not, Sidgwick's reconciliation of
intuitional morality and utilitarianism obviously deploys a
sophisticated form of intuitionist epistemology, one allowing for the
fallibilism of its conclusions. He formulates four criteria or
conditions 



> 
> 
> the complete fulfillment of which would establish a significant
> proposition, apparently self-evident, in the highest degree of
> certainty attainable: and which must be approximately realised by the
> premises of our reasoning in any inquiry, if that reasoning is to lead
> us cogently to trustworthy conclusions. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 338])
> 
> 
> 
> 



The first, often called simply the "Cartesian Criterion",
demands that the "terms of the proposition must be clear and
precise", and the second requires that the "self-evidence
of the proposition must be ascertained by careful reflection",
which is especially important in ethics because 



> 
> 
> any strong sentiment, however purely subjective, is apt to transform
> itself into the semblance of an intuition; and it requires careful
> contemplation to detect the illusion. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 339]) 
> 
> 
> 



Third, the "propositions accepted as self-evident must be
mutually consistent", since it "is obvious that any
collision between two intuitions is a proof that there is error in one
or the other, or in both". (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 341]). And
fourth, since 



> 
> 
> it is implied in the very notion of Truth that it is essentially the
> same for all minds, the denial by another of a proposition that I have
> affirmed has a tendency to impair my confidence in its validity. 
> 
> 
> 



This last adds an important social dimension to Sidgwick's
epistemology: 



> 
> 
> the absence of such disagreement must remain an indispensable negative
> condition of the certainty of our beliefs, 
> 
> 
> 



for 



> 
> 
> if I find any of my judgements, intuitive or inferential, in direct
> conflict with a judgment of some other minds, there must be error
> somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other
> mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgments
> necessarily reduces me temporarily to a state of neutrality. (Sidgwick
> 1874 [1907: 341-42]) 
> 
> 
> 



In other, more purely epistemological works, Sidgwick collapsed the
first two conditions into one, such that his philosophical
intuitionism involved the three-pronged demand for clarity and ability
to withstand critical reflection, consistency or coherence, and
consensus of experts. He was also apt to explain that these conditions
only afforded the best means for reducing the risk of error, rather
than establishing indubitable truth. On this count, such posthumous
works as *Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant* (1905) and
*Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations* (1902) provide important
supplements to the *Methods*. Marcus G. Singer (2000) provides
an excellent edited collection of those of Sidgwick's essays and
reviews most relevant to the *Methods.* Unfortunately, much
otherwise excellent work on Sidgwick's intuitionism has been
compromised by a failure to recognize the significance of these other
works.


## 3. Epistemology and Chaos



Perhaps no region of Sidgwick's work has been the subject of
greater interpretive controversy than his epistemology. The early work
of Schneewind (1963), Rawls (1971, and Schultz ([ed.] 1992) played up
the dialectical side of Sidgwick's approach and the ways in
which he anticipated the Rawlsian account of the method of reflective
equilibrium. Reactions to any such interpretation, which supposedly
accorded a too generous role to "received opinion" in
Sidgwick's methodology, came from Peter Singer (1974) and many
others influenced by Hare's critique of Rawls (see also Sverdlik
1985, and especially, Skelton 2007, 2008, 2010a,b). Rawls himself
shifted his ground somewhat in later work, playing up Sidgwick's
"rational intuitionism" (Rawls 1993, 2007). But other
accounts, notably Brink (1994), Shaver (1999, 2011, 2014) and Phillips
(2022), have recognized that Sidgwick's approach contains both
dialectical and more purely intuitionist elements, debating whether
these can be combined in a consistent or coherent way. Recent work on
Sidgwick has also benefited from the renaissance in and rehabilitation
of intuitionism, evident in such works as Audi (1997), Parfit
(2011-2017), and Stratton-Lake ([ed.] 2002); the latter contains
an important contribution by Crisp that effectively distances
Sidgwick's views from cruder versions of intuitionism, though
Deigh (2010) has argued forcefully that Sidgwick was too committed to
an axiomatic approach that was undermined by developments in
analytical philosophy, a point in some ways reminiscent of
Donagan's (1977) critique of Sidgwick's intuitionism.
Schultz (2013, 2014a) surveys the development of some of these
debates, and emphasizes the role of consensus in Sidgwick's
epistemology, a factor also figuring in the Sidgwickian methodology
developed by Parfit (2011-2017). But this is a very lively area
of research in which the history of English moral philosophy from
Whewell to Ross is still being actively rewritten in dramatic fashion
(Hurka [ed.] 2011; 2014a). Yet it does appear that in the last decade,
the scholarly emphasis has been disproportionately on Sidgwick and his
successors, notably Ross, rather than Sidgwick and his predecessors,
notably Whewell, who remains a comparatively neglected figure (Snyder
2001 [2019], 2006).



Sidgwick's epistemology is linked to other significant
controversies as well, such as those concerning the degree to which he
can really be classified as a utilitarian, in any unqualified fashion.
For Sidgwick argues, over the course of the *Methods*, that
common-sense or intuitional morality keeps giving way to more abstract
formal principles as the better candidates for genuinely self-evident
truths. Although there is some controversy over just how many such
principles he advances, at the least he defends a universalizability
principle (one must be able to will one's maxim to be a
universal law) and a principle of rational prudence (or temporal
neutrality, such that one should be *ceteris paribus* equally
concerned with all parts of one's life), in addition to the
utilitarian principle of rational benevolence. Controversially, he
holds that the universalizability principle is merely formal and lacks
content, being consistent with both egoism and utilitarianism, and
that temporal neutrality translates into a form of prudence. And in
fact, even utilitarianism is actually derived from two more
fundamental principles, and involves the "relation of the
integrant parts to the whole and to each other" in order to
obtain 



> 
> 
> the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of
> no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the
> Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are
> special grounds for believing the more good is likely to be realised
> in the one case than in the other. And it is evident to me that as a
> rational being I am bound to aim at good generally,--so far as it
> is attainable by my efforts,--not at a particular part of it.
> 
> 
> 
> 



And from 



> 
> 
> these two rational intuitions we may deduce, as a necessary inference,
> the maxim of Benevolence in an abstract form: viz. that each one is
> morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as
> his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially
> viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him. (Sidgwick
> 1874 [1907: 382]) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, in his more careful statements of the candidates for
self-evident truths, Sidgwick refrains from formulations directly
invoking "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"
or hedonistic considerations. Some of the most sophisticated
commentary on the *Methods*, such as Schneewind (1977), Shaver
(1999, 2014), Nakano-Okuno (2011), Parfit (2011-2017), Phillips
(2011, 2022), de Lazari-Radek and Singer (2014, 2016), Hurka (2014a),
and Crisp (2015), has highlighted the gap between these
"axioms" and the substantive ethical theories derived or
developed from them. Sidgwick himself appreciated the irony of his
position, the way in which the hard-headed, reformist utilitarian
emphasis on clarity and conclusiveness had dissipated in his work:
there are indeed 



> 
> 
> certain absolute practical principles, the truth of which, when they
> are explicitly stated, is manifest; but they are of too abstract a
> nature, and too universal in their scope, to enable us to ascertain by
> immediate application of them what we ought to do in any particular
> case; particular duties have still to be determined by some other
> method. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 379]) 
> 
> 
> 



Common-sense rules have their place, but are not even clear enough to
serve as the "middle axioms" of the utilitarian theory. As
he put it to Dakyns: 



> 
> 
> 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 ABC. (*Memoir*: 277)
> 
> 
> 



Worse still, all was not happy even in the ethereal region of the
axioms. The "insolubility" of the "fundamental
problem" of ethics--the key problem that had troubled
Sidgwick in the 1860s--was indeed on display in Sidgwick's
treatise, in that he did not find the unified account of practical
reason that he sought even at the more abstract level. As he had put
it in an earlier letter to his friend Dakyns: 



> 
> 
> You know I want intuitions for Morality; at least one (of Love) is
> required to supplement the utilitarian morality, and I do not see why,
> if we are to have one, we may not have others. I have worked away
> vigorously at the selfish morality, but I cannot persuade myself,
> except by trusting intuition, that Christian self-sacrifice is really
> a happier life than classical insouciance. (*Memoir*: 90) 
> 
> 
> 



The problem of self-sacrifice and the claims of rational egoism were
not, on Sidgwick's view, amenable to the same form of
reconciliation with utilitarianism that intuitional morality was. In
fact, the first edition of the *Methods* concludes that
rational egoism and utilitarianism end up in a stand-off, that there
is a "dualism of the practical reason", and that as a
result, there is a "fundamental contradiction in our apparent
intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct" such that 



