by Bart Schultz
who, just because they had these dispositions, were so strongly disposed to reject
Utilitarianism and insist on the intrinsic value of these actions and of ends other
than universal good.
It follows that there is a deeply uneasy gap or dislocation in this type of theory
between the spirit that is supposedly justified and the spirit of the theory that
supposedly justifies it. The gap is not very clearly perceived, if at all, by Sidgwick, nor, in my view, is its significance fully or at all adequately understood by later
theorists who have adopted very much Sidgwick’s position.
As Williams recognizes, Sidgwick does have certain strategies for deal-
ing with this dislocation not available to later utilitarians, albeit these are of
a fairly elitist variety, such that the utilitarian theorists might be conceived
as an elite class guiding, in Government House fashion, a less enlightened
populace. But there are other responses to his critique as well, as later
sections will explain, and it is mentioned here precisely because it applies
more broadly than this passage suggests.
In fact, something akin to Williams’s line of objection runs through
a wide swath of criticism directed at the Methods, figuring in the argu-
ments of perfectionists, virtue ethicists, anti-theorists, pragmatists, and
others concerned to claim that Sidgwick just misses the point of the
nonhedonistic alternatives. Indeed, it is a venerable line of argument,
and something very like it was given in Rashdall’s review of the third
edition of the Methods:
We must believe in a future life, Prof. Sidgwick tells us, because we must believe
that the constitution of things is rational. And yet, according to Prof. Sidgwick,
the universe is so constituted that the man who most completely succeeds in
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concealing from himself the true end of his being – or haply in never finding it
out – will ultimately realise that end most thoroughly. A priori no one can deny that the universe may be so constituted; but where is the rationality of such a
state of things? If we are to make assumptions, let them be such as will satisfy the
logical demand on which they are founded. If we are to assume a rational order in
the universe, surely the end prescribed to a man by his Reason must be his highest
end. Man is so far a rational being that he is capable of preferring the rational
to the pleasant. Surely, then, the reasonableness of such a preference cannot be
dependent on its ultimately turning out that he has after all preferred the very things which his love of the reasonable led him to reject.
Such objections have of course been seized on by many different critics
of utilitarianism, anxious to demonstrate that this view cannot capture
the recognition we accord to nonhedonistic values, or lives rather than
acts, or other aspects of commonsense morality. Obviously, elegant and
subtle as Sidgwick’s approach to happiness may be, it has not converted
the legions of perfectionists or those defenders of “virtue ethics” who
hold that the good life is one characterized by the exercise of certain
excellences – courage, generosity, justice, and so forth – that are valuable
for their own sake and constitute the happy life as parts of a whole, without
requiring any reference to pleasure or desirable consciousness for their
vindication.
Now, again, Sidgwick was not unappreciative of the force of such views,
or of the efforts of the ancients – “through a large part of the present work
the influence of Plato and Aristotle on my treatment of this subject has
been greater than that of any modern writer” (ME ) – but he could not
persuade himself that they offered a genuinely constructive solution to the
problems of ethics: “it seems worthy of remark that throughout the ethical
speculation of Greece, such universal affirmations as are presented to us
concerning Virtue or Good conduct seems always to be propositions which
can only be defended from the charge of tautology, if they are understood
as definitions of the problem to be solved, and not attempts at its solution”
(ME –).
Indeed, the Greek worldview was limited not only by its failure to artic-
ulate the notion of disinterested duty. The “whole ethical controversy of
ancient Greece,” on Sidgwick’s reading, was based on the assumption that
“a rational individual would make the pursuit of his own good his supreme
aim,” and in claiming that the good was best conceived not in terms of
pleasure but in terms of virtue – a nonhedonist eudaimonism – figures
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such as Aristotle simply lapsed into vagueness and tautology, defining
virtue in terms of good and good in terms of virtue in a vicious circle (ME
–). Clarity in this department required that it be possible to compare
and contrast, to quantify at least in a rough way, the happiness generated
by one activity rather than another, or by one life rather than another.
Falling back on some diffuse notion of “judgment” was no determinate
solution at all.
