by Bart Schultz
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overdrawn; Sidgwick’s intuitionism insists on the procedural and reflective
aspects of practical deliberation, making one’s views one’s own through
the application of reason, being self-directed, and so forth. And this
is the strong point of Schneewind’s interpretation. Cast in terms of the
account of Sidgwick’s Apostolic commitments, one could say that with
Sidgwick, the intuitionist conception of the self as seeker, friend, and
discussant was not all that thin. The dialectical side of his approach was
absolutely crucial.
Unfortunately, however, the different shadings of emphasis here do
translate into some very important substantive differences in ethical prin-
ciple. An important corollary to all such Kantian and neo-Kantian views
involves the so-called “publicity” criterion. As Kant himself put it, in an
appendix to Perpetual Peace: “All actions affecting the rights of other hu-
man beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with being made
public.” This feature of the Kantian orientation is clearly at work in
Rawls’s arguments.
The basic idea, simply built into the Rawlsian position, is that it is
crucial to the notion of a “public conception of justice” that all citi-
zens would at least have some grasp of the basic principles of justice
and of their justifying reasons, their derivation from a point of view rep-
resenting the conditions for reaching a fair agreement on such principles.
After all, how can one freely, of one’s own will, obey the law one gives
oneself if one does not know what it is? Here, the kinds of legitimating
conditions that Rousseau found in direct democracy are translated into
the abstract conditions for reasoning to moral conclusions – or, in Rawls’s
case, to principles of political justice. As Rawls frames it:
It is fitting, then, that the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens as
free and equal should meet the requirements of full publicity. For if the basic
structure relies on coercive sanctions, however rarely and scrupulously applied,
the grounds of its institutions should stand up to public scrutiny. When a political
conception of justice satisfies this condition, and basic social arrangements and
individual actions are fully justifiable, citizens can give reasons for their beliefs and conduct before one another confident that this avowed reckoning itself will
strengthen and not weaken public understanding. The political order does not, it
seems, depend on historically accidental or established delusions, or other mis-
taken beliefs resting on the deceptive appearances of institutions that mislead us
as to how they work. Of course, there can be no certainty about this. But pub-
licity ensures, so far as practical measures allow, that citizens are in a position to
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know and to accept the pervasive influences of the basic structure that shape their
conception of themselves, their character and ends. As we shall see, that citizens
should be in this position is a condition of their realizing their freedom as fully autonomous, politically speaking. It means that in their public political life nothing is hidden.
Although Rawls is here adapting the Kantian idea to the construction of
a distinctly political view, the larger analogies should be evident enough.
When Kantian and neo-Kantian reconstructions of “conscience” – that
is, each rational agent’s capacity for acting freely and responsibly – focus
on the capacity for moral self-direction, on the ordinary person’s ability
to grasp what morality requires and to act on it, the publicity condition is
in play. When one is called upon to extend to others the respect that one
accords oneself, as a creature able to rise above inclination and to act freely
and responsibly, the demands of reasonableness are inseparable from the
demands of publicity.
And it is perhaps at this juncture that one can best appreciate how
Sidgwick parted from the Kantian project. For one of the most notorious
features of his utilitarian orientation concerns exactly this issue of pub-
licity. The charge that Sidgwick’s view amounts to “Government House”
utilitarianism amounts to the charge that he rejects any such principle of
publicity as a sine qua non for moral principles. As we have seen, the point
has been sharply put by Bernard Williams – a perceptive critic of both
utilitarianism and Kantianism – who urges that Sidgwick’s utilitarianism
is “the morality of an élite” such that “the distinction between theory
and practice determines a class of theorists distinct from other persons,
theorists in whose hands the truth of the Utilitarian justification of non-
Utilitarian dispositions will be responsibly deployed. This outlook accords
well enough with the important colonial origins of Utilitarianism.”
Williams points up some of the most notorious passages in the Methods,
namely, those having to do with the possibility of an “esoteric morality.”
Thus, in discussing when exceptions to the ordinary rules of morality
should be permitted, Sidgwick allows that there may be cause for further
doubt, beyond the clearer instance where exceptional ethical treatment
would involve a class of cases and would be acceptable to a community
of enlightened utilitarians. This is the “doubt whether the more refined
and complicated rule which recognises such exceptions is adapted for the
community in which he is actually living; and whether the attempt to
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Consensus versus Chaos
introduce it is not likely to do more harm by weakening current morality
than good by improving its quality.” That is,
Supposing such a doubt to arise . . . it becomes necessary that the Utilitarian should consider carefully the extent to which his advice or example are likely to influence
persons to whom they would be dangerous: and it is evident that the result of
this consideration may depend largely on the degree of publicity which he gives
to either advice or example. Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to
do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be
right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons
what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if
it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the
face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it
would be wrong to recommend by private
advice or example. These conclusions
are all of a paradoxical character: there is no doubt that the moral consciousness
of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality,
differing from the one popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that
an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy. We
may observe, however, that there are strong utilitarian reasons for maintaining
generally this latter common opinion; for it is obviously advantageous, generally
speaking, that acts which it is expedient to repress by social disapprobation should
become known, as otherwise the disapprobation cannot operate; so that it seems
inexpedient to support by any moral encouragement the natural disposition of
men in general to conceal their wrong doings; besides that the concealment would
in most cases have importantly injurious effects on the agent’s habits of veracity.
Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the
opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so
should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that
the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense
should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened
few. And thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that
some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the
vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable
indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad
results in their hands. (ME –)
Of course, it hardly seems that this would be a case of the vulgar keeping
aloof, and Sidgwick also allows that in an “ideal community of enlightened
Utilitarians this swarm of perplexities and paradoxes would vanish,” since
in such a society all would share the same principles and abilities. Hence,
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as a form of indirect utilitarianism – a version of the claim that the util-
itarian end is best achieved by having people reason according to largely
nonutilitarian standards or decision procedures – Sidgwick’s position may
seem somewhat compromised, since it would not extend to the ideally en-
lightened community. As Williams notes, however, “it is not generally
true, and it was not indeed true of Sidgwick, that Utilitarians of this type,
even though they are pure theorists, are prepared themselves to do without
the useful dispositions altogether,” which is why they still might have the
problem of “reconciling the two consciousnesses in their own persons –
even though the vulgar are relieved of that problem, since they are not bur-
dened with the full consciousness of the Utilitarian justification.” This
would seem to be in line with Sidgwick’s reservations about the limits of
even a more highly evolved utilitarian society, absent the theistic postulate.
As suggested earlier on, Williams himself finds such views flatly incred-
ible, a virtual abdication of the task of moral reflection. The dispositions
to truth telling and the rest that Sidgwick describes as having utilitarian
value
turn out to be a very valuable element in the world of practice. But that means
that divergences of sentiment and various kinds of conflict that flow from those
dispositions are themselves part of the world of practice, and the answers that
they demand have to come from impulses that are part of the situation as it
is actually experienced in the world of practice. It follows that a theory which
stands to practice as Sidgwick’s theory does cannot actually serve to eliminate
and resolve all conflicts and unclarities in the world of practice, though they
are the conflicts that were complained of when the method of intuitionism was
unfavourably reviewed.
The problem, once again, is “that the moral dispositions, and indeed
other loyalties and commitments, have a certain depth or thickness: they
cannot simply be regarded, least of all by their possessor, just as devices
for generating actions or states of affairs.” On the contrary, they
will characteristically be what gives one’s life some meaning, and gives one some
reason for living it; they can be said, to varying degrees and variously over time,
to contribute to one’s practical or moral identity. There is simply no conceivable
exercise that consists in stepping completely outside myself and from that point
of view evaluating in toto the dispositions, projects, and affections that constitute the substance of my own life.
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Hence the worries of perfectionists, virtue ethicists, and Sidgwick him-
self concerning the limits of indirection and the alternative to moral
schizophrenia being moral elitism of a rarefied variety.
Not surprisingly, Williams also finds Parfitian-style accounts of esoteric
morality, cast as self-effacing moral theories, altogether peculiar: “Parfit’s
emphasis is on the question whether the fact that an ethical theory has
one or another of these properties [being self-effacing or self-defeating]
shows that it is untrue. I am less clear than he is about what this means.
The discussion . . . concerns what kind of life, social or personal, would
be needed to embody such a theory.”
Curiously, Schneewind’s discussion of these passages from the Methods
defining Sidgwick’s esotericism seems not to recognize the provocation
that such a view represents to Kantian publicity. As he glosses it:
[T]he utilitarian will be led, more generally, to the conclusion that it is undesirable to have everyone calculating everything on a utilitarian basis, since the unavoidable indefiniteness of such calculations leaves scope for the wicked and the weak to
construct specious excuses for their misbehaviour. . . . The point raises in turn the more general question of the significance of divergent moral beliefs in a society. If common-sense moral rules are generally taken to be valid, what is the utilitarian
to do when there are conflicting opinions each claiming that status? Sidgwick
thinks that while contradictory moral beliefs cannot both be correct it may be
advantageous at times to have conflicting opinions held by different social groups –
one is reminded here of John Stuart Mill’s passionate defence of diversity of
opinion – and so it may be best that one person should commit an act, for which
he is condemned by a segment of society. Sidgwick illustrates this with the case
of rebellion.
This, however, does not
really engage the concern. Although Schnee-
wind obviously does see that Sidgwick went much further than any of
his utilitarian predecessors in invoking indirect strategies to counter the
charge that utilitarianism flies in the face of received opinion, it is quite
evasive to treat this potential for moral elitism in such a sanitized fashion,
as a ringing endorsement of diversity. Sidgwick may have, in Mauricean
fashion, downplayed the provocation, but that was his way.
Now, this notion of a sophisticated or two-level utilitarianism that might
even go so far as to countenance a completely esoteric morality points up
just how difficult it is to find in Sidgwick’s idea of a method of ethics
an effectively Kantian endorsement of the plain person’s capacity for
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moral self-direction. The method of the plain person may, under cer-
tain conditions, be completely but justifiably bricked off from any reflec-
tive grasp of the justifying grounds of ultimate principle. (Again, this
also points up the way in which both Sidgwick and Mill would have
largely circumvented worries as to whether they were at bottom “act”
utilitarians, since how one should calculate is something that is itself
subject to the utilitarian principle: it is a contingent, empirical ques-
tion what the best strategy or decision procedure would be for advancing
the general happiness.) Insofar as people would in the main do best by
calculating according to rules, such as the rules of commonsense morality,
that is the policy recommended; insofar as they approximate the com-
munity of enlightened utilitarians, more sophisticated calculations might
be allowed. One need not suppose that the plain person should or
could have a full philosophical grasp of the justification of morality to
think that Sidgwickian esotericism violates Kantian publicity. And this
only underscores Sidgwick’s uncertainty about the direction of “civilised”
opinion.
Against the naive objection that if Sidgwick had believed anything of
this sort he would not have gone about proclaiming it in his great work,