by Bart Schultz
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
intuitionism as a method to perfection as an end. Had he not done so,
it would have been clearer than it is that the dogmatic intuitionism he
examines is a deontological, not a covertly teleological, method.” Plau-
sibly, however, this mixing of the two positions was another aspect of
the Whewellian view that so troubled him; at least, Whewell, in his The
Elements of Morality, had often been at pains to demonstrate that his theory
captured much of what was attractive in the notion of human perfection
as an end.
In the first edition of the Methods, Sidgwick had, in the chapter on
“Good” concluding Book I, given a clear indication of how important these
various considerations were for addressing the “method” of intuitionism:
Thus we are [provisionally] led to the conclusion that the only Good that can
claim to be so intrinsically, and at the same time capable of furnishing a standard
of conduct, is Perfection or Excellence of conscious life. And so we seem brought
round again to the method discussed in the first part of this chapter, the form
or phase of Intuitionism which takes “good” instead of “right” conduct as its
most general notion. Only there is this important difference, that Conscious Life
includes besides actions the whole range of feeling. We saw in chap. that we had
to distinguish the recognition of Excellence in feelings from the recognition of
their Pleasantness: and that this distinction seemed to be implied in the contrast
drawn by recent Hedonists between the quality of pleasures and their quantity.
In aiming, therefore, at the Perfection of conscious life, we shall endeavour to
realize this excellence in all our feelings. Now though Feeling is to some extent a
subject of our common intuitions of right and wrong (as we think that actions, to
be perfectly right, must be done from right motives), yet it seems to be so only
in a subordinate and restricted manner: and there is much excellence of feeling
(elevation or refinement of taste, &c.) which is not thus included. It seems then that the method which takes Perfection or Excellence of conscious existence as ultimate
end, if we restrict its scope to the Perfection of the individual agent, coincides primâ facie with the ordinary form of Intuitionism, since Virtues are always recognised as the chief of human perfections: but that in so far as the former notion comprehends
more than virtue, there is likely to be a certain practical divergence between the
two methods. And if we take the Perfection of mankind in general as the ultimate
end, this divergence may be increased indefinitely: for we cannot assume à priori that the best way for each man to attain his own perfection is by aiming at the
perfection of others. We cannot but hope that this is the case, just as we cannot but hope that when an individual sacrifices his own happiness to that of others, the
sacrifice will be in some way repaid him: but perhaps the constitution of things
does not admit of this. (ME –)
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The allusions to Mill here involve not only his doctrine of higher plea-
sures, but also his division between the ethical and aesthetic realms, some-
thing that also figures in Sidgwick’s conception of ethics. When Sidgwick
concludes his later treatment of the matter in Book III, however, he admits
that he is “forced to leave the ethical method which takes Perfection, as
distinct from Happiness, to be the whole or chief part of ultimate Good, in
a rudimentary condition.” Such modesty is less marked in later editions:
If we are not to systematise human activities by taking Universal Happiness as
their common end, on what other principles are we to systematise them? It should
be observed that these principles must not only enable us to compare among
themselves the values of the different non-hedonistic ends which we have been
considering, but must also provide a common standard for comparing these values
with that of Happiness; unless we are prepared to adopt the paradoxical position
of rejecting happiness as absolutely valueless. For we have a practical need of
determining not only whether we should pursue Truth rather than Beauty, or
Freedom or some ideal constitutions of society rather than either, or perhaps
desert all of these for the life of worship and religious contemplation; but also
how far we should follow any of these lines of endeavour, when we foresee among
its consequences the pains of human or other sentient beings, or even the loss of
pleasures that might otherwise have been enjoyed by them.
I have failed to find – and am unable to construct – any systematic answer to
this question that appears to me deserving of serious consideration: and hence I
am finally led to the conclusion . . . that the Intuitional method rigorously applied yields as its final result the doctrine of pure Universalistic Hedonism – which it
is convenient to denote by the single word, Utilitarianism. (ME )
Thus, perfectionism can be assimilated to dogmatic intuitionism
(because they supposedly coincide on ethical matters), which can in turn
be assimilated to utilitarianism, as we shall see in more detail presently.
