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does – that the calm desire for my ‘good on the whole’ is authoritative;
and therefore carries with it implicitly a rational dictate to aim at this
end, if in any case a conflicting desire urges the will in an opposite
direction.” We may, he allows, keep the notion of such a dictate “merely
implicit and latent” by interpreting, in line with common sense, “ul-
timate good on the whole for me” as meaning “what I should practi-
cally desire if my desires were in harmony with reason, assuming my
own existence alone to be considered.” Or, as he concludes in the fifth
edition,
‘ my ultimate good’ must be taken to mean in the sense that it is ‘what is ultimately desirable for me,’ or what I should desire if my desires were in harmony with reason, – assuming my own existence alone to be considered, – and is thus identical
with the ultimate end or ends prescribed by reason as what ought to be sought or
aimed at, so far as reason is not thought to inculcate sacrifice of my own ultimate
good. (ME )
Thus, the calm desire for one’s “ultimate good on the whole,” so con-
strued, would seem to involve a form of rational authority that rules
out such things as irrational desires and weakness of will. Analogously,
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“[u]ltimate good on the whole,” Sidgwick tries to show, “if unqualified by
reference to a particular subject, must be taken to mean what as a rational
being I should desire and seek to realize, assuming myself to have an equal
concern for all existence” – which is, of course, in contrast with “ultimate good on the whole for me” (ME –).
But again, “good or excellent actions are not implied to be in our power.”
In either case, there may well be a difference between the judgment that
such and such is good and the judgment that one ought to do such and
such. It is only when the call to action takes shape, in practical deliberation,
that the concern with promoting the good melds into the imperative of
the right.
Schneewind’s summary of this tangled topic is hard to match:
The concepts of goodness and rightness then represent differentiations of the
demands of our own rationality as it applies to our sentient and our active powers.
Seeing this helps give us a better understanding of what Sidgwick takes the basic
indefinable notion of practical rationality to be. It is what is common to the notions of a reason to desire, a reason to seek or aim at, a reason to decide or choose, a
reason to do; it does not involve an authoritative prescription to act where there
is barely reason to desire something, or even where there is fairly strong reason,
but only where there is stronger reason to desire one thing than to desire anything
else, and that one thing is within our powers. At this point it becomes the through-
and-through “ought” or “right” of definite dictates claiming to give authoritative
guidance to our conduct. If any “metaethical” answer to the question of the
nature of the object of moral judgements is implicit in Sidgwick’s position, it is
that moral judgements embody the fact that we are reasonable beings who feel
and act. In judging what is right or good, we are following out the implications of
our rationality for the practical aspects of our nature.
This seems plausible. The notion of “good” speaks to our sentient, feel-
ing nature, and that of “right” to our agency, and the two meet when
the authoritative pronouncements of the former come to yield concrete
practical direction in the authoritative pronouncements of the latter. But
as Sidgwick admits, the differences in intuitional method that arise from
this “variation of view as to the precise quality immediately apprehended
in the moral intuition” are “peculiarly subtle and difficult to fix in clear
and precise language” (ME ). It was just this space for argument that
would eventually produce the “ideal” utilitarianism of Moore, who re-
sisted Sidgwick’s interpretation of “good” and his supposed prioritizing
of “ought.” However, as Thomas Hurka has argued, the distance between
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these figures is hard to determine. Noting how Sidgwick recognized that
his account of “ought” could be deemed problematic because inability to
control irrational desires would suggest a violation of the principle that
“ought” implies “can,” Hurka explains:
Sidgwick acknowledged this in earlier editions of The Methods of Ethics. After defining the good as what we ought to desire, he 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.
Hence, the stock contrast between Sidgwick and Moore – with the
former defining “good” in terms of the unanalyzable “ought” and the
latter defining “right” in terms of the unanalyzable “good” – may be a
bit simplistic. Rashdall, who knew them both, even claimed that Moore
rightly recognized Sidgwick as his predecessor in holding “the idea of an
indefinable good,” but that he was preposterous in suggesting that this
was an original discovery of the latter:
To say nothing of writers who (like Mr. Moore and myself ) learned the doctrine
largely from Sidgwick, I should contend that it was taught with sufficient dis-
tinctness by Plato (whatever may be thought of his further attempt to show that
only the good has real existence), Aristotle, and a host of modern writers who
have studied in their school – by no one more emphatically than by Cudworth.
The only criticism which I should make upon Mr. Moore’s exposition of it is
that he ignores the other ways in which the same notion may be expressed, and
in particular the correlative notion of ‘right’ or ‘ought.’ He is so possessed with
this idea that ‘good’ is indefinable that he will not even trouble to expound and
illustrate it in such ways as are possible in the case of ultimate ideas.
It was perhaps just this obsession that rendered Moore’s notion of the
good vulnerable to the charge that it failed to be sufficiently normative,
sufficientl
y “ought-implying.” Furthermore, Rashdall’s remark is illu-
minating not least for the way in which it brings out the common Platonic
inheritance of Sidgwick and Moore – a point that, in light of the previous
chapters, seems particularly revealing. Evidently, however, as later sections
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will explain, Sidgwick’s efforts to explicate the “good” as what one “ought
to desire” and his reluctance to talk about the “property” of “goodness”
did make for serious differences with Moore when it came to the sub-
ject of egoism. At any rate, the division between Sidgwick and Moore in
many ways comes down to the question of whether it makes sense to talk
of agent-relative goodness, of the “ultimate good” of a particular person,
generating reasons for that person but not necessarily for others, as in the
case of egoism.