Somewhat analogous objections are directed at the religious ethicist
James Martineau, about whom, as Schneewind observes, Sidgwick wrote
more than about any other contemporary excepting Herbert Spencer. For
Martineau, the objects of ethical judgment are not things or acts per se
but persons, and what is judged is always the “inner spring of action,”
assessed according to a scale of motives. But this is scarcely a system at all,
according to Sidgwick; it is either as vague as unrefined common sense
or must collapse into a utilitarian calculation of the consequences flowing
from the different motives in action.
As negative as Sidgwick is on these matters, he obviously took the lower,
“Goethean” ideal very seriously, even if he awkwardly tried to fold it into
Whewellian intuitionism or at least to divide it into that and nonhedonistic
egoism. His later engagements with the work of Green, Rashdall, and
Moore would again suggest that he was in fact quite willing to treat this
as, in effect, a separate method on its own terms, as he had in his earlier
discussions with the Grote Club. Indeed, he was very appreciative of the
classical influence on writers such as Green, and how this informed the
rejection of any dualism of practical reason because, in T. H. Irwin’s words,
“[t]he full realization of one person’s capacities requires him to will the
good of other people for their own sake. We can show that the dualism of
practical reason is avoidable if we can set out a true conception of a rational
&nbs
p; agent’s good.” This was, obviously, not a result to which Sidgwick was
emotionally averse. However, as Irwin stresses,
Sidgwick acknowledges Butler as the source of his own formulation of the dualism
of practical reason; and he believes that Aristotelian non-hedonist eudaimonism
allows us to think we have escaped the dualism simply because we mistake vague
and useless formulations of substantive principles with practical consequences.
Once we try to say more precisely what a person’s good consists in, we will see
that we are either assuming some highly controversial claim about the relation of
morality to self-love or opening the very gap that Sidgwick calls to our attention.
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Sidgwick, therefore, cannot take seriously any attempt to derive practical con-
clusions from a general conception of happiness such as the one Aristotle accepts;
and he cannot endorse Aristotle’s attempt . . . to show that self-love, correctly understood, requires acceptance of morality.
For Irwin, and for many others drawn to perfectionism or virtue ethics,
Sidgwick’s main reason for rejecting nonhedonistic eudaimonism “rests
on a demand for clarity that plays a highly controversial role at cru-
cial points in The Methods of Ethics,” and that begs the question of
whether this kind of clarity “is necessary or appropriate in this case.”
Both Aristotle and Green could be given more generous readings, on
this basis, though Irwin, like Schneewind, does agree with much of
what Sidgwick says about the difference between ancient and modern
ethics.
Yet as Thomas Hurka has argued, Irwin is actually forced to concede
on one truly fundamental issue, given the paradox of altruism:
On no plausible perfectionist view can a person’s good consist entirely in promot-
ing the good of others, and the other states that are good are ones for which conflict, especially over scarce resources, is possible. But Irwin does not state Sidgwick’s
argument in its strongest form. As (accurately) characterized by Irwin, Green’s
account of the good involves a vacuous circularity: each person’s good consists en-
tirely in promoting the good of others, which consists entirely in their promoting the good of others, which consists entirely in their promoting, etc. Unless there is something else that is good, there is nothing for all this promoting to aim at. This
is Sidgwick’s argument against the view that virtue, understood as pursuit of the
good, can be the only intrinsic good. . . . And his response to Green therefore takes the form of a dilemma: for the good to be entirely non-competitive it must consist
entirely in virtue, but then the theory of the good is vacuous; for the theory of the good not to be vacuous it must contain goods other than virtue, for which conflict
is possible.
Hurka goes on to observe, rightly, that Sidgwick’s hedonistic account
does not simply follow from such criticism, since even “if virtue cannot
be the only intrinsic good it can be one intrinsic good among others,
and its being so can make the good less competitive than on views like
Sidgwick’s.” Such options have been explored by Moore, Rashdall, Ross,
and, more recently, by Hurka himself, who endorses part of Rashdall’s
claim, against Sidgwick, that what the partisans of virtue value is “the
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settled bent of the will towards that which is truly or essentially good, and
not a mere capacity or potentiality of pleasure-producation such as might
be supposed to reside in a bottle of old port.”