> 
> 
> the "Cosmos" of Duty is thus really reduced to a Chaos,
> and the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect
> ideal of rational conduct is seen to have been foredoomed to
> inevitable failure. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 473]) 
> 
> 
> 



Later editions of the work sounded a somewhat less bleak concluding
note, but did not differ in substance. The main possible solutions to
the problem that Sidgwick considered are two, a weakening of
epistemological standards, or a Theistic postulate about the coherent
moral government of the universe. On the first, he suggests that if




> 
> 
> we find that in our supposed knowledge of the world of nature
> propositions are commonly taken to be universally true, which seem to
> rest on no other ground than that we have a strong disposition to
> accept them, and that they are indispensable to the systematic
> coherence of our beliefs,--it will be more difficult to reject a
> similarly supported assumption in ethics, without opening the door to
> universal scepticism. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 509]) 
> 
> 
> 



On the second, he explains that if 



> 
> 
> we may assume the existence of such a Being, as God, by the
> *consensus* of theologians, is conceived to be, it seems that
> Utilitarians may legitimately infer the existence of Divine sanctions
> to the code of social duty as constructed on a Utilitarian basis; and
> such sanctions would, of course, suffice to make it always every
> one's interest to promote universal happiness to the best of his
> knowledge. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 506])
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick often departed from the pristine language of the axioms when
describing this conflict. In another important essay on his own work,
he explained that along with 



> 
> 
> (a) a fundamental moral conviction that I ought to sacrifice my own
> happiness, if by so doing I can increase the happiness of others to a
> greater extent than I diminish my own, I find also (b) a
> conviction--which it would be paradoxical to call
> "moral", but which is none the less fundamental--that
> it would be irrational to sacrifice any portion of my own happiness
> unless the sacrifice is to be somehow at some time compensated by an
> equivalent addition to my own happiness. (Sidgwick 1889: 483) 
> 
> 
> 



He urges that each of these convictions has as much clarity and
certainty "as the process of introspective can give" and
each also finds wide assent "in the common sense of
mankind". Moreover, his account of rational egoism does not rely
on a narrow or low-minded account of self-interest. Besides



> 
> 
> admitting the actual importance of sympathetic pleasures to the
> majority of mankind, I should go further and maintain that, on
> empirical grounds alone, enlightened self-interest would direct most
> men to foster and develop their sympathetic susceptibilities to a
> greater extent than is now commonly attained. The effectiveness of
> Butler's famous argument against the vulgar antithesis between
> Self-love and Benevolence is undeniable: and it seems scarcely
> extravagant to say that, amid all the profuse waste of the means of
> happiness which men commit, there is no imprudence more flagrant than
> that of Selfishness in the ordinary sense of the term,--the
> excessive concentration of attention on the individual's own
> happiness which renders it impossible for him to feel any strong
> interest in the pleasures and pains of others. (Sidgwick 1874 [1907:
> 501])
> 
> 
> 



Still, he found it impossible to deny that even very high-minded
versions of egoism posed a problem, prescribing actions conflicting
with the general good in such cases as heroic sacrifice of self in
battle, etc. This view, he suggested, could be found in Butler's
claim that "Reasonable Self-love and Conscience are the two
chief or superior principles in the nature of man", each
generating an obligation, though Frankena (1992), Darwall (2000) and
Crisp (2019) have raised questions about the historical accuracy of
this attribution. But in any event, the basic point is that if 



> 
> 
> the Egoist strictly confines himself to stating his conviction that he
> ought to take his own happiness or pleasure as his ultimate end, there
> seems no opening for an argument to lead him to Utilitarianism (as a
> first principle). But if he offers either as a reason for this
> conviction, or as another form of stating it, the proposition that his
> happiness or pleasure is objectively "desirable" or
> "a good", he gives the requisite opening. For the
> Utilitarian can then point out that *his* happiness cannot be
> more objectively desirable or more a good than the happiness of any
> one else; the mere fact ... that *he is he* can have
> nothing to do with its objective desirability or goodness. (Sidgwick
> 1873: 259-60) 
> 
> 
> 



But the egoist need not make that move--it is just as rational
simply to take one's own point of view as it is to take the
point of view of the universe--of the utilitarian
superperson.



Sidgwick's dualism has a long history of stimulating
controversy, even leading some commentators to urge that he is better
termed a "dualist" or "dual-source theorist"
than a utilitarian (Crisp 2002, 2014, 2015). Moore (1903) famously
dismissed the problem on the grounds that the notion of one's
"own good" was nonsense, but Mackie (1976) sharply
countered that Moore was begging the question. Broad (1930) claimed
that Sidgwick's account was confused, since his proposed
solutions did not touch the problem of the inconsistent fundamental
principles, though this has been effectively addressed by Coady
(1994), Schneewind (1977) and many others. Brink (1988) has argued
that it is absurd to claim that two self-evident principles are
inconsistent, but Shaver (1999) has replied that Sidgwick is for the
most part consistent in calling the principles at issue only
"apparently" self-evident, though Shaver also suggests
that Sidgwick did not present a compelling case for the egoistic side
of the conflict. Skorupski (2000) has forcefully argued that there is
no dualism of the "pure" practical reason, which is agent
neutral, but there are many such conflicts in the larger field of less
than pure practical reason, not merely a conflict with egoistic
reasons. Parfit, too, argued that Sidgwick's two standpoints
approach failed to capture how egoistic reasons can be weaker than
omnipersonal ones (Parfit 2011a,b), though Smith (2009) has defended
Sidgwick's construction of the problem. And Baier (1995) argued
that Sidgwick's account suffers from various ambiguities because
he does not clearly distinguish "requiring" reasons from
"permissive" ones, which would avoid the contradiction.
Indeed, more generally, it is telling that many of Sidgwick's
most notable admirers, such as Larmore (1996) and Parfit
(2011-2017), do not carry all the baggage of his epistemological
intuitionism but prefer instead to translate his arguments into the
idiom of objective normative "reasons". Indeed, Parfit
called his deeply Sidgwickian view a form of non-naturalistic,
non-metaphysical moral rationalism. And in his major works on the
*Methods*, Phillips (2011, 2022) reconstructs Sidgwick's
arguments in a similar, Parfitian way, while retaining more of
Sidgwick's terminology. He also, in Phillips (2022:
210-31), provides an excellent overview of the various positions
on the Sidgwickian dualism. Thus, in one vocabulary or another, these
controversies are likely to continue as long as there is such a thing
as ethical philosophy.



The issue is worth illustrating in more detail, given the importance
of recent work in this area. Thus, unlike Sidgwick, but like Crisp
(2006b, 2015) and Phillips (2011, 2022), Parfit did not regard
practical reason as teetering on chaos or think it a cosmic calamity
if we could not demonstrate that we always have most objective reason
to do what would be impartially best, or that impartial and egoistic
reasons can be harmonized, though he did think it would be a cosmic
calamity if there were no objective normative reasons (Edmonds 2023).
When it came to Sidgwick's dualism, he was content to sort out
the complex of objective reasons that we might have, without going so
far as to worry about the absurdity of a universe in which Own Good
and Other Good might be left in conflict, and he even pronounced
Sidgwick's "somber claims" on this score
"overstatements", and the result of an unhelpful
"two standpoints" framework of self and other that misses
how we can compare the strength of different reasons. Parfit urged
that Sidgwick's more plausible, revised claim is simply: 



> 
> 
> When one of our two possible acts would make things go in some way
> that would be impartially better, but the other act would make things
> go better either for ourselves or for those to whom we have close
> ties, we often have sufficient reasons to act in either of these two
> ways. (Parfit 2011a: 137) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, Sidgwick drew the conflict too narrowly, between impartial and
egoistic reasons; he failed to consider the full range of less than
fully impartial reasons and how they may or may not be comparatively
stronger than impartial ones. He also failed to consider the relevance
of a Reductionist view of personal identity in undermining egoism.
Indeed, Parfit went even further in elaborating the complex of
objective reasons, allowing not only that we might have personal and
partial, but not self-interested reasons that could outweigh impartial
reasons, but also that, if we are not act consequentialists, we might
find conflicts between impartial reasons and moral reasons, such as
deontological ones (Parfit 2017). As Crisp (2006b, 2015) has argued,
and as Parfit clearly admitted, Sidgwick himself took a less elaborate
view. But for all his revisionism, Parfit did reflect Sidgwick's
views at a great many points, not least in taking very seriously the
consensus of experts criterion, which pushed him to develop his
"Triple Theory", a consequentializing convergence of rule
consequentialism, Kantian universalizability, and Scanlonian
contractualism. Although the Triple Theory is at some distance from
Sidgwick's form of utilitarianism, Parfit denied that he had
dismissed the viability of act consequentialism (de Lazari-Radek &
Singer 2020).



