Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 42
sage does not give Sidgwick a convincing argument for rational egoism.
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Consensus versus Chaos
At best, on the personal identity interpretation, it defeats one argument
against rational egoism.” Add to this the arguments from Schneewind and
Sverdlik to the effect that, on balance, Sidgwick demonstrates that com-
mon sense is better systematized by utilitarianism than by egoism, and it
is, Shaver claims, that much more puzzling why Sidgwick finds egoism so
troubling. True, Sidgwick admits that “Utilitarianism is more rigid than
Common Sense in exacting the sacrifice of the agent’s private interests
where they are incompatible with the greatest happiness of the greatest
number,” and this renders the coincidence of egoism and utilitarianism
even less probable than the coincidence of egoism and common sense.
(ME ) Nonetheless,
Sidgwick’s point is that a rational egoist would face more difficulty capturing
utilitarian demands than capturing the demands of common-sense morality. He
does not, then, think his indirect considerations show that utilitarianism is no more demanding than common-sense morality. But it does not follow that commonsense morality supports rational egoism more than it supports utilitarianism, even
when sacrifices alone are considered. For rational egoism is much less demanding than common-sense morality. Sidgwick can both make the quoted claim and say
that common-sense morality supports utilitarianism over rational egoism. He can
do so by holding that the departures rational egoism makes from common-sense
morality, in the direction of being less demanding, are greater than the departures
utilitarianism makes from common-sense morality, in the direction of being more
demanding.
Still, for Shaver, Sidgwick’s most plausible (if not very plausible) reason
for taking rational egoism seriously comes, not from Cartesian considera-
tions, but from its “wide acceptance,” amounting to social verification – the
“preponderant assent” it has enjoyed in “the common sense of mankind”
and “the history of ethical thought in England.” In the first edition of the
Methods, Sidgwick states that “there seems to be more general agreement
among reflective persons as to the reasonableness of its fundamental prin-
ciple, than exists in the case either of Intuitionism or of . . . Utilitarianism.”
Citing everyone from Hobbes to Hume, from Butler to Kant, Sidgwick
could naturally assume that “it is hardly going too far to say that common
sense assumes that ‘interested’ actions, tending to promote the agent’s
happiness, are prima facie reasonable: and that the onus probandi lies with those who maintain that disinterested conduct, as such, is reasonable”
(ME ).
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
Perhaps, as seems likely, this is part of the explanation of why Sidgwick
could be so passionate about the dualism of practical reason and yet so
apparently casual about the defense of rational egoism. As we have seen, he
was simply steeped in the problem of self-sacrifice, defined in part by the
contrast not only with Bentham’s (supposed) psychological egoism, but
also with the eudaimonism of the ancients (or Goethe) and the Christian
conception, found in Butler, of personal redemption. Egoism, one might
say, was too close to see clearly, so prevalent was it in the Western tradition
as understood by Sidgwick. This point will be reinforced in the chapters
to follow, but it is worth recalling here his famous confession, to Symonds,
that “I feel by the limitations of my nature incapable of really compre-
hending the state of mind of one who does not desire the continuance of
his personal being. All the activities in which I truly live seem to carry
with them the same demand for the ‘wages of going on’.” (M ) How,
without appeal to some form of egoism (interested or disinterested) could
one possibly understand the force of the pervasive concern for personal
survival of physical death?
But there remains the puzzle of why, in this case, the greater system-
atizing power of utilitarianism did not, in Sidgwick’s eyes, render it more
credible than egoism, at least on that level. Valuable as Shaver’s analysis
surely is, it does, in the end, cut two ways: he makes Sidgwick’s episte-
mology sound much more sensible than Brink allows, thereby reinforcing
the significance of the dualism as Sidgwick presents it, but he then leaves
Sidgwick looking strangely dogmatic and vacuous on the core defense of
egoism, thereby undercutting the force of the dualism as Sidgwick presents
it. Indeed, Shaver in various respects simply fails to appreciate what really
pained Sidgwick about the dualism – among other things, the perversity of
an unjust universe, in which death is the end. And he also fails to capture
just how Sidgwick worried about the direction of commonsense morality,
and about the destructive potential of narrower forms of egoism, matters
that are not altogether perspicuous in the Methods.
