Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 47
Since, however, it is manifest, at the close of the treatise, that I do not consider the principle of Rational Egoism to have been confuted, but only contradicted; and
since I carefully explain, on p. , how in my view this confutation is avoided, I
confess that I can hardly understand my critic’s misunderstanding.
Here Sidgwick is actually appealing to common sense to support the
axiomatic grounding of utilitarianism, but doing so by linking it to the
“common belief that the design of the Creator of the world is to realise
Good.” And he is insistently denying that egoism has been confuted by
any of the arguments presented in the first two editions (by “contra-
dicted” he could mean “shown to be inconclusive by the equal rationality
of utilitarianism,” but this is not obvious), even going so far as to concede
the weakness of the case for utilitarianism. He uses the expression the
“dualism of practical reason” as a label for his own “ethical view,” and his
indignation is reminiscent of that expressed in the Methods over the pos-
sibility that the wages of virtue could be “dust.” Puzzlingly, Shaver does
not consider this exchange in any detail. But it both affirms Sidgwick’s
dualism in uncompromising terms and vividly expresses his worry about
how the moral content of common sense might be dependent on religious
belief.
True, in “Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies,” Sidgwick did
admit that he had earlier set out rational egoism “without a sufficient ra-
tional justification,” as Gizycki had claimed. And he allowed the tenability
of Gizycki’s view that “the preference of Virtue or general happiness to
private happiness is a dictate of reason, which remains no less clear and co-
gent, however ultimate and uncompensated may be the sacrifice of private
happiness that it imposes,” because “even if the reality and essentiality
of the distinction between one individual and another be granted, I do
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not see how to prove its fundamental practical importance to anyone who
refuses to admit it.” Yet, revealingly, Sidgwick concludes this passage by
flatly stating “but I find such a refusal impossible to myself, and I think it
paradoxical.”
Impossible? Paradoxical? Why “impossible,” of all things, unless some-
thing along the lines of Schneewind’s interpretation is correct?
Sidgwick does also appeal to common sense, but in a curious way that ad-
mits that the explicit articulation of egoism has not been all that common:
I admit that it is only a minority of moralists who explicitly accept this dualism of rational or governing principles; but I think myself justified in inferring a wider
implicit acceptance of the dualism from the importance attached by dogmatic
moralists generally to the conception of a moral government of the world, and
from the efforts of empirical utilitarians to prove – as in Bentham’s posthumous
treatise – that action conducive to greatest happiness is always also conducive to
the agent’s greatest happiness.
If his own statement of the dualism has proved controversial, and thus
somewhat confidence-shaking, nonetheless his confidence is partly re-
stored by the fact that “while to some critics the sacrifice of self to others
seems solely rational, others avow uncompromising egoism; and no one
has seriously attemped to deny that the choice between one or other alter-
native – according to any forecast of happiness based on mere mundane
experience – is occasionally forced on us.” If Gizycki and Rashdall fell
on one side, Barratt fell on the other.
Thus, the upshot would seem to be that common sense in fact contains,
in implicit form, a potentially explosive contradiction, waiting to emerge
once the religious worldview fades. Put differently, Sidgwick questions,
in a way that other secular utilitarians did not, the degree to which the
utilitarian evolution of morality may in fact, perhaps paradoxically, have
depended on the evolution of Christianity. Lurking behind the minimal
metaphysics of the Methods is the hope that secular morality will be able
to go it alone, but also the profound worry that this may prove impossible.
