by Bart Schultz
in ).
These latter strategies are, of course, also plainly suggestive of how,
in practical terms, the world might be structured to soften the problem
of the dualism of practical reason, even without benefit of deity. And
Sidgwick analyzes them in terms of the type of character formation that
utilitarianism should seek. His treatment of egoism works in parallel, also
elaborating the most effective forms of socialization and going far beyond
even a strategic, indirect version of Hobbesian egoism.
For as we have seen, Sidgwick goes much further in making the case for
egoism, urging also that egoism is more plausibly construed more high-
mindedly, as the “Goethean” ideal. Even if he cannot quite see the point of
aiming at virtue without producing some gain in desirable consciousness
to someone, he does think that desirable consciousness is largely attached
to the things praised as virtues. Again, much of this argument involves a
complex account of the pursuit of happiness by indirect means:
[B]esides admitting the actual importance of sympathetic pleasures to the majority
of mankind, I should go further and maintain that, on empirical grounds alone,
enlightened self-interest would direct most men to foster and develop their sym-
pathetic susceptibilities to a greater extent than is now commonly attained. The
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effectiveness of Butler’s famous argument against the vulgar antithesis between
Self-love and Benevolence is undeniable: and it seems scarcely extravagant to say
that, amid all the profuse waste of the means of happiness which men commit,
there is no imprudence more flagrant than that of Selfishness in the ordinary sense
of the term, – that excessive concentration of attention on the individual’s own
happiness which renders it impossible for him to feel any strong interest in the
pleasures and pains of others. The perpetual prominence of self that hence results
tends to deprive all enjoyments of their keenness and zest, and produce rapid
satiety and ennui: the selfish man misses the sense of elevation and enlargement given by wide interests; he misses the more secure and serene satisfaction that
attends continually on activities directed towards ends more stable in prospect
than an individual’s happiness can be; he misses the peculiar rich sweetness, de-
pending upon a sort of complex reverberation of sympathy, which is always found
in services rendered to those whom we love and who are grateful. He is made to
feel in a thousand various ways, according to the degree of refinement which his
nature has attained, the discord between the rhythms of his own life and of that
larger life of which his own is but an insignificant fraction. (ME )
Direct assault on one’s happiness, or on one’s good conceived in other
terms, is likely, as with the direct assault on insomnia, only to chase it fur-
ther and further from one’s grasp. Again, both the egoist and the utilitarian
can recognize this peculiar feature of happiness, and argue in a two-level
fashion that the ultimate end to be sought can effectively be sought only by
such indirect means as, say, cultivating sympathetic dispositions, abiding
for the most part by rough commonsense moral rules, and so forth. In
other words, though
the ‘dictates of Reason’ are always to be obeyed, it does not follow that ‘the dictation of Reason’ – the predominance of consciously moral over non-moral motives –
is to be promoted without limits; and indeed Common Sense appears to hold that
some things are likely to be better done, if they are done from other motives than
conscious obedience to practical Reason or Conscience. (ME )
And insofar as the utilitarian can go rather further in the assimilation of
commonsense morality, this is not simply because egoism often takes the
form of a self-defeating selfishness – Arnoldian complacency was not quite
that. Recall Sidgwick’s plea for fire and strength over sweetness and light,
as well as his (partial) assimilation of perfectionism to dogmatic intuitional
morality.