In fact, the works of de Lazari-Radek and Singer (2012, 2014, 2016)
have opened up some ingenious new lines of argument in this area,
arguments that, they claim, are more thoroughly Sidgwickian. As noted,
Sidgwick had argued that apparently self-evident claims had to be
clear and precise, able to withstand critical reflection, consistent
with one another, and able to win a consensus of experts, though in
other writings he collapsed the first two into just one condition. De
Lazari-Radek and Singer seem less concerned to reject any element of
Sidgwick's account than to add to it, such that the significance
of evolutionary "debunking" arguments is recognized, and
this leads them to reject Sidgwick's Dualism:



> 
> 
> We might have become reasoning beings because that enabled us to solve
> a variety of problems that would otherwise have hampered our survival,
> but once we are capable of reasoning, we may be unable to avoid
> recognizing and discovering some truths that do not aid our survival.
> That can be said about some complicated truths of mathematics or
> physics. It can also, as Parfit has suggested, be the case with some
> of our normative epistemic beliefs; for instance, the belief that when
> some argument is valid and has true premises, so that this
> argument's conclusion must be true, these facts give us a
> decisive reason to believe this conclusion. Parfit argues that this
> normative claim about what we have decisive reason to believe is not
> itself evolutionarily advantageous, since to gain that advantage, it
> would have been sufficient to have the non-normative beliefs that the
> argument is valid, and has true premises, and that the conclusion must
> be true. Hence this and other normative epistemic beliefs are not open
> to a debunking argument. This may also hold for some of our moral
> beliefs. One such moral truth could be Sidgwick's axiom of
> universal benevolence: "each one is morally bound to regard the
> good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as
> he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly
> knowable or attainable by him". (de Lazari-Radek & Singer
> 2014: 182-83)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, if, with Sharon Street (2006), one holds that in many cases 



> 
> 
> it is more scientifically plausible to explain human evaluative
> attitudes as having evolved because they help us to survive and to
> have surviving offspring, than because they are true, (de Lazari-Radek
> & Singer 2014: 180) 
> 
> 
> 



one can debunk many of the beliefs competing with the Axiom of
Universal Benevolence, such as those purportedly justifying partial or
personal reasons for action. If Benevolence is not debunked, and if it
can in fact be accounted for straightforwardly as a result of reason
coming as a unity or package, such that either 



> 
> 
> we have a capacity to reason that includes the capacity to do advanced
> physics and mathematics and to grasp objective moral truths, or we
> have a much more limited capacity to reason that lacks not only these
> abilities, but others that confer an overriding evolutionary
> advantage. If reason is a unity of this kind, having the package would
> have been more conducive to survival and reproductions than not having
> it. (de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014: 183) 
> 
> 
> 



Of course, as Parfit commented, one might concede that this argument
has some force, but think other objections to egoism, say from a
Reductionist view of personal identity, or Present-Aim account of
rationality, also matter (Parfit 2017: 339-40).



That Singer, in particular, should in this way have developed
defenses, not only of Sidgwickian hedonism, esotericism, and totalism
(in population ethics), but also of Sidgwickian metaethical
cognitivism (against his former commitment to Hare's
prescriptivism), and used these to advance a form of utilitarianism
that, he holds, is more consistently utilitarian than Sidgwick's
own position and in that way in line with Sidgwick's deeper
tendencies, is illustrative of the increasingly important role that
Sidgwick's work is playing in cutting edge ethical theory.
Whether the principle of Universal Benevolence really has the ability
to withstand evolutionary debunking arguments, and whether such
arguments can really be made compelling in the first place, are open
questions, as is the question of whether Sidgwick himself would not
have found such gambits too narrow and unable to address his deeper
worries about the religious significance of the dualism of practical
reason (Schultz 2014b, 2017; Gray 2015). But even so, these recent
developments amount to something of a Sidgwickian counter-revolution
to the Rawlsian Kantian revolution, an effort at both the meta and
substantive ethical levels to provide an effective cognitive
intuitionist and consequentialist alternative to Kantian
constructivist and proceduralist accounts of moral reasons.



Although Sidgwick denied that it was his special purpose, in the
*Methods*, to call attention to the dualism of practical
reason, this problem clearly loomed very large for him and affected
many other aspects of his life and work, including his views on the
history of ethics: he thought egoism the dominant view of the
classical Greek philosophers, the difference between ancients and
moderns having largely to do with the modern preoccupation with
"ought" rather than "good" and the emergence
of the dualism in Butler (Frankena 1992; Irwin 1992, 1994, 2011; Crisp
2015). Again, arguably, he never did full justice to non-hedonistic,
teleological forms of perfectionism (Hurka 2001, [ed.] 2011, 2014a;
Crisp 2015) or to fully deontological, Kantian views (Schneewind 1977;
Korsgaard 2009). However, as the remarks above underscore, the range
of his arguments is richer and more fertile than many of his critics
have recognized. Indeed, in his own day, he advanced effective
criticisms of the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, the idealism of
Green and Bradley, and most of the other currents of philosophical
opinion that he encountered. Weinstein (2000) argues effectively that
on key points Spencer and Sidgwick had much in common; Brink (2003)
indicates just how intelligent and penetrating the exchanges between
Sidgwick and Green were, though he concludes that Green scored an
effective point in charging that Sidgwick's hedonism was
implausible, even if coherent, a point that the recent hedonists are
of course not willing to concede (de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2014,
2016).



In the end, however, at least on the topic of classifying
Sidgwick's *Methods* as a work of classical
utilitarianism, it remains difficult to dissent from
Schneewind's summary of its heterodoxy: the *Methods*



> 
> 
> centers on an examination of the accepted moral opinions and modes of
> thought of common sense. It involves a rejection of empiricism and
> dismisses the issue of determinism as irrelevant. It emphasizes an
> attempt to reconcile positions seen by utilitarians as deeply opposed
> to each other. It finds ethical egoism as reasonable as
> utilitarianism; and it concludes with arguments to show that, because
> of this, no full reconciliation of the various rational methods for
> reaching moral decisions is possible and therefore that the realm of
> practical reason is probably incoherent. (Schneewind 1974 [1992:
> 94])
> 
> 
> 



This helps explain why the work continues to inspire both utilitarians
and their critics.


## 4. Religion and Parapsychology



In an intriguing piece of retrospection written in 1887, Sidgwick
explained: 



> 
> 
> Some fifteen years ago, when I was writing my book on Ethics, I was
> inclined to hold with Kant that we must *postulate* the
> continued existence of the soul, in order to effect that harmony of
> Duty with Happiness which seemed to me indispensable to rational moral
> life. At any rate I thought I might *provisionally* postulate
> it, while setting out on the serious search for empirical evidence. If
> I decide that this search is a failure, shall I finally and decisively
> make this postulate? Can I consistently with my whole view of truth
> and the method of its attainment? And if I answer "no" to
> each of these questions, have I any ethical system at all? (quoted in
> *Memoir*: 467)
> 
> 
> 



Whether Sidgwick's memory was entirely accurate is uncertain. In
a letter actually composed in 1870, he confessed to his friend Roden
Noel:



> 
> 
> I have never based my belief in immortality on our consciousness of
> the oneness of Self. I have always considered Kant's
> "Paralogisms" conclusive as against that.
> 
> 
> 
> What I really base it on (apart from the evidence supplied by
> Spiritualism, and apart from religious grounds) is on *Ethics*,
> as Kant, supported by Common Sense. But I do not state the argument
> quite as you answer it, but thus
> 
> 
> 
> In the face of the conflict between Virtue & Happiness, my own
> voluntary life, and that of every other man constituted like me, i.e.,
> I believe, of every normal man, is reduced to hopeless anarchy.
> 
> 
> 
> Two authorities roughly speaking Butler's
> "self-love" and "Conscience" claim to rule,
> and neither will yield to the other.
> 
> 
> 
> The only way of avoiding this intolerable anarchy is by the Postulate
> of Immortality. But you may say--"you cannot believe it
> because you want to"
> 
> 
> 
> I reply; I find
> 
> 
> 1. in me an inherited predisposition to this faith.
> 2. In human history the belief is that of the best part of mankind:
> it has nearly, though not quite, the authority of a belief of Common
> Sense. (quoted in Schultz 2004: 441).
> 
> 
> 



At any rate, he often expressed dissatisfaction with the Kantian
solution, devoting endless hours to "the serious search for
empirical evidence" of personal survival. He had long been
sympathetic to this type of natural theology, devoting more effort to
it than to exploring alternative epistemological arguments of
relevance to the dualism. Indeed, Sidgwick joined the Cambridge
"Ghost Society" as an undergraduate, and he had already
devoted many years to informal psychical research before the formation
of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1882, although his efforts
expanded thanks to the larger formal organization (Gauld 1968;
Oppenheim 1985; McLuhan & Gauld 2020
 [Other Internet Resources]).
 He was president of the SPR from 1882-85 and again from
1888-93. The comparative sobriety of his leadership of this
organization, which represented an unusual combination of eminent
intellectuals, first-rate scientists, and spiritualistic lunatics,
undoubtedly did a great deal to enhance its respectability and insure
its longevity. Even many of the spiritualists, who were precommitted
to belief in disembodied human spirits, seances, and so forth, allowed
that Sidgwick was as fair-minded as any non-mystic could be.