One is strongly tempted to interpret this in the light of Sidgwick’s per-
sonal struggles and his reluctance to openly attack religion. That is, as
the material presented in Chapter strongly suggests, Sidgwick was pro-
foundly uncertain about the degree to which commonsense morality would
lean toward utilitarian justifications of self-sacrifice, should religious skep-
ticism grow more pervasive, and a fuller discussion of egoism’s grounding
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would necessitate the very thing he had determined not to give: an open,
explicit critical discussion of the failings of theology. It was one thing to
claim that practical reason required a theistic postulate for its unity; it
was something else again to demonstrate why theology could not pro-
vide this and how that might undermine the moral force of self-sacrifice,
as embedded in common sense. Sidgwick was so obviously exercised by
what would happen when the religious worldview finally came apart in the
popular consciousness, and so drawn to the view (despite his criticisms of
Seeley) that utilitarianism captured in a refined way the virtue of Christian
benevolence, that the possibility that utilitarianism was actually drawing
on intellectual capital supplied by the Christian inheritance was for him a
rather natural worry. Yes, common sense on balance supported utilitarian-
ism, and carried some justificatory force. But common sense was evolving,
hard to pin down, and at least somewhat divided. Could the aversion to
frank egoism be sustained without a broadly religious consciousness? How
else to explain the characteristic confession:
[T]he reason why I keep strict silence now for many years with regard to theology
is that while I cannot myself discover adequate rational basis for the Christian
hope of happy immortality, it seems to me that the general loss of such a hope,
from the minds of average human beings as now constituted, would be an evil of
which I cannot pretend to measure the extent. I am not prepared to say that the
dissolution of the existing social order would follow, but I think the danger of such dissolution would be seriously increased, and that the evil would certainly be very
great. (M )
Presumably, Sidgwick was not being silently horrified at the prospect of
further progress toward a society of ideal utilitarians of an enlightened sec-
ular bent, or even a society of perfectionists. Yet Shaver�
��s account supplies
no explanation whatsoever of this fundamental Sidgwickian concern. At
most, Shaver explains that Sidgwick
thinks utilitarianism provides a good explanation of differences in common-sense
morality over time, place, and occupation. For example, theft is venial where labour
is unnecessary. . . . He also thinks utilitarianism can be seen as what common-sense morality is coming increasingly to approximate. . . . This supports the conclusion that utilitarianism underlies common-sense morality. Sidgwick does not claim
that rational egoism provides a poorer explanation or destination, and he has some
reason not to do so: since rational egoists and utilitarians will usually make the same recommendations, the appeal to differences over time, place, and occupation may
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be insufficiently fine grained to reveal a winner. However, Sidgwick does record
one change that favours utilitarianism. Rational egoism has difficulty explaining
duties to those who cannot reciprocate. But such duties have become increasingly
popular: Sidgwick notes the condemnation of exposing infants and the extension
of aid for the sick and poor. (ME n) He might now add the concern with animal
welfare. If so, utilitarianism better explains not just our verdicts and reasoning,
but also changes in common sense.
To emphasize, during the era of Herbert Spencer, the utilitarian support
for protecting the vulnerable was surely admirable, and Shaver is correct
to call attention to this part of Sidgwick’s argument. But clearly, none
of this goes very far toward explaining how Sidgwick could at the same
time be so worried about the direction of commonsense morality and the
undermining of the social order. Shaver himself goes on to observe:
It is quite plausible to think Sidgwick overestimates the force of his indirect
utilitarian considerations. Utilitarianism is probably more demanding than he
supposes. It is less plausible, but still possible, that he underestimates the force
of the indirect rational egoist considerations. If so, common-sense morality may
be friendlier to rational egoism, and more hostile to utilitarianism, than has been
argued. This, I think, shows the importance of Sidgwick’s appeal to common-sense
moral reasoning and to historical change. Provided these favour utilitarianism over
rational egoism, Sidgwick might concede that, when attention is confined to the
dictates of each regarding sacrifices, the case for choosing utilitarianism over
rational egoism on the basis of common sense is inconclusive.
But of course, if Sidgwick were worried about precisely such potential
errors in his assessment, and not very confident in his – or anyone else’s –
ability to predict the direction of historical change, then he would be much
more anxious about the viability of egoism, in this respect, than Shaver
suggests, and rightly so.
There can be little doubt that Sidgwick was more agnostic in just this
way, and that this in part explains his deep gloom over the “failure” of the
Methods. In June of , he had written to Myers:
As for my philosophy, it gets on slowly. I think I have made out a point or two
about Justice: but the relation of the sexes still puzzles me. It is a problem with ever new x’s and y’s emerging. Is the permanent movement of civilized man towards the Socialism of force, or the Socialism of persuasion (Comte), or individualism
(H. Spencer)? I do not know, and yet everything seems to turn on it.
