Henry Sidgwick Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) was a British utilitarian philosopher. His version of utilitarianism, presented in the 1874 The Methods of Ethics, built on and amended the work of fellow Victorian philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill. The next generation of British thinkers found the sheer moral sincerity of their predecessors an easy target. In his 2004 Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, Bart Schultz quotes economist John Maynard Keynes as saying that Sidgwick “never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove it wasn’t and hope that it was” (4). It is perhaps fairer to say that Sidgwick was born into a turbulent era of increasing doubt and, like Mill before him, responded to these challenges with both passion and hard thought.

Sidgwick’s inner existence was marked by struggle and change, but outwardly he led a quiet life that was spent for the most part within the academy. The greatest drama of this scholarly life was his resignation of his post as a fellow at Trinity College in 1869. He had come to believe that biblical scripture could not stand up to modern scientific scrutiny, and he decided he could no longer endorse the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, acceptance of which was required of the fellows of Cambridge. He nevertheless remained at Cambridge in a specially created position. Two years later, partly due to Sidgwick’s resignation, British parliament voted to abolish the religious requirement, and Sidgwick was reinstalled in his position as fellow.

Sidgwick attempted to strengthen utilitarianism as the most promising secular alternative to the eroding religious morality. His most distinctive contributions were methological and metaethical. These innovations are contained in Sidgwick’s greatest work, The Methods of Ethics. According to Sidgwick, ethics studies what an individual ought to do. A method of ethics is a comprehensive, internally consistent standard of moral behavior that answers this question. By definition, one cannot rationally employ more than one method. However, Sidgwick states that the average person does not consciously employ a single method to guide his moral decision-making. Instead, he uses multiple commonsense maxims as guides. Ordinary practical reasoning, thus characterized, is limited and conflicted. Despite its limitations, Sidgwick asserts that this is the place to begin moral philosophy. By critically examining commonsense reasoning, one eventually can uncover what methods do exist.

At first, Sidgwick argues that all genuine methods of ethics belong to one of three categories: egoism, utilitarianism, or intuitionism. The category of egoism consists of the method that directs the agent to pursue his own happiness. This utilitarian method is to act so as to maximize the happiness of humanity as a whole. The third category of intuitionism contains more than one method. Each settles on right actions based on clear moral intuitions. Later in the Methods of Ethics, however, Sidgwick complicates this initial classification by stating that utilitarianism and hedonism also each rest on a basic moral intuition. Here he evades a criticism made of John Stuart Mill. Mill’s proof of the principle of utility in Utilitarianism (1861) was widely viewed as unsuccessful because it argued from a positive fact to a normative principle. By deriving utilitarianism from the moral intuition of “rational benevolence,” Sidgwick avoids this particular criticism.

Sidgwick divides ethical questions about political life into two groups. The first set of questions concerns the proper relationship between the individual agent and his political environment. This set includes traditional questions about individual political obligation and belong to ethics proper, according to Sidgwick’s definition of it. The second set of questions inquires into the ideal society. Sidgwick calls the discipline that addresses these questions politics. He asserts that ethics and politics are related but distinct disciplines. He examines politics, as understood by him, in both his 1883 work The Principles of Political Economy, and in his 1891 work The Elements of Politics. In these texts, he employs a utilitarian standard, discussing the details of a government whose arrangements maximize the happiness of the community. His contributions to the study of political economy, focusing on socialist interventions into a market system, are especially distinguished.

The immediately following generation of British philosophers tended to denigrate Sidgwick even as they borrowed from him; G. E. Moore is a prominent example. In the second half of the twentieth century, the political philosophy of John Rawls reintroduced Sidgwick to political theorists. An opponent of utilitarianism, Rawls nonetheless championed Sidgwick as a rigorous thinker and adopted some aspects of his methodology. Since then, the literature on Sidgwick has continued to grow.

Bibliography:

Blanshard, Brand. Four Reasonable Men. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Schneewind, Jerome B. Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Schultz, Bart. Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1887.
The Methods of Ethic, 7th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981.
The Elements of Politics, 2nd ed. London: Adamant, 2005.

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