According to Hurka, the more plausible versions of perfectionism –
untouched by Sidgwick’s criticisms – make it clear that there “are initial
goods such as the pleasure and knowledge of everyone, and then higher-
level moral goods that consist in caring about those goods appropriately.
That is a perfectionist view that values virtue but is not egoistic and
not at all circular,” and in this it differs from ancient perfectionism and
“the virtue ethics that is its contemporary descendant,” at least as these
are understood by Irwin and many others. But Hurka also allows that
many of the virtue ethicists who have objected to indirect or self-effacing
forms of consequentialism have been guilty of an even severer form of
moral schizophrenia. For consequentialists, including utilitarians, “the
source of self-effacingness is a contingent psychological fact,” whereas
“virtue-ethical theory must be non-contingently self-effacing,” since to
“avoid encouraging self-indulgence, it must say that being motivated by
its claims about the source of one’s reasons is in itself and necessarily
objectionable.”
As Sidgwick so often insisted, and as Hurka appears to admit, the
Greeks can be plausibly understood as being in the main egoists, for whom
cultivating one’s perfection or virtue was, after all, cultivating one’s own
perfection or virtue. They were the forerunners of Arnoldian sweetness
and light. One need only read, say, Aristotle on magnanimity to grasp how
self-indulgent this orientation could become. Thus, it must be allowed
that Sidgwick’s critical arguments carried and carry a good deal of force
against some tremendously important ethical positions and thinkers, even
if they cannot be credited with answering all the questions raised by his
students Rashdall and Moore – who, after all, were developing Sidgwick’s
project on many fronts.
One might therefore conclude that however dismissive the treatment
of Sidgwick’s hedonism has been, his arguments and those of his contem-
poraries are nonetheless enjoying that curious vitality, characteristic of
utilitarianism and egoism in general, that seems to come with having been
pronounced dead so often. Just how vital this discussion is will become
clearer in the sections to follow. This preliminary survey of the issues is
meant simply to highlight various controversial elements of Sidgwick’s
approach that need to be kept in mind in order to understand just how
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carefully qualified his claims for utilitarianism actually were, and how
fertile in philosophical insight they have proved to be.
Of course, Sidgwick’s hedonistic interpretation of ultimate good, it
should be stressed again, also falls afoul of the conception of utility at work
in most orthodox neoclassical economics, where the notion of minimally
isons of utility, serves as the last word on practical rationality (or at least has
done so until recent decades). Yet, as Book II of the Methods handsomely
demonstrates, Sidgwick was as painfully aware of the difficulties involved
in adding up and comparing utilities as any twentieth-century economist –
asking, for example, “who can tell that the philosopher’s constitution is not
such as to render the enjoyments of the senses, in his case, comparatively
feeble?” (ME ) He was, however, also cognizant of the unavoidability
of making “comparisons between pleasures and pains with practical re-
liance on their results,” for purposes both of ethics and of everyday life
(ME ). The by now vast literature on the inadequacies of Pareto op-
timality as a substitute for justice, although often working in the service
of Kantian alternatives to utilitarianism, at least points up the intelligence
of Sidgwick’s fundamental conviction – informed by a great deal of eco-
nomic sophistication – that interpersonal (and intrapersonal) comparisons
of some sort can hardly be avoided when discussing any marginally real-
istic social scheme. The stronger point to make in this connection con-
cerns the curious denouement for Benthamism that came with Sidgwick’s
candid, frustrated confession that “in the development of human nature,
the incalculable element increases at a more rapid ratio than the calcu-
lable.” How overly ambitious could he have been, when he claimed that
“I think that with great trouble one may come to calculate the sources of
such happiness as may then be found to be nearly valueless to us”?
III. The Methods of Ethics: Common Sense, Intuition,
and Certainty
The orthodox moralists such as Whewell (then in vogue) said that there was a
whole intelligible system of intuitions: but how were they to be learnt? I could
not accept Butler’s view as to the sufficiency of a plain man’s conscience: for it
appeared to me that plain men agreed rather verbally than really.
In this state of mind I had to read Aristotle again; and a light seemed to dawn
upon me as to the meaning and drift of his procedure – especially in Books ii.,
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