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This is not an idiosyncratic expression of ignorance. Quite the con-
trary. As Sidgwick wryly argued in his essay on “Political Prophecy and
Sociology”:
[I]nnovators whose social and political ideals are really in their inception quite
unhistorical, are naturally led to adopt the historical method as an instrument of
persuasion. In order to induce the world to accept any change that they desire, they
endeavour to show that the whole course of history has been preparing the way
for it – whether ‘it’ is the reconciliation of Science and Religion, or the complete
realisation of Democracy, or the fuller perfection of Individualism, or the final
triumph of Collectivism. The vast aggregate of past events – many of them half-
known and more half-understood – which makes up what we call history, afford
a malleable material for the application of this procedure: by judicious selection
and well-arranged emphasis, by ignoring inconvenient facts and filling gaps of
knowledge with convenient conjectures – it is astonishing how easy it is plausibly
to represent any desired result as the last inevitable outcome of the operation of
the laws of social development; the last term of a series of which the formula is
known to the properly instructed historian. (MEA –)
Or the properly instructed theologian, moral theorist, and so on, and on.
Naturally, this also suggests the importance of the complications arising
from the various indirect forms of utilitarianism and egoism, when it came
to making out the direction of common sense and its epistemic worth. What
could be more obvious than Sidgwick’s overwhelming sense that he had
succeeded only in bringing out the incalculable nature of so much that
was of importance in human affairs, rendering the particular demands
of duty highly uncertain and contestable? This was a most ironic fate
for someone with utilitarian sympathies, who had prized the objective,
conflict-resolving features of this position, but it is hard to deny that it
was Sidgwick’s, especially given the tentativeness of his major treatises
on economics and political theory. The point will be spelled out in later
chapters.
And this penumbra of uncertainty about the nature of good – how to
interpret it, how to calculate it, and consequently how to estimate the value
of indirect strategies – goes far toward providing a reasonable explanation
of the depth of Sidgwick’s anxiety about the death of God as it bore on
ethics. This is not only concern about the disenchantment coming with
the popular realization that the life of virtue might be dust (though it
is certainly that as well), but also concern that narrower, materialistic
forms of egoism could be that much harder to dismiss. Consider, by way
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of example, the spectre of James Fitzjames Stephen, an illustrious old
Apostle whose infamous attack on Mill, Liberty, Eq
uality, Fraternity, was
reviewed by Sidgwick in , just as he was completing the Methods:
The third part of the treatise is so far original that it attacks the one element
in Christian teaching which the most virulent antagonists of Christianity have
hitherto left unassailed – the sentiment of human brotherhood. In discussing
‘Fraternity’ Mr. Stephen seems to confound two very distinct issues, how far
men actually do love each other, and how far it would be for their mutual benefit
that they should. Sometimes, indeed, the discussion seems to be almost narrowed
to the question whether Mr. Fitzjames Stephen loves his fellow-men: which, he
assures us, is only the case to a very limited extent. Life, to Mr. Stephen, would
be intolerable without fighting: a millennium where the lion is to lie down with the
lamb, presents to him a very flat and tedious prospect: he has no patience with the
sentimentalists who insist on pestering him with their nauseous affection. These
facts are not without interest for the psychological student: and we may admit that
they exhibit forcibly the difficulty of realising the evangelical ideal.
Sidgwick claims that these are not “serious arguments against the prac-
tical doctrine that any possible increase of mutual goodwill among the
members of the human family is likely to be attended with an increase of
their common happiness.” But he allows that Stephen “generally assumes
that every one must necessarily wish to impose his own idea of happiness
upon every one else: indeed in one place he goes so far as to say that if two
persons’ views of what constitutes happiness are conflicting, they cannot
have a mutual wish for each other’s happiness.”
Worth recalling in this context is Sidgwick’s statement, in the first
edition of the Methods, that
we cannot even concede to Hobbes that under existing circumstances it is a clear universal precept of Rational Self-love that a man should “seek peace and ensue
it:” since some men gain, by the disturbance of society, wealth, fame, and power,
to an extent to which in peaceful times they could not hope to approximate: and
though there is always some risk involved in this mode of pursuing these goods,
it may be reduced to a small amount by a cool and skilful person who has the art
of fishing in troubled waters. It may be admitted that this road to success is over-