And thus, again, the best candidate for ultimate good is the hedonistic
one: experiences of pleasurable or desirable consciousness. Put more pre-
cisely, the candidate is a “compromise” form of quantitative hedonism,
with both a preference element and a mental-state one. Sidgwick cannot
shake the thought that the virtuous life loses its luster if we imagine it as,
say, conjoined to extreme pain. And throughout his meditations on the
good, he is convinced that consciousness must figure in whatever good
there is in the universe. When Moore, in Principia Ethica, insisted that
it was absolutely obvious that if there were two universes devoid of all
consciousness, one perfectly beautiful and one perfectly foul, it would be
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better that the perfectly beautiful one should exist, he was responding
to Sidgwick’s argument that no one “would consider it rational to aim
at the production of beauty in external nature, apart from any possible
contemplation of it by human beings.”
Naturally, for Sidgwick, as for Moore, it would be quite wrong to claim,
as Bentham did, that “ultimate good” simply means “pleasurable,” since
this would make it a mere tautology to say that pleasure is ultimate good,
and a mere tautology is scarcely what fundamental ethical argument re-
quires. Whether ultimate good should be interpreted in this hedonistic
fashion is a significant, possibly mistaken, proposition – an open question.
One needs to show how empty or circular
notions of, for example, virtue as
ultimate good actually are. What such hedonism has going for it, beyond
the considerable brute force of the Benthamite argument that no one in
their right mind supposes that sheer, needless, avoidable pain is a good
thing, is mainly that it allows for a way to sort out and settle competing
claims about particular goods – how, for example, to balance the claims
of health against the claims of love or creativity. No other account that
he is aware of allows for bringing at least some degree of precision and
determinateness to judgments of good.
Appended to the foregoing passage is a note suggesting that the con-
troversy over vivisection happily illustrates the way in which happiness
serves as the final court of appeal, since no one “in this controversy has
ventured on the paradox that the pain of sentient beings is not per se to
be avoided.” On this urgent question, Sidgwick thus falls in with what
has been a proud utilitarian tradition from Bentham and Mill down to
Peter Singer – namely, the view that the pains and pleasures of all sentient
creatures morally matter and must therefore be included in the utilitarian
calculus. Another note explains, in faintly Aristotelian fashion, that “so
long as Time is a necessary form of human existence, it can hardly be
surprising that human good should be subject to the condition of being
realised in successive parts.”
Many critics, past and present, have felt that Sidgwick’s insistence on
determinateness amounts to a far-too-ambitious construction of rational-
ity, involving the complete ordering of all possible acts or states of affairs.
Yet the appeal to such an ideal is, in Sidgwick’s work, a complex matter.
Certainly, as should be evident, he is always keenly aware of how far short
of such an ideal practical reason usually ends up, and one can typically
take him as making the case for those who stress the impossibility of any
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such rational ordering. He is admittedly willing to recognize the ever-
increasing sphere of the incalculable element in human affairs, however
lamentable or problematic it may be. At any rate, it is far from obvious
that many of his arguments would not survive translation into more recent
idioms concerning real-world codes and indirect, incomplete methods of
calculation; indeed, one is tempted to say that his critical and skeptical
claims measurably contributed to these more recent idioms.
Similar considerations of system and determinateness apply to both
universalistic and egoistic hedonism, of course, though Sidgwick denies
that commonsense morality is as receptive to the latter – it is “rather
the end of Egoistic than of Universalistic Hedonism, to which Common
Sense feels an aversion” (ME ). Like Mill, he thinks that much of
the hostility to utilitarianism comes from the confusion of it with egoism
(narrowly construed) and a failure to appreciate how elevated pleasant
consciousness can be, though he also allows that egoism has an important
role to play in commonsense morality, as will be shown.