Sidgwick's parapsychology was clearly and admittedly an
extension of his religious studies and as such relevant to the
solution of the dualism of practical reason. He did not successfully
spell out the precise chain of argument leading from evidence for
survival to a unified conception of practical reason, but the general
Theistic idea of a "friendly Universe" enjoying a
utilitarian moral government was obviously behind his efforts. Again,
although he was not sure that he could rationally defend it, he was
strongly drawn to the Theistic view that there is a "Heart and
Mind" behind phenomena--a "Sovereign Will that orders
all things *rightly*" (*Memoir*: 604)--and
that the universe is ethically meaningful, even if the storm and
stress that he had suffered in the 1860s had permanently distanced him
from Christian orthodoxy. Interestingly, his conversion to a more
utilitarian mode of ethical theory had even predated his break with
Anglican orthodoxy, which involved a long and painful struggle that
had him studying Hebrew and German, engaging with the new biblical
criticism of Strauss and Renan, and arguing with some of the most
prominent theologians of his day, including Benson. He found, however,
that historical and philological study of the Bible could not answer
the deepest philosophical and ethical questions, which called for,
among other things, free and open inquiry into the possibility of
miracles and paranormal phenomena. Unfortunately, he found that
orthodox religion was all too often unreceptive to such forms of
inquiry, and that his doubts about such matters as the Virgin Birth
were not adequately addressed by the theologians. In a revealing
public letter to the *Times*, Sidgwick distinguished three
different approaches to the Bible: "Simple Scripturalism",
which took it all as literally true, "Historical
Scripturalism", which took only its theological and moral
statements has having that standing, and "Rationalism",
which held that, although the "most important part of religious
truth ... was discovered or revealed before the first century of
Christianity was closed", nonetheless 



> 
> 
> the process of development which the historical scripturalist traces
> between the earlier and later of them has continued since, and will
> continue, and that we cannot forecast its limits, and that even where
> the doctrine of the Bible, taken as a whole, is clear, an appeal lies
> always open to the common sense, common reason, and combined
> experience of the religious portion of mankind. (quoted in Schultz
> 2004: 83) 
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick identified himself with the Rationalist camp, which was
congenial to developing a thin Theistic account of religion
emphasizing the moral government of the universe, personal survival of
physical death, and the existence of a benevolent God. Indeed, he is
confident "that the thought of civilised Europe is moving
rapidly in its direction, and that it must inevitably spread and
prevail", though he also hopes "that it may spread with
the least possible disruption and disorganization of existing
institutions, the least possible disruption of old sympathies and
associations". He is also confident, as he makes plain in
various works, that the day of theological censure and
authoritarianism is passing.



Sidgwick's psychical research never yielded the hard proof of
survival that he sought, and although at the end of his life he
concluded that it had been largely a waste of time, he allowed that
there were some positive results from it and that, at least in the
1890s, some promising new lines of research had emerged. The
investigation of personal survival turned out to be bound up with the
investigation of many other purportedly paranormal phenomena:
telepathy, telekinesis, hypnotism, automatic writing, trance
mediumship, apparitions of the living as well as the dead, the claims
of Theosophy, etc. After all, it was argued, a medium supposedly
relaying information from the dead might instead be in telepathic
communication with living sources of that information. Thus, in order
to establish that communication from the "other world" had
actually occurred, it was essential to be able to rule out the
possibility of telepathy (Gauld 1968, 2007).



The "Sidgwick Group", as it was called--that is,
Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, Arthur and Gerald Balfour, F. W. H. Myers,
Lord Rayleigh, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, and a few
others--worked in close collaboration, and ended up establishing
to their satisfaction the reality of telepathic communication among
the living, the findings being presented in the series of massive (and
quite sophisticated) studies *Phantasms of the Dead*,
*Phantasms of the Living*, and the *Census of
Hallucinations*. As Myers explained the work:



> 
> 
> under our heading of "Phantasms of the living", we
> propose, in fact, to deal with all classes of cases where there is
> reason to suppose that the mind of one human being has affected the
> mind of another, without speech uttered, or word written, or sign
> made;--has affected it, that is to say, by other means than
> through the recognised channels of sense.
> 
> 
> 
> To such transmissions of thoughts or feelings we have elsewhere given
> the name of *telepathy*; and the records of an experimental
> proof of the reality of telepathy will form a part of the present
> work. But ... we have included among telepathic phenomena a vast
> class of cases which seem at first sight to involve something widely
> different from a mere transference of thought.
> 
> 
> 
> I refer to *apparitions*; excluding, indeed, the alleged
> apparitions of the *dead*, but including the apparitions of all
> persons who are still living, as we know life, though they may be on
> the very brink and border of physical dissolution. And these
> apparitions ... are themselves extremely various in character;
> including not visual phenomena alone, but auditory, tactile, or even
> purely ideational and emotional impressions. All these we have
> included under the term *phantasm*; a word which, though
> etymologically a mere variant of *phantom*, has been less often
> used, and has not become so closely identified with *visual*
> impressions alone. (Myers [1886], 1975: vol. II, ix)
> 
> 
> 



Psychical research, Myers goes on to suggest, can now claim "a
certain amount of actual achievement". Thus,



> 
> 
> We hold that we have proved by direct experiment, and corroborated by
> the narratives contained in this book, the possibility of
> communications between two minds, inexplicable by any recognised
> physical laws, but capable (under certain rare spontaneous conditions)
> of taking place when the persons concerned are at an indefinite
> distance from each other. And we claim further that by investigations
> of the higher phenomena of mesmerism, and of the automatic action of
> the mind, we have confirmed and expanded this view in various
> directions, and attained a standing-point from which certain even
> stranger alleged phenomena begin to assume an intelligible aspect, and
> to suggest further discoveries to come.
> 
> 
> 
> Thus far the authors of this book, and also the main group of their
> fellow-workers, are substantially agreed. (Myers [1886], 1975: vol.
> II, xx)
> 
> 
> 



This last line indicates, in particular, that Henry Sidgwick, whose
name did not appear among the list of authors of these works, was in
substantial agreement with their claims, which certainly appears to be
the case. As Broad, a later sympathizer, summarized one of the main
conclusions of the most comprehensive of the studies, the *Census
of Hallucinations*: 



> 
> 
> About one visual hallucination in *sixty-three* occurs within a
> period of twenty-four hours round about the death of the person whose
> apparition has been "seen". If such deal-coincidences were
> purely fortuitous concurrences of causally independent events the
> proportion would be about one in *nineteen thousand*. 
> 
> 
> 



Broad concluded that the *Census* was "a uniquely and
meticulously careful contribution to an important branch of their
subject". (Broad 1938 [1952]: 144)



But these studies suggested that much of the supposed evidence for
personal survival was merely evidence for telepathic communications
from the living (albeit, perhaps dying), and Sidgwick consequently
found much of this work distressing rather than encouraging. It was
only in the 1890s, with the famous case of Leonora Piper, that he came
to think that there was something resembling a "prima
facie" case for survival. Piper was an American whose trance
mediumship produced purported communications from particular deceased
persons, and her claims withstood the combined scrutiny of the best
researchers in both the American and British S.P.R.s, including
William James, the Sidgwicks, Richard Hodgson, and Frank Podmore. As
Braude (2003) indicates, the Piper case is still being debated to this
day (see also Berger 1987). Evidence of this nature helped persuade
Eleanor Sidgwick, in the years following Henry's death, that his
personality had survived physical death and succeeded in communicating
with her. In an extremely curious, even bizarre, chapter of this
history, Eleanor and her brothers, Arthur and Gerald, along with
various close friends and colleagues, apparently developed a plot,
supposedly with help from the "other side", to bring about
the birth of a "spirit child" who could become a new
Messiah, ushering in a reign of global peace (Roy 2008; Gray 2011;
Schultz 2017). What the actual, historical Henry might have made of
such an effort at applied esoteric morality is a very intriguing
question. 