However, these points will be developed in the following section, after
some additional stage setting. To reply to the charges made by Gizycki,
Shaver, and so many other critics, a rather fuller account of Sidgwick
on egoism is necessary. The remainder of this section will provide some
background material useful for keeping the dualism of practical reason
in proper perspective, and will try to tie together some of the themes
raised earlier concerning Sidgwick’s indirect arguments about indirect
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Consensus versus Chaos
strategies, themes deeply suggestive of how, in practical terms, he dealt
with this dualism. Understanding the gap between mundane experience
with a theistic postulate and mundane experience without a theistic pos-
tulate would seem to be important for grasping Sidgwick’s core concern
about the chaos of practical reason – after all, why would not a nontheistic
harmonization do as well as a theistic one, if it could be made out? Just
how Millian was he willing to be about this vital matter?
In truth, many have worried about Sidgwick’s understanding of the
Western tradition and the place of the dualism of practical reason within
it. Indeed, his claim that in formulating this dualism, he was simply
proving himself to be a student of Butler would appear to be question-
able. Thus, according to Stephen Darwall, Sidgwick’s dualism �
��is actu-
ally closer to Hutcheson’s notion that universal benevolence and calm
self-love are the two independent ‘grand determinations’ than to any-
thing in Butler” and may even derive ultimately “from a contemporary
of Locke’s, Richard Cumberland.” But William Frankena has argued
powerfully that “ethical dualism, at least in the form in which Sidgwick
accepts it, did not work itself entirely clear in Butler and did not do so
until Sidgwick himself worked on it, if even then.” That is,
In just what way, then, is Butler a dualist? He certainly is one in the sense of
holding that there are (at least) two faculties or principles in human nature, one
egoistic and the other not, each of which has some regulative power and authority
as such and independently of the other. As far as I can see, however, he is not one in the further sense of thinking that they are fully coordinate in authority, obligation, and reasonableness, though Sidgwick seems to think he is. Their dictates are not
in principle equally authoritative, obligatory, or reasonable for Butler; in principle, for him reasonable self-love is supreme. Sidgwick seems to think that a dualist
will hold that his two faculties are coordinate in theory, in practice, or in both; but Butler does not hold them to be coordinate in either sense. Thus, by Sidgwick’s
own account, which I take to be correct, Butler is not as much of a dualist as he
appears to think. Butler is an ethical dualist, but only in a rather qualified way.
Sidgwick’s early modern dualists are not as much on the same beam he is as he
judges them to be.
For Frankena, Sidgwick must have been on a “rhetorical high” when
he suggested that the modern view, once worked clear, recognized two
governing faculties in reason. For as Sidgwick himself notes in other
contexts,
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
there is no such thing as the modern or even British view about the number of governing faculties found, not even on his own account; he himself describes
Hobbes and Spinoza as egoists, that is, as finding, as the Greeks did, that egoistic
reason is the sole governing faculty in us. Nor, according to Sidgwick, do all of
the British put all of the faculties they regard as operative in us under reason, as he implies . . . ; he expressly cites Shaftesbury as the first to transfer “the centre of ethical interest from the Reason . . . to the emotional impulses that prompt to social duty,” specifically to our moral sense and our disinterested and altruistic feelings, and portrays Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith as following Shaftesbury’s suit,
as many other have.
Plausibly, then, Sidgwick himself was more original on this score than
he let on. More to the point, it is quite possible that he outstripped his
predecessors in compellingly and explicitly bringing out the force of the
dualism as a potential moral dilemma for a post-Christian age. For there
was something quite ingenious, or insidious, about his frequent invocations
of Butler, as though the tacit question was: what becomes of Butler’s
system, or of any Christian ethical view, once the theological postulate is
removed? In this way, Sidgwick positively invited consideration of how
far the Butlerian view would collapse into chaos once there was no God
to coordinate interest and duty, and duty was no longer certain. And the
chaos might bear the color of reason.
But to come to terms with Sidgwick’s subversive and unadmitted orig-
inality – characteristically Mauricean and Apostolic, to be sure – it is
necessary to consider further just what kind of chaos he envisioned for
practical reason, in practical terms. One leading concern, as we have seen,
is just how constructive the method of egoism might be, how able to narrow
or soften the conflicts of “mundane experience.” Clearly, much depends
on the interpretation of common sense and the reach of indirect strategies,
egoistic and utilitarian, both for purposes of justification and for purposes
of motivation. Again, how essential was the God of theism?