Thus, a significant part of Sidgwick’s tactic in coping (or trying to cope)
with the implications of the dualism of practical reason involved addressing
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how high-minded indirect strategies – as effective social policies – might
or might not narrow the distance between egoism and utilitarianism. Yet
in this region, where all the practical details of duty were to be worked
out, some of the most important calculations only grew hazier. Indeed, an
additional, quite insidious aspect of this conflict within practical reason is
suggested by the way in which it could figure, in practical terms, even in
a more highly evolved utilitarian society, since utilitarianism itself might
on balance require the very dispositions that would create an analogous
conflict:
But allowing all this, it yet seems to me as certain as any conclusion arrived
at by hedonistic comparison can be, that the utmost development of sympathy,
intensive and extensive, which is now possible to any but a very few exceptional
persons, would not cause a perfect coincidence between Utilitarian duty and self-
interest. . . . Suppose a man finds that a regard for the general good – Utilitarian Duty – demands from him a sacrifice, or extreme risk, of life. There are perhaps
one or two human beings so dear to him that the remainder of a life saved by
sacrificing their happiness to his own would be worthless to him from an egoistic
point of view. But it is doubtful whether many men, ‘sitting down in a cool hour’
to make the estimate, would affirm even this: and of course that particular portion
of the general happiness, for which one is called upon to sacrifice one’s own, may
easily be the happiness of persons not especially dear to one. But again, from this
normal limitation of our keenest and strongest sympathy to a very small circle of
human beings, it results that the very development of sympathy may operate to
increase the weight thrown into the scale against Utilitarian duty. There are very
few persons, however strongly and widely sympathetic, who are so constituted as
to feel for the pleasures and pains of mankind generally a degree of sympathy at
all commensurate with their concern for wife or children, or lover, or intimate
friend: and if any training of the affections is at present possible which would
materially alter this proportion in the general distribution of our sympathy, it
scarcely seems that such training is to be recommended as on the whole felicific.
And thus when Utilitarian Duty calls on us to sacrifice not only our own pleasures
&nbs
p; but the happiness of those we love to the general good, the very sanction on which
Utilitarianism most relies must act powerfully in opposition to its precepts. (ME
–)
This account suggests the possibility that even the best of mundane ex-
perience might be fairly rife with paradox and practical compromise. For
Sidgwick, the unsatisfactoriness of the world without some form of reli-
gious enchantment is hard to blink. There may be irreducible trade-offs
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in trying to expand the circle of one’s sympathetic concern, such that
the attempt to render it more effective in the large may actually render
it less effective in the small. It would, of course, be nice if there were
more precise methods for comparing the various optimizing strategies,
but these, on Sidgwick’s account, are for the much further future. Ulti-
mately, he rejects the attempts to find a deductive or “scientific short-cut
to the ascertainment of the right means to the individual’s happiness,” a
“high priori road,” as it were, whether in the form of an account of the
psychophysical sources of pleasure and pain or in the form of a Spencerian
account of the preservation of life, and he does so because such efforts are
still immature and at best yield only “a vague and general rule, based on
considerations which it is important not to overlook, but the relative value
of which we can only estimate by careful observation and comparison of
individual experiences” (ME ). Thus, there can be no appeal beyond
reflective experience, and reflective experience is deeply problematic and
opaque. Why, after all, might not the evolution of common sense be replete
with productive forms of delusion, perhaps ethical as well as religious?
Still, Sidgwick’s treatment of both the external and internal sanctions
that utilitarianism might deploy is remarkably wide-ranging and not alto-
gether unpractical. The strictures of utilitarianism may require that one
painfully reign in even one’s philanthropic impulses, if such charity in the
small turns out to be the less effective means to the greatest happiness.
Or again, a man may find that he can best promote the general happiness by
working in comparative solitude for ends that he never hopes to see realised, or by
working chiefly among and for persons for whom he cannot feel much affection,
or by doing what must alienate or grieve those whom he loves best, or must
make it necessary for him to dispense with the most intimate of human ties. In
short, there seem to be numberless ways in which the dictates of that Rational
Benevolence, which as a Utilitarian he is bound absolutely to obey, may conflict
with that indulgence of kind affections which Shaftesbury and his followers so
persuasively exhibit as its own reward. (ME )
Utilitarian sympathy was not to be confused with sentimentalism.
It is hard, in reading such passages, not to think back to the dilemmas of
Sidgwick’s resignation crisis, or to the issue of subscription generally, and
all the ways in which the most painful of these conflicts had, in his mind,
to do with those who acted hypocritically out of the best motives – “pious
fraud” or “sweetness and light.” Which is, of course, not to deny that he
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also worried about the “sensual herd,” those who needed both reassurance
about the motives of people in high places and orthodox religion as their
“real elevator.” Self-sacrifice was a problem across the board. But worrying
about the force of the better argument and worrying about the force of
the working class or “lower races” were not exactly the same thing. The
Methods, for all its candor, does tend resolutely to stress the former and
ignore the latter, veiling the social and political realities that made the
dualism of practical reason a pervasive source of such practical anxiety
for Sidgwick. And it hardly conveys the quite singular way in which this
dualism was an abstract reflection of Sidgwick’s personal struggle to unify
duty and friendship, suggestive as the above passages may be. What if
high-minded utilitarian soaring derived from such concrete particular
relationships as Apostolic friendships?