If much of Sidgwick's psychical research today looks rather
gullible, it must be allowed that his positive conclusions were always
very cautious and guarded, and that his work in fact had an
overwhelmingly negative, destructive effect, akin to that of recent
debunkers of parapsychology. The Sidgwick Group exposed one fraud
after another, including the fraudulent claims of Madame Blavatsky and
the Theosophical movement, though Theosophists continue to dispute
this. Indeed, Theosophy remains an influential "New Age"
form of the esoteric spiritualism that Sidgwick found attractive
(given its concern with the common mystical core of all religions) but
impossible to defend (Oppenheim 1985). Insofar as parapsychology has
ever enjoyed any standing as a rigorous field of scientific inquiry,
this is thanks to the efforts of Sidgwick. Furthermore, the work of
the Sidgwick Group helped pave the way for much of the developing
research in depth psychology generally, calling attention to the
efforts of Freud, Charcot, Richet and many others whose names are not
primarily associated with parapsychology (Gauld 1968, 2007).



Thus, Sidgwick's parapsychological investigations were of
a-piece with his work on ethics and religion, and, especially in the
late 1880s, similarly frustrating. As he explained to his close friend
Symonds, he had 



> 
> 
> tried *all* methods in turn--all that I found pointed out
> by any of those who have gone before me; and all in turn have
> failed--revelational, rational, empirical methods--there is
> no proof in any of them. (*Memoir*: 472) 
> 
> 
> 



But Sidgwick was not eager to publicly proclaim the negative results
of his investigations, any more than he was eager to publicly proclaim
the skepticism about orthodox religion with with which they were
entangled. In the 1860s, in his work with the Free Christian Union and
religious investigations generally, he had been more open, freely
identifying himself as a Rationalist and a skeptic. But in the
aftermath of his resignation, he ceased to attack openly the religious
beliefs and organizations that he deemed indefensible. As he later
explained to an old friend:



> 
> 
> In fact, the reason why I keep strict silence now for many years with
> regard to theology is that while I cannot myself discover adequate
> rational basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality, it seems
> to be that the general loss of such a hope, from the minds of average
> human beings as now constituted, would be an evil of which I cannot
> pretend to measure the extent. I am not prepared to say that the
> dissolution of the existing social order would follow, but I think the
> danger of such dissolution would be seriously increased, and that the
> evil would certainly be very great. (*Memoir*: 357)
> 
> 
> 



Caught between the "Great Either-Or" of "Pessimism
or Faith", Sidgwick may have regarded his position as "an
inevitable point in the process of thought", but it was one he
took "as a soldier takes a post of difficulty", and he
could not assume the responsibility of drawing others to it
(*Memoir*: 354). He was not sure that the subject of ethics was
sufficiently like science and unlike theology to render his academic
position legitimate, even if he did not have to swear belief in the
Thirty-Nine Articles. But he did allow himself the hope that 



> 
> 
> a considerable improvement in average human beings in this respect of
> sympathy is like to increase the mundane happiness for men generally,
> and to render the hope of future happiness less needed to sustain them
> in the trials of life. (*Memoir*: 358) 
> 
> 
> 



Hence, the importance of political and educational reform. It was
"premature to despair". Indeed, if Placido Bucolo, the
force behind an impressive series of conferences on Sidgwick hosted by
the University of Catania, is correct, Sidgwick's non-despairing
Theistic heart shone through his work and activities throughout his
life (Bucolo, Crisp, & Schultz [eds] 2007, [eds] 2011). But there
is still a great deal of research to do on this subject, on the
politics and sociology of parapsychology (see Warner 2006), as well as
the way in which Sidgwick distanced himself from Kantian arguments for
religious belief. Such research will likely prove more fruitful if it
resists the temptation to treat the *Methods* as a stand-alone
work, with a narrow, textualist interpretive approach that Sidgwick
himself would have rejected. Even Parfit failed to notice that
Sidgwick had, in his psychical research, addressed the issue of the
philosophical significance of a Reductionist view of personal
identity, albeit in richer terms than the Humean ones alluded to in
the *Methods* (Schultz 2004, 2018).



Still, perhaps the larger point of Sidgwick's worries about the
dualism and related issues is best captured by the gloss that, in the
second edition of the *Methods*, he put on the dualism and its
possible resolution by the appropriate Theistic premise:



> 
> 
> For, if we find an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our
> apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct, we seem forced
> to the conclusion that they were not really intuitions after all, and
> that the apparently intuitive operation of the Practical Reason is
> essentially illusory. Therefore it is, one may say, a matter of life
> and death to the Practical Reason that this premise should be somehow
> obtained.... it seems plain that in proportion as man has lived
> in the exercise of the Practical Reason--as he believed--and
> feels as an actual force the desire to do what is right and reasonable
> as such, his demand for this premise will be intense and imperious.
> Thus we are not surprised to find Socrates--the type for all ages
> of the man in whom this desire is predominant--declaring with
> simple conviction that "if the Rulers of the Universe do not
> prefer the just man to the unjust, it is better to die than to
> live". And we must observe that in the feeling that prompts to
> such a declaration the desire to rationalize one's own conduct
> is not the sole, nor perhaps always the most prominent, element. For
> however difficult it may practically be to do one's duty when it
> comes into conflict with one's happiness, it often does not seem
> very difficult, when we are considering the question in the abstract,
> to decide in favour of duty. When a man passionately refuses to
> believe that the "Wages of Virtue" can "be
> dust", it is often less from any private reckoning about his own
> wages than from a disinterested aversion to a universe so
> fundamentally irrational that "Good for the Individual" is
> not ultimately identified with "Universal Good". (Sidgwick
> 1877: 468-69)
> 
> 
> 



It was, plausibly, this spectre of an unfriendly universe, of a
perverse Cosmos and a fragmented self in which reason is schizophrenic
or indeterminate, and the Wages of Virtue all too often dust, that
most deeply disturbed Sidgwick, even if he sometimes articulated the
issue in drier philosophical terms. And any successful but more
limited defense of one side or another of the dualism may well have
been, for him, only a very partial victory, a battle rather than the
war. His deepest convictions were more Tennysonian--the allusions
to "wages" being to Tennyson's poem of that title,
the last stanza of which reads:



> 
> 
> The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
>   
> 
> Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?
>   
> 
> She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
>   
> 
> To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
>   
> 
> Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
> 
> 
> 



At the least, as Phillips (2022: 230-31) observes in connection
with the debunking argument of de Lazari-Radek and Singer, 



> 
> 
> if they do succeed, Sidgwick would get one thing he would certainly
> have liked--an argument for the truth of utilitarianism--at
> the cost of losing another thing he also very much wanted, an argument
> for the existence of God. 
> 
> 
> 



But that might be better put: what concerned Sidgwick most deeply was
how to defend a vision of a friendly moral order of the universe in
which best for all and best for oneself were happily harmonized, with
neither sacrificed for the sake of the other. Small wonder that he did
not find what he was looking for.


## 5. Economics, Politics, Education



Sidgwick may have thought that the "deepest problems" of
human life had to do with the religious and ethical problems that
inspired his parapsychological research, but he nonetheless also
devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to both the theoretical
and practical sides of economics, politics, law, and ethics, which
were after all relevant to the problem of the dualism. In this he was
certainly in line with the tradition of Bentham and James and J. S.
Mill, all of whom presented utilitarianism as a comprehensive doctrine
that prioritized political, legal, and economic reform (Albee 1901;
Skorupski 1993; Rawls 1993 [1996], 2007). If Sidgwick had his own take
on these subjects, his perspective was still that of a theorist and
reformer with broad "interdisciplinary" concerns, rather
than that of an ethicist obsessed with personal ethics narrowly
construed. His professional credentials as both an economist and
political scientist were impeccable, although the professional
organizations now associated with these disciplines were only
beginning to take shape in his era. He was an active member of the
section of the British Association concerned with political economy
and economics, and his book on *The Elements of Politics*,
first published in 1891, became a staple of political science at
Cambridge and elsewhere. He is best thought of as one of the founding
fathers of the "Cambridge School" of economics, one whose
contributions should be classed with those of Alfred Marshall and A.
C. Pigou (Backhouse 2006; Medema 2009; Cook 2009; Winch 2009; Cord
[ed.] 2017). 