Even admitting Shaver’s reservations, Sidgwick’s treatment of the ego-
istic side of the dualism of practical reason was impressive on a great many
counts, simply as an extensive, systematic formulation (if not justification)
of the method, one also profoundly relevant for any discussion of the ex-
ternal and internal sanctions so often invoked by utilitarianism. Shaver
perhaps does not go quite far enough in bringing out how Sidgwick strug-
gled to determine the ways in which egoism had lent itself to constructive
ethical theorizing. Having done so much to explain how Sidgwick could,
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Consensus versus Chaos
consistently with his intuitionism, place some stock in common sense,
Shaver should more readily allow the good sense of his worrying about
just how egoistic common sense might really be, particularly given the
Christian hope of a “happy immortality.” This is not to confuse proof
with sanctions, but it is to try to measure the distance between God’s moral
order and mundane experience. And after all, Sidgwick was scarcely one
to pronounce a priori that mundane experience was clearly contradictory,
rather than only apparently so.
Thus, Sidgwick notes that Hobbes’s system,
though based on Materialism and Egoism, was yet intended as ethically construc-
tive. Accepting in the main the commonly received rules of social morality, it
explained them as the conditions of peaceful existence which enlightened self-
interest directed each individual to obey; provided only the social order to which
they belonged was not merely ideal, but made actual by a strong government.
Now no doubt this view renders the theoretical basis of duty seriously unstable;
still, assuming a decently good government, Hobbism may claim to at once ex-
plain and establish, instead of undermining, the morality of Common Sense.
(ME n)
Even the rather narrow egoism of the Hobbesian view might go some
way toward underwriting commonsense morality, though Sidgwick reg-
isters serious qualms about how far the artificial harmonizing of interests
by institutional means could really go, in either Hobbes or Bentham. As
he remarked in his essay on “Bentham and Benthamism,”
[U]nless a little more sociality is allowed to an average human being, the problem
of combining these egoists into an organisation for promoting their common
happiness is like the old task of making ropes of sand. The difficulty that Hobbes
vainly tried to settle summarily by absolute despotism is hardly to be overcome
by the democratic artifices of his more inventive successor. (MEA )
This passage nicely captures Sidgwick’s views a
bout the limits of exter-
nal (e.g., legal, institutional) sanctions for producing a utilitarian artificial
harmony of interests, and it also points to his abiding concern with ex-
ploring the potential of internal – especially dispositional – ones, which is
where some of the most difficult and intriguing indirect strategies come
into the picture. On this he was most explicit, and happy to ally him-
self with the utilitarian tradition. Consider his early review of Grote’s
P: IJD,JRQ ,FhN,GLS
cB.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
posthumous An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy:
[I]n his remarks on Mill’s ‘Neo-utilitarianism’ as he calls it, he is too apt to re-
gard any deviations from Benthamism as alien elements, introduced from other
sources and not really reconcilable with the fundamental principles of the system.
Thus he points out very well the great difference between the innovating utili-
tarianism of Bentham, which professed to reconstruct morality from (utilitarian)
first principles: and the conservative utilitarianism of Mill, which takes en bloc the current rules of morality, as ‘beliefs obtained from experience as to the effect of
actions on happiness, to be accepted provisionally even by the philosopher’. But
he does not see that the difference, important as it is, is yet one that may fairly
exist within the school: both sides would agree that the question of accepting provisionally or throwing aside traditional rules of morality must be settled entirely
on utilitarian grounds; and that, so far as innovation is necessary, the principle of utility must be the principium innovandi et reformandi. Again Mill is charged with
‘importing’ from Stoicism the consideration of man’s social feelings as a sanction
of utilitarian rules; and no doubt we have here another divergence from Bentham.
But there again the difference is not ethical, but psychological: if men actually
have social sympathies, with their attendant pains and pleasures, Bentham cannot
without inconsistency refuse to recognise these latter as ‘sanctions’; and indeed he
does recognise them, in a later correction of his system (sent privately to Dumont