Now, although the general scholarly consensus, past and present, thus
appears to be that Sidgwick did not hold a naturalistic “full-information”
view of the “good,” there is some difference of opinion over just why
he took this route. And there have been some important dissenting
positions as well, from Rawls down to the present. Thus, a rather dif-
ferent reading is given by Roger Crisp, in his essay “Sidgwick and Self-
Interest.” Crisp maintains that “Sidgwick believed that self-interest is
constituted by awareness of the fulfilment of certain desires one would
have if special knowledge were available to one. In contemporary terms,
this account comprises an Informed-desire Theory, constrained by an
Experience Requirement.” Crisp argues to the effect that Sidgwick’s def-
inition of the good in terms of “[w]hat I should practically desire if my
desires were in harmony with reason” was not meant to contrast with
the earlier definition – “what he would desire and seek on the whole if
all the consequences of all the different lines of conduct open to him
were accurately foreseen and adequately realised in imagination at the
present point of time.” Agreeing that the former was a response to the
problem of weakness of will, Crisp nonetheless holds that it was a collat-
eral, not contrasting, alternative, and that if the earlier definition “spells
out what it is that makes someone’s life go best,” the later one “implies
that seeking this is what one has most reason to do.” Which is to say,
Crisp in effect denies that the “proper reasoning” requirement was meant
to qualify the naturalism of the “full-information” or “informed desire”
account.
However, Crisp allows that the interpretations advanced by Parfit and
Schneewind are “more charitable,” in that they make Sidgwick appear
less incapable of recognizing “that desires may be irrational even in the
conditions of full information he envisaged.” And of course, Sidgwick
may have deliberately toned down his non-naturalism in the late editions
of the Methods.
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Matters get even stickier when Sidgwick tries to work out a substantive
account of ultimate good. If, as he insists, “the practical determination
of Right Conduct depends on the determination of Ultimate Good,” the
devil is in the details, and Sidgwick’s hedonistic answer is perhaps the fea-
ture of his work that has distanced it most from recent neo-utilitarianism
(and from every other moral theory). L. W. Sumner urges that as
“Sidgwick conceives it, the contest at this point is between happiness on
the one hand and various (subjective) perfectionist goods, such as knowl-
edge and freedom, on the other.” And as Sumner also notes, Sidgwick’s
form of hedonism, ostensibly treating pleasures as “a class of feelings”
having the common property of pleasantness, betrays subtle differences
from earlier utilitarian accounts. As Sidgwick explains:
Shall we then say that there is a measurable quality of feeling expressed by the
word ‘pleasure,’ which is independent of its relation to volition, and strictly un-
definable from its simplicity? – like the quality of feeling expressed by ‘sweet,’
of which also we are conscious in varying degrees of intensity. This seems to be
the view of some writers: but, for my own part, when I reflect on the notion of
pleasure, – using the term in the comprehensive sense I have adopted, to include
the most refined and subtle intellectual and emotional gratifications, no less than
the coarser and more definite sensual enjoyments, – the only common quality
that I can find in the feelings so designated seems to be that relation to desire
and volition expressed by the general term ‘desirable’. . . . I propose therefore to define Pleasure . . . as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or – in cases of comparison – preferable.
(ME )
As Sumner cogently observes, both Mill and Sidgwick, 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.
One could, Sumner urges, rightly think of Sidgwick as advancing an
“externalist, attitude” model of hedonism, rather than as returning to
a pure, Benthamite “internalist” hedonism, with its “sensation model”
emphasizing common hedonic tone and so forth. In either case, of course,
“pleasures and pains are purely mental states,” experiences that can be
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identified through introspection. However, on the internalist view, what
is introspected is a particular internal quality, whereas on the externalist
view, it is the external relation of being liked or disliked.
Sidgwick certainly did defend this candidate theory of ultimate good in
a wide range of writings, and it formed a crucial part of his treatment of
egoism and utilitarianism, which got translated into “Egoistic Hedonism”
and “Universalistic Hedonism,” respectively. Yet, as the next section will
show, he was never as confident about this hedonistic interpretation of
good as he was
of his general account of good and how it ought to be
maximized, and he was ever troubled by whether he had really done justice
to the perfectionist alternative, in its more compelling forms. And it is
in this region that, ironically enough, one also finds much material that
has a contemporary ring, despite the poor reputation of hedonism. As
Shaver suggests, “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
judgement after reflection. (Contemporary discussions of the ultimate
good, such as those by Parfit, Griffin, Hurka, and Sumner, follow the
same procedures.)” In some respects, the bottom line is simply this:
[S]o far as we judge virtuous activity to be a part of Ultimate Good, it is, I conceive, because the consciousness attending it is judged to be in itself desirable for the
virtuous agent; though at the same time this consideration does not adequately
represent the importance of Virtue to human wellbeing, since we have to consider
its value as a means as well as its value as an end. We may make the distinction
clearer by considering whether Virtuous life would remain on the whole good for
the virtuous agent, if we suppose it combined with extreme pain. The affirmative
answer to this question was strongly supported in Greek philosophical discussion:
but it is a paradox from which a modern thinker would recoil: he would hardly
venture to assert that the portion of life spent by a martyr in tortures was in itself desirable, – though it might be his duty to suffer the pain with a view to the good of others, and even his interest to suffer it with a view to his own ultimate happiness.
(ME )
However, Sidgwick’s treatment of perfectionism is troublingly elusive
at points, provoking questions about nonhedonistic and nonegoistic and
nonteleological alternatives. Schneewind notes that “he does in effect con-
sider the possibility of a fourth method, one involving a non-hedonistic
teleological principle; and he need not, therefore, have linked dogmatic
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