But Sidgwick's reputation as an economist has often suffered
from an invidious comparison with Marshall, his Cambridge colleague
and rival, who is classed among the greatest figures in the history of
the discipline. Marshall was both a brilliant economic thinker and a
relentless discipline builder, the man who basically established
modern economics as an independent academic discipline at Cambridge.
As "University politicians" he and Sidgwick were often at
odds with each other, since Sidgwick on some points resisted his
efforts, believing that economics should remain integrated with the
study of politics. Almost immediately upon his appointment as
professor in late 1884, Marshall, in a famous incident, confronted
Sidgwick and ridiculed him for his "mania" for
"over-regulation" and his "failure to attract men on
a large scale", the way Green had at Oxford. Marshall claimed
that Sidgwick was hampering his efforts, despite his greater knowledge
of economics. Sidgwick reflected on the charges, but concluded that
missionary zeal was not for him:



> 
> 
> feeling that the deepest truth I have to tell is by no means
> "good tidings", I naturally shrink from exercising on
> others the personal influence which would make men [resemble] me, as
> much as men more optimistic and prophetic naturally aim at exercising
> such influences. Hence as a teacher I naturally desire to limit my
> teaching to those whose bent or deliberate choice it is to search
> after ultimate truth; if such come to me, I try to tell them all I
> know; if others come with vaguer aims, I wish if possible to train
> their faculties without guiding their judgements. I would not if I
> could, and I could not if I would, say anything which would make
> philosophy--my philosophy--popular. (*Memoir*:
> 394-96)
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick had known Marshall for a long time--since the
1860s--and had in fact helped his career. He had in effect
tutored Marshall in philosophy, stimulated his interest in educational
reform, fostered their mutual interest in political economy, and
helped call attention to the importance of Marshall's early
work, privately circulating some of it. Initially, Marshall had joined
in the cause of women's higher education, but he later opposed
it, despite his marriage to Newnham graduate Mary Paley. Thus, by the
1880s and 90s, relations between the two men were often quite strained
(Groenewegen 1995).



Sidgwick had in fact long been a student of political economy.
"Mill's influence", he explained, led him "as
a matter of duty" to "study political economy thoroughly,
and give no little thought to practical questions, social and
political" (*Memoir*: 36). In the early 1860s, he was
absorbed in the study of Mill's classic work, the *Principles
of Political Economy*, and much influenced by Mill's
Cambridge disciple, the blind political economist Henry Fawcett. From
the late 1870s on, he regularly published works in this field,
producing his own *Principles of Political Economy* in 1883,
heading the political economy section of the British Association,
contributing to *Palgrave*, and serving on various government
Commissions concerned with economic questions (he developed
considerable expertise devising intricate taxation schemes) His work
as an academic and policy advisor put him in touch with (directly or
indirectly) many of the leading economists of the day--not only
such Cambridge colleagues as Fawcett, Marshall, J. N. Keynes, and
Herbert Foxwell, but also such figures as Edgeworth, Leon Walras, N.
Senior, J. E. Cairnes, and W. S. Jevons. He was even familiar with the
work of Karl Marx, at a time when few trained economists even knew who
Marx was. Moreover, he was long involved with both the practical and
theoretical work of the Cambridge Charity Organization Society,
developing a sophisticated, eclectic approach to the issue of poor
relief.



But like Marshall and many economists down to the present, Sidgwick
drew a careful distinction between the descriptive side (the science)
of economic analysis and the normative or policy side (the art), which
especially concerns the proper role of government intervention in the
market system to improve wealth production or wealth distribution. He
was also steeped in the great methodological debates over the
historical or inductive versus the analytic or deductive approaches to
the subject, and his balanced efforts to combine the two--and
strengthen comparative studies as well--considerably distance his
work from older Benthamite defenses of Laissez Faire. For Sidgwick,
"economic man" is simply an abstraction that may be useful
for explaining or predicting some aspects of the behavior of people
under certain historical circumstances and in certain situations. Both
the science and art of economic analysis need to recognize the
limitations of the assumption that people always act out of
self-interest and happily so. Indeed, as he rather heatedly put it in
his "The Scope and Method of Economic Science":



> 
> 
> There is indeed a kind of political economy which flourishes in proud
> independence of facts; and undertakes to settle all practical problems
> of Governmental interference or private philanthropy by simple
> deduction from one or two general assumptions--of which the chief
> is the assumption of the universally beneficent and harmonious
> operation of self-interest well let alone. This kind of political
> economy is sometimes called "orthodox", though it has the
> characteristic unusual in orthodox doctrines of being repudiated by
> the majority of accredited teachers of the subject. But whether
> orthodox or not, I must be allowed to disclaim all connection with it;
> the more completely this survival of the *a priori* politics of
> the eighteenth century can be banished to the remotest available
> planet, the better it will be, in my opinion, for the progress of
> economic science. (Sidgwick 1885: 2-3 [*Miscellaneous*:
> 171])
> 
> 
> 



Sidgwick's position certainly reflected the more sophisticated,
more historical, and even more socialistic views of the later J. S.
Mill, who had been influenced by both the Romantic movement and
Macaulay's withering criticisms of the apriorism of
Benthamism--that is, of the supposedly Benthamite attempt to
deduce the best form of law and government from the assumption of
universal self-interest (Capaldi 2004; Pitts 2005). Sidgwick followed
Mill in thinking that political economy needed to pay attention to the
complexity and historical variety of human motivation and character,
as well as the condition of the working class. Perhaps
characteristically, however, Sidgwick appreciated the paradox involved
in the successful application of the historical method:



> 
> 
> [I]t may be worth while to point out to the more aggressive
> "historicists" that the more the historian establishes the
> independence of his own study, by bringing into clear view the great
> differences between the economic conditions with which we are familiar
> and those of earlier ages, the more, *prima facie*, he tends to
> establish the corresponding independence of the economic science
> which, pursued with a view to practice, is primarily concerned to
> understand the present. (Sidgwick 1883 [1901: 48])
> 
> 
> 



This is not to applaud the increasing individualism and
self-interested behavior of the modern world, which in fact rather
worried Sidgwick. Again like Mill, he hoped that the future would
bring a growth in human sympathy and moral motivation. He even hoped
that individuals would come to be motivated to work by their concern
to do their bit for the common good, to make their contribution to
society; "ethical" socialism, though not necessarily
governmental socialism, was for him a very attractive development.
However, another side of this story concerns how those in the
"waiting room of history", as Chakrabarty (2000) called
it, would be treated, not as different, but as inferior. As Mill put
it, in *The Principles of Political Economy*:



> 
> 
> To civilize a savage, he must be inspired with new wants and desires,
> even if not of a very elevated kind, provided that their gratification
> can be a motive to steady and regular bodily and mental exertion. If
> the negroes of Jamaica and Demerara, after their emancipation had
> contented themselves, as it was predicted they would do, with the
> necessaries of life, and abandoned all labour beyond the little which
> in a tropical climate, with a thin population and abundance of the
> richest land, is sufficient to support existence, they would have sunk
> into a condition more barbarous, though less unhappy, than their
> previous state of slavery. The motive which was most relied on for
> inducing them to work was their love of fine clothes and personal
> ornaments. No one will stand up for this taste as worthy of being
> cultivated, and in most societies its indulgence tends to impoverish
> rather than to enrich; but in the state of mind of the negroes it
> might have been the only incentive that could make them voluntarily
> undergo systematic labour, and so acquire or maintain habits of
> voluntary industry which may be converted to more valuable ends. In
> England, it is not the desire of wealth that needs to be taught, but
> the use of wealth, and appreciation of the objects of desire which
> wealth cannot purchase, or for attaining which it is not required.
> Every real improvement in the character of the English, whether it
> consist in giving them higher aspirations, or only a juster estimate
> of the value of their present objects of desire, must necessarily
> moderate the ardour of their devotion to the pursuit of wealth. (Mill
> 1871: 104-5)
> 
> 
> 



Like Mill, and Bentham for that matter, Sidgwick was an enthusiastic
supporter of Wakefield and colonization, which was deemed necessary to
relieve pressures of population growth in England. Like them, he
devoted considerable energy to theorizing the comparative demands of
colonization, settler colonization, and dominion with respect to
Britain's "civilizing mission". But at least with
respect to his contributions to the supposed "science" of
economics, there has long been considerable controversy over how
successful Sidgwick was in going beyond Mill and appreciating the
"marginalist revolution" going on around him. Deane argues
that 



> 
> 
> the *Principles* owed more to the classical tradition of J. S.
> Mill than to what contemporaries were then calling the "new
> political economy" of Jevons and Marshall. (Deane 1987: 329)
> 
> 
> 
> 



And Howey, in an influential work, insists that economists 



> 
> 
> must add something to and take something away from hedonism, as
> ordinarily construed, before it becomes marginal utility economics.
> Jevons and Gossen could make the transformation; Sidgwick never could.
> (Howey 1960: 95) 
> 
> 
> 



On the other side, however, Sidgwick's economic work has been
praised by more than one Nobel Prize winner, including George Stigler.
Stigler, after remarking on how the work of Cournot and Dupuit on
monopoly and oligopoly "began to enter English economics, in
particular though Edgeworth, Sidgwick, and Marshall", confessed
that he was 



> 
> 
> coming to admire Henry Sidgwick almost as much as the other two. His
> *Principles* ... has two chapters (bk II, ch. IX and X)
> which are among the best in the history of microeconomics, dealing
> with the theories of human capital and noncompetitive behavior.
> (Stigler 1982: 41) 
> 
> 
> 



Elements of the Chicago School of Economics, particularly of law and
economics, have been intriguingly traced back to Sidgwick by Steven
Medema (2007), who has also helpfully brought out the impact of
Sidgwick's religious concerns on his economic approach (2008,
2009). Many of the contributions to Cord (2017) clarify and highlight
the role Sidgwick played in the development of economics, at Cambridge
and in general.