As later sections and chapters will spell out, the Methods does take on a
very different aspect when read in the light of Sidgwick’s various life crises
and other writings. His preoccupations did shape its construction, did in-
fluence what was said and what was left unsaid. Would Sidgwick have
included himself among the “very few exceptional persons” capable of
fully assimilating and acting upon the utilitarian orientation out of a supe-
rior sympathy? Could he thus be exempted from the dislocation between
theory and practice (or justification and motivation) of which Williams
complained? Just how many levels of moral thinking did he allow himself
or other “moral saints”? How utopian was the “ideal” utilitarian society?
How many trade-offs or compromises would it represent? What was the
message of the Methods, on balance, when it came to that cultural evolution
toward a more comprehensive sympathy and greater willingness for self-
sacrifice that Sidgwick had apparently worked toward so assiduously in so
many ways? For all his reluctance to enter into the details of psychology,
he does suggest a tentative theory of moral psychological maturation:
Perhaps, indeed, we may trace a general law of variation in the relative proportion
of these two elements as exhibited in the development of the moral consciousness
both in the race and in individuals; for it seems that at a certain stage of this
development the mind is more susceptible to emotions connected with abstract
moral ideas and rules presented as absolute; while after emerging from this stage
and before entering it the feelings that belong to personal relations are stronger.
Certainly in a Utilitarian’s mind sympathy tends to become a prominent element
of all instinctive moral feelings that refer to social conduct; as in his view the
rational basis of the moral impulse must ultimately lie in some pleasure won or
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pain saved for himself or for others; so that he never has to sacrifice himself to an Impersonal Law, but always for some being or beings with whom he has at least
some degree of fellow-feeling. (ME –)
&nb
sp; Sidgwick’s objections to sentimentalism notwithstanding, there is noth-
ing far-fetched in finding in such passages anticipations of a distinctively
utilitarian critique of neo-Kantian, Kohlbergian accounts of the stages of
moral development. Although it may not be terribly surprising that
Sidgwick would interpret this process of maturation, both individual and
social, as a growth through obedience to abstract rules to a capacity for
empathy focused on real relations to other sentient beings, very little at-
tention has been directed to his contributions in this area. Obviously,
his own Apostolic development took something like this form, what with
his emphasis on friendship.
Still, where did all this sophisticated theorizing lead, when it came to
the brute force of the dualism of practical reason as a potential reality of
mundane moral experience? Where, in the end, did Sidgwick actually come
down on how far the circle of sympathy might expand? How self-effacingly
utilitarian might the egoist become? Sidgwick’s view of utilitarianism often
outdid Mill’s in its high-minded soaring: “Universal Happiness, desirable
consciousness or feeling for the innumerable multitude of living beings,
present and to come” – this was “an end that satisfies our imagination by
its vastness, and sustains our resolution by its comparative security.” But
just whose imagination did he have in mind? Was this clerisy a Eurocentric
one? And was this a matter of reason, or of emotion? Of justification, or of
motivation? And either way, why, with this vision of societal and individual
maturation before him, was he always so terribly anxious about the future,
his own and that of civilization?
V. Practical Chaos
Yet Prof. Sidgwick holds that Egoism is rational; and it will be useful briefly to
consider the reasons which he gives for this absurd conclusion. ‘The Egoist,’
he says . . . ‘may avoid the proof of Utilitarianism by declining to affirm,’ either
‘implicitly or explicitly, that his own greatest happiness is not merely the ultimate rational end for himself, but a part of Universal Good.’ And in the passage to
which he here refers us, as having there ‘seen’ this, he says: ‘It cannot be proved
that the difference between his own happiness and another’s happiness is not
for him all-important’. . . . What does Prof. Sidgwick mean by these phrases ‘the