At any rate, in both cases, the pursuit of happiness must, if it is to
be effective, take an indirect route. This is an extremely important qual-
ification, one that, Sidgwick believes, also helps to deflate much of the
commonsense resistance to hedonism. It is vital to see that
from the universal point of view no less than from that of the individual, it seems
true that Happiness is likely to be better attained if the extent to which we set
ourselves consciously to aim at it be carefully restricted. And this not only because action is likely to be more effective if our effort is temporarily concentrated on the realisation of more limited ends – though this is no doubt an important reason: –
but also because the fullest development of happy life for each individual seems to
require that he should have other external objects of interest besides the happiness
of other conscious beings. And thus we may conclude that the pursuit of the ideal
objects . . . Virtue, Truth, Freedom, Beauty, etc., for their own sakes, is indirectly and secondarily, though not primarily and absolutely, rational; on account not
only of the happiness that will result from their attainment, but also of that which
springs from their disinterested pursuit. While yet if we ask for a final criterion
of the comparative value of the different objects of men’s enthusiastic pursuit,
and of the limits within which each may legitimately engross the attention of
mankind, we shall none the less conceive it to depend upon the degree in which
they respectively conduce to Happiness. (ME )
The indirect nature of both egoism and utilitarianism has been appealed
to in order to deflect criticism arising from conflicts with common sense,
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though the utilitarian version of this – which is, in effect, doubly indirect,
indirect at both the individual and social levels – is especially important,
at least for Sidgwick. As the next section will explain more fully, most
of the work done by conceptual distinctions between acts and rules or
decision procedures and standards is, in his case, done through appeal to
the necessity of indirect strategies for maximizing happiness. In familiar
fashion, utilitarians of this type argue that if the acceptance of a rule
will make for a greater number of optimal acts, because the suboptimal
acts cannot be identified and countered in advance, then the acceptance is
justified (even on “act-utilitarian” grounds, though this is an anachronistic
idiom). Similarly, certain motives reliably productive of optimal acts ought
to be fostered. One of the reasons why utilitarianism and egoism have
been so often confused stems from the way in which the early utilitarians
promoted laissez-faire economics, often failing to make sufficiently plain
that their appeal to economic self-interest was part of an indirect strategy
for maximizing general happiness. But other motives also importantly
figure in indirect strategies. Most utilitarians past and present have insisted
that special obligations to, or greater concern for, those near and dear
must be justifiable on utilitarian grounds, as the best means to maximizing
overall happiness in any society organized in a halfway-decent fashion.
After all, one is usually best positioned to help oneself and those close
to one; the efficient deployment of this information for the sake of the
greatest good is all that the utilitarian is demanding. Sidgwick went still
further, aiming to capture such perfectionist values as truth seeking in this
way. Indeed, h
e had a keen eye for pleasures that one could experience only
by radically changing one’s nature: “the sacrifice of sensual inclination to
duty is disagreeable to the non-moral man when he at first attempts it, but
affords to the truly virtuous man a deep and strong delight” (ME ).
Of course, there is some question here of just how coherent it would be
to pursue, for example, truth for its own sake while recognizing that this is
only “indirectly and secondarily” rational. How could one value truth for
its own sake while knowing that this is only an indirect means to achieving
what is really intrinsically valuable? The issue of moral schizophrenia –
as some critics term such indirection or self-effacingness – has been
effectively brought out by Bernard Williams, here in connection with
Sidgwick’s two-level utilitarianism:
Certainly it is empirically possible, and on the lines of Sidgwick’s argument it
must be true, that the dispositions will do the job which the Utilitarian theory
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has assigned to them only if the agents who possess those dispositions do not see
their own character purely instrumentally, but rather see the world from the point
of view of that character. Moreover, those dispositions require them to see other
things in a non-instrumental light. Though Utilitarianism usually neglects the
fact, they are dispositions not simply of action, but of belief and judgement; and
they are expressed precisely in ascribing intrinsic and not instrumental value to
various activities and relations such as truth-telling, loyalty and so on. Indeed, if Sidgwick is right in saying that the Utilitarian theory explains and justifies larger areas of everyday morality than had been supposed by the intuitionists, and that
he has succeeded in his project of reconciling Utilitarianism and intuitionism by
explaining in Utilitarian terms some of the phenomena on which the intuitionists
were most insistent – if that is so, then it must be that in the actual world the dispositions do present themselves to their possessors, and also present other
features of the world, in this non-instrumental light. It was these possessors