For his part, Sidgwick at least claimed that he was part of the new
movement, describing himself as a disciple of Jevons: 



> 
> 
> as Jevons had admirably explained, the variations in the relative
> market values of different articles express and correspond to
> variations in the comparative estimates formed by people in general,
> not of the *total* utilities of the amounts purchased of such
> articles, but of their *final* utilities; the utilities, that
> is, of the last portions purchased. (Sidgwick 1883 [1901: 82]) 
> 
> 
> 



But he did allow that the differences with the older, Millian school
had been exaggerated, and he continued, despite his considerable
mathematical expertise, to do economics in a qualitative mode. Even
so, he showed considerable acumen in setting out and conceptually
clarifying the fundamental concepts of economics (wealth, value,
labor, money, efficiency, etc.), in bringing out the difficulties
involved in cross-cultural and trans-historical comparisons of wealth,
and in analyzing the various cases of market failure, from monopoly to
collective action problems to negative externalities. Indeed, his
accounts of market failure and the possible remedies--the
"art" of political economy--have received somewhat
more recognition. Even Marshall praised this side of Sidgwick's
work. It is widely admitted that Marshall's hand-picked
successor at Cambridge, A. C. Pigou, produced a form of welfare
economics that largely recapitulated Sidgwick's contributions
(Backhouse 2006; Medema 2009; Cook 2009; Winch 2009).



The form of Sidgwick's *Principles of Political Economy*,
with its careful conceptual clarifications and distinction between
normative and descriptive arguments, and its successive qualifications
to individualistic, free market accounts of both, would prove to be
characteristic, figuring in many of his essays and in such works as
*The Elements of Politics*. As in the case of the
*Methods*, the structure of these works has often made it
difficult to see precisely where Sidgwick comes down on many issues.
Typically, he begins with a robust statement of the
"individualistic principle", as, for example, in the
*Elements*:



> 
> 
> what one sane adult is legally compelled to render to others should be
> merely the negative service of non-interference, except so far as he
> has voluntarily undertaken to render positive services; provided that
> we include in the notion of non-interference the obligation of
> remedying or compensating for mischief intentionally or carelessly
> caused by his acts--or preventing mischief that would otherwise
> result from previous acts. This principle for determining the nature
> and limits of governmental interference is currently known as
> "Individualism" ... the requirement that one sane
> adult, apart from contract or claim to reparation, shall contribute
> positively by money or services to the support of others I shall call
> "socialistic". (Sidgwick 1891 [1919: 42])
> 
> 
> 



Then, typically, he goes on to explain how any such principle reflects
various psychological and sociological presuppositions--for
example, that sane adults are the best judges of their own
interests--and that these are only approximate generalizations
and subject to crucial limitations. The psychological assumption that
"every one can best take care of his own interest" and the
sociological one that "the common welfare is best attained by
each pursuing exclusively his own welfare and that of his family in a
thoroughly alert and intelligent manner"--both essential to
the case for Laissez Faire--end up being very heavily qualified
and subject to so many exceptions that it is scarcely evident what
Sidgwick means when he calls individualism "in the main
sound". The list of qualifications covers everything from
education, defense, child care, poor relief, public works, collective
bargaining, environmental protections, and more. He stresses two cases
that, he urges, perspicuously point up the problems with the
individualistic principle: "the humane treatment of lunatics,
and the prevention of cruelty to the inferior animals". Such
restrictions do not aim at securing the freedom of the lunatics or the
animals, but are a "one-sided restraint of the freedom of action
of men with a view to the greatest happiness of the aggregate of
sentient beings". An unfortunate--but alas, all too
revealing--note adds that the "protection of inferior races
of men will be considered in a subsequent chapter" (Sidgwick
1891 [1919: 141-42]).



These qualifications and limitations then invariably involve a
discussion of the case for socialism and/or communism, a subject that
Sidgwick addressed at length in many works. His main objection to
socialistic interference was the familiar one that too much of it
would lead to splendidly equal destitution, as the old line has it,
and that for people as presently constituted economic incentives were
needed to spur them to produce. But again, a better, more communal
world was possible, and he hoped that "human nature" would
change, growing more sympathetic and more amenable to ethical
socialism, leaving the door open to the possibility of legitimating
much greater governmental interference with the market. Winch (2009)
expertly brings out not only how far Sidgwick went in suggesting that
government interference with markets should become "a normal
element" of industrial policy, but also how his acceptable
alternative to expropriating landlords as part of radical land
nationalization was a program of reparative justice such that the poor
"should be eligible for compensation by the rich". (Winch
2009: 219). 



At any rate, as noted above, whatever his anxieties about economic
socialism, Sidgwick was openly enthusiastic about ethical socialism,
the possibility of humanity growing more altruistic and compassionate,
regarding their labor as their contribution to the common good. He was
under no illusions whatsoever, not only about the market failing to
reflect claims of desert or merit, but also about the limitations of
that abstraction, "economic man", since historical and
cultural or national context could dramatically alter the
possibilities for moving beyond economic individualism, though again,
in some areas this emphasis on "national character" lent
itself to the racist and imperialistic tendencies of the British
empire (Schultz 2004). It is possible that Sidgwick's drift
toward racism may have been in significant part a result of his
absorption in the work of Jevons, who held that a "man of lower
race, a negro for instance, enjoys possession less, and loathes labour
more; his exertions, therefore, soon stop" (Jevons 1871: 177).
Such views on matters of race, which were more extreme than
Mill's, would increasingly reverberate through late
nineteenth-century political economy (Macmillan 1890), finding
expression in Sidgwick's admirer Edgeworth, who would insist on
how "Capacity for pleasure is a property of evolution, an
essential attribute of civilisation", with
"civilisation" being determined in part by race.
(Edgeworth 1881 [2003: 78]).



Clearly, in his political theoretical work, Sidgwick admittedly simply
assumed the utilitarian criterion as the normative bottom line, rather
than arguing for it against rational egoism. He also stressed, in many
different works, that no one could confidently predict the direction
of civilization. Although in his more historical works, notably
*The Development of European Polity*, Sidgwick assembled
evidence to suggest that a continued growth in federalism and
large-scale state organizations was likely, it was a very carefully
hedged conclusion and cast against a broad critique of the social
sciences. Much as he admired the sweep and ambition of such pioneers
of sociology as Spencer and Comte (whose emphasis on the
"consensus of experts" was appropriated for his
epistemological work), he regarded their "sciences" of the
laws of human development as absurdly over-blown, yielding wildly
different predictions about the future course of humanity. He
sincerely hoped that a more cosmopolitan attitude would be the wave of
the future, and that the growth of international law and cooperation
would decrease the likelihood of war, but he could not convince
himself that social science--with the partial exception of
economics--was beyond its infancy when it came to predicting
things to come (Sidgwick 1902a; see also the introduction to Bryce
& Sidgwick [eds] 1919).



Thus, although D. G. Ritchie famously charged that with Sidgwick
utilitarianism had grown "tame and sleek" and lost its
reforming zeal, others, notably F. A. Hayek, held that he had in
effect paved the way for the "New Liberalism" and even
Fabian socialism that soon overtook British politics, legitimating a
far greater degree of state intervention (Schultz 2004). Woodrow
Wilson, the future president of the U. S., admired Sidgwick's
*Elements*, but found the more abstract, analytic side of his
work oddly "colorless" and in need of historical content.
These debates continue (Collini 2001; Kloppenberg 1992; H. S. Jones
2000; Bell 2007, 2016; Winch 2009; Miller 2020), though it would be
difficult to conclude that anyone has got Sidgwick quite right.
Sidgwick was at times tame and sleek, at times subversive and
reformist, at times anxious, at times hopeful, and always more or less
skeptical. At any rate, Sidgwick's work in politics and
political theory, like his work in economics, does reveal how far he
was from Benthamism; he even criticized at length the Austinian theory
of sovereignty--which analyzed law in terms of authoritative
command and habitual obedience--so dear to the Benthamites, in a
critique that received high praise from the legal historian (and
Sidgwick student) F. W. Maitland.



But some sides of Sidgwick have not aged at all well, though they too
need to be addressed. In an important article on "The Political
Philosophy of Henry Sidgwick", Miller goes so far as to argue
that Sidgwick's political philosophy has "fallen into
oblivion while his ethics continues to be celebrated" because of




> 
> 
> the weight he attached to common sentiments and beliefs in his
> application of the utility principle, illustrated by his treatment of
> topics such as secession and colonialism. Moreover his *Elements of
> Politics* is arranged in such a way that he never has to confront
> the basic question of what makes states legitimate. This means that
> neither political moralists, who want to see the utility principle
> applied in more radical fashion, nor political realists, for whom the
> problem of establishing political order is central, find much to
> commend in his political philosophy. (Miller 2020: 261) 
> 
> 
> 



There is certainly much that is right in Miller's position. It
must be allowed, at the least, that Sidgwick's political
writings did not achieve the inspiring tone of J. S. Mill, and that,
for all of his indebtedness to *On Liberty, Considerations on
Representative Government* etc., he tended to highlight the more
elitist Millian concerns--concerns that often reflected his
anxieties about the dualism of practical reason, rather than his hopes
for a better world. Like the later Mill, Sidgwick harbored many
suspicions about the wisdom of democracy and championed the need for a
cultural "clerisy" or vanguard of educated opinion, often
sounding a note not unlike that of Walter Lippmann in the twentieth
century, stressing how an educated elite should benevolently shape
public opinion. He much admired the work of his friend James Bryce,
author of *The American Commonwealth* (1888), which pointed up
both the vitality and the dangers of the U.S. political system. But he
devoted comparatively little effort to proclaiming the benefits of
freedom of conscience and speech (or grassroots democracy), was quite
critical of Mill's schemes for proportional representation, and
worried at length about how 



> 
> 
> to correct the erroneous and short-sighted views of self-interest,
> representing it as divergent from duty, which certainly appear to be
> widely prevalent in the most advanced societies, at least among
> irreligious persons. 
> 
> 
> 



In fact, for the government to supply teachers of this view might even
be 



> 
> 
> indirectly individualistic in its aim, since to diffuse the conviction
> that it is every one's interest to do what is right would
> obviously be a valuable protection against mutual wrong, 
> 
> 
> 



though it would probably detract from the credibility of such teachers
if they were salaried employees of the state (Sidgwick 1891 [1919:
213-14]). 



The more sinister aspects of Sidgwick's worries about what he
termed the"lower classes" and the "lower
races", and the ways in which his work (including his
parapsychology) intertwined with a variety of late Victorian
imperialistic projects, including those of his colleague Sir John
Seeley, his friend Charles Henry Pearson, and his brother-in-law
Arthur Balfour, have been brought out primarily by Schultz (2004,
2007, 2017) and Bell (2007, 2016), though Miller also recognizes the
importance of these matters. Plausibly, another reason why
Sidgwick's political work has been comparatively neglected is
that there is so much deeply offensive, colonialist, imperialist, and
racist content in it. As Bell puts it:



> 
> 
> Sidgwick frequently wrote in a racialized idiom, and his work is
> studded with examples of crude (albeit standard) civilizational
> stereotyping.... This was a vision of liberal civilizational
> imperialism, remaking the manners as well as the map of the world, and
> drawing on a long-standing argument about the occupation of
> "unoccupied" territory leavened with late Victorian
> moralism about the duties of imperialists to indigenous populations.
> (Bell 2016: 262)
> 
> 
> 



For Sidgwick, it was an open, urgent question whether the "lower
races" were not inherently so, and he thought that intermarriage
between races should be prohibited (as it often was) if there was
forthcoming evidence that such marriages could result in the
"debasement" of the "superior" race, though he
hoped that would not prove to be the case. In addition to admiring his
colleague Seeley's work on the expansion of England, he allowed
that the evidence marshalled by his friend Charles Henry Pearson, in
his *National Life and Character*, evidence about the
"threat" to the supremacy of the "white races"
from the "black and yellow races", was very impressive, if
not quite decisive (Schultz 2004; 2017: 328-3). Like so many in
his circles, Sidgwick occasionally used the "N word" to
refer to Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and even while
acknowledging the historical atrocities of settler colonialism, he
insisted that



> 
> 
> civilised nations ... in performance of their legitimate
> business--for it is their legitimate business on utilitarian
> principles--of civilizing the world ... have to commit acts
> which cannot but be regarded as aggressive by the savage nations whom
> it is their business to educate and absorb. (Sidgwick 1902a:
> 236-37) 
> 
> 
> 



He bought into the racist stereotyping of "national
character" to be found in Millian ethology and the work of
Bryce, and he supported the harsh repressive measures his
brother-in-law Arthur Balfour used against the Irish, during his time
as Irish Secretary, opposing Home Rule for Ireland. He extolled the
satisfactions of the "spiritual expansion" of
"civilized" nations, whatever the economics of the matter,
and apparently despite the fact that when it came to metaethical
foundations, these nations were not themselves very far along on the
imperialist scale of "civilization", being too tempted by
a Machiavellian materialism and Jingoism making for conflict at home
and abroad. 



Thus, perhaps what Sidgwick's political writings so effectively
highlight is how his version of liberal imperialism is weaker on the
liberal side than the Millian version, and how his views on quelling
social strife and achieving peace through a more cosmopolitan,
internationalist world order could reflect his racialized and racist
version of the "civilizational mission" of Victorian
imperialism, heightened by anxieties about the growth of democracy and
the decline of religion. As with Mill, it is through the lens of the
critique of the culture of imperialism that one can most sharply
discern just why education was accorded such a crucial role here.
Given the anti and postcolonial scholarship devoted to Bentham and
James and John Stuart Mill, for example Inder Marwah's
*Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill and the
Government of Difference* (Marwah 2019; see also Pitts 2005), it
is very surprising indeed how the comprehensive vision of
utilitarianism that Sidgwick advanced could be ignored or censored in
the way that it has been and mostly continues to be. Of course, as
with Mill, Sidgwick was somewhat better on the home front and with
certain reformist causes, at least insofar as these can be
decolonized. Despite his disclaimers, he truly was committed to
expanding and improving educational opportunities, the better to
influence the direction of reform. His (highly Millian) feminism was
focused on higher education for women and the foundation of Newnham
College, and his many attempts to improve the curriculum of Cambridge
University (by including Bentham, modern literature, physiology and
other new subjects) were correlated with efforts to expand its
audience and impact (McWilliams Tullberg 1975 [1998]; Sutherland
2006). And beyond formal educational institutions, Sidgwick was
indefatigable in promoting and participating in discussion societies,
ever aiming at the elusive "consensus of experts" that his
epistemology called for. If, towards the end of his life, his
participation in such vehicles as the "Ethical Societies"
reflected his despair over the possibility of achieving such a
consensus on the "deepest problems", and instead involved
an effort to set such problems aside in the hope of agreeing on the
practical upshot of ethical questions (Sidgwick 1898), this was not
his most characteristic attitude (Skelton 2011), though such
participation did bring home to him how important it was to widen his
dialogical efforts. His support for John Addington Symonds, one of the
English followers of Walt Whitman and a pioneer of gay studies, is
also suggestive of how important some of his reformist efforts could
be (Schultz 2004).



As with other aspects of his politics, Sidgwick's views on
education and culture have not received nearly as much critical
attention as his ethical work. But they merit careful analysis, given
the way in which he fell in between Mill and Dewey as a prominent and
politically charged consequentialist philosopher-educator. Calling for
the inclusion of both older humanistic and modern scientific elements
in any form of education worthy of the name, and for an open-minded
fallibilistic attitude, he explained in "The Pursuit of
Culture":



> 
> 
> since the most essential function of the mind is to think and know, a
> man of cultivated mind must be essentially concerned for knowledge:
> but it is not knowledge merely that gives culture. A man may be
> learned and yet lack culture: for he may be a pedant, and the
> characteristic of a pedant is that he has knowledge without culture.
> So again, a load of facts retained in the memory, a mass of reasonings
> got up merely for examination, these are not, they do not give
> culture. It is the love of knowledge, the ardour of scientific
> curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts and ideas, to
> make them our own and fit them into the living and growing system of
> our thought; and the trained faculty of doing this, the alert and
> supple intelligence exercised and continually developed in doing
> this,--it is in these that culture essentially lies. (1897
> [*Miscellaneous*: 352]).
> 
> 
> 



Perhaps Sidgwick would have admitted that there was always room for
more doubt.