by Bart Schultz
it should be observed that he did add a carefully crafted footnote to the
relevant section, in which he explains that “Common Sense to a certain
extent” does accept the idea of such indirection, in that “it would be com-
monly thought wrong to express in public speeches disturbing religious
or political opinions which may be legitimately published in books” (ME
n). And of course, he did rather bury his claims in a very long tome,
one replete with various Mauricean subterfuges.
Clearly, this last thought was very much from the heart, and suggestive
of his general Apostolic tendencies towards esotericism, given the way in
which he had sought to negotiate the aftermath of his resignation crisis. At
a time when the literate public, though growing, was still very small, and
universal public education was only just on the horizon as a genuine reality,
Sidgwick’s attitude was perfectly plausible. In his historical context, the
clerisy, or intellectual aristocracy, could take much for granted about the
smallness and clubbiness of their world. One need only ask how many
readers the Methods is likely to attract even today to understand how he
could be so complacent about his message failing to reach the “sensual
herd.” Again, his position was nicely expressed in a letter to his old Rugby
friend Major-General Carey:
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[M]y creed, such as it is, is sufficient to enable me to live happily from day to day, hoping for more light from some quarter or other. But experience has convinced
me that what contents me would not content others; and therefore for the last ten
years – since in I gave up, to avoid hypocrisy, my Fellowship at Trinity –
I have ‘kept silence even from good words,’ and never voluntarily disclosed my
views on religion to any one. (M )
It was in this context too that he had explained to J. R. Mozley, in a letter
quoted earlier:
[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. (M )
However, what Sidgwick goes on to say in the next lines marks the
crucial qualification to his own qualified, practical endorsement of esoteric
morality:
But I am not prepared to say that this will be equally true some centuries hence;
in fact, I see strong ground for believing that it will not be equally true, since the tendency of development has certainly been to make human beings more
sympathetic; and the more sympathetic they become, the more likely it seems
to me that the results of their actions on other human beings (including remote
posterity) will supply adequate motives to goodness of conduct, and render the
expectation of personal immortality, and of God’s moral order more realised, less
important from this point of view. At the same time a considerable improvement
in average human beings in this respect of sympathy is likely to increase the
mundane happiness for men generally, and to render the hope of future happiness
less needed to sustain them in the trials of life. (M –)
Such passages also indicate some important qualifications to Williams’s
analysis, which is cast strictly in terms of the arguments for utilitarianism
in Book IV and fails to catch the significance of the dualism of practical
reason for Sidgwick’s larger position. Thus, the concern here – once again
apparently covering both justification and motivation – would seem to be
cast in terms of the harmonization project, such that moral maturation
will yield an increase in general and individual happiness, rendering the
problem of self-sacrifice less compelling. The complications on the egoistic
side of this effort, given the failure of deductive approaches and the limits
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of indirection, would need to be addressed as well, and Williams does
not do this. But how this argument would run is evident from Sidgwick’s
conclusion to his chapter on “Happiness and Duty” in Book II:
To sum up: although the performance of duties towards others and the exercise
of social virtue seem to be generally the best means to the attainment of the individual’s happiness, and it is easy to exhibit this coincidence between Virtue
and Happiness rhetorically and popularly; still, when we carefully analyse and
estimate the consequences of Virtue to the virtuous agent, it appears improbable
that this coincidence is complete and universal. We may conceive the coincidence
becoming perfect in a Utopia where men were as much in accord on moral as
they are now on mathematical questions, where Law was in perfect harmony
with Moral Opinion, and all offences were discovered and duly punished: or we
may conceive the same result attained by intensifying the moral sentiments of all
members of the community, without any external changes (which indeed would
then be unnecessary). But just in proportion as existing societies and existing
men fall short of this ideal, rules of conduct based on the principles of Egoistic
Hedonism seem liable to diverge from those which most men are accustomed to
recognise as prescribed by Duty and Virtue. (ME )
This and the previous passage might suggest how, in certain humors,
Sidgwick did express some less guarded thoughts about the potential of
an ideal enlightened community – future community, anyway – of utilitar-
ians. Plainly, his own sense of duty compelled him to work assiduously to
at least try to push the sympathetic development of humanity forward, if
mainly in that Millian fashion described earlier, so that the normal person
might come to sincerely wish to pursue his or her own interests only in
ways compatible with the general happiness. But as we have seen, he was,
on reflection, quite guarded and tentative in his hopes for future society
and social prognoses, much more alert to how little could confidently be
said about the laws of historical development and the shortcomings of any
future society, in a godless universe. Comte, Spencer, Marx, and even Mill
were to his mind wildly optimistic in this department. And his own psy-
chological work, with the experiments in intuitive theism, was less than
conclusive when it came to the matter of the basic fabric of human nature.
Hence, the persistent anxiety running through his expressions of uncer-
tainty. Precisely what was it in human nature that was responsible for this
matura
tion of the sympathetic tendencies? How crucial, and how natural,
was the religious impulse or some form of reverence? How responsible was
it for his own faith in “Things in General,” or for the more self-sacrificing
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tendencies of the public? The theistic postulate offered so much more by
way of hope for reconcilation, but it had yet to be vindicated.
Thus, there can be little doubt that the sections of the Methods devoted to
esoteric morality were among the most personal and revelatory of any in the
entire book, and not merely theoretical speculations of purely hypothetical
interest. Here was the philosophical expression of Mauricean paternalism;
here was the philosophical payoff of pursuing Mill’s advice about looking
into the touchy matter of the utility of truth. Obviously, Sidgwick was
walking a very carefully constructed path, taking solace not only in the
possibility of future progress, but also in the way that the germ of such
progress appears to be one of the elements of commonsense morality.
Thus, the man who
earnestly and successfully endeavours to realise the Utilitarian Ideal, however he
may deviate from the commonly-received type of a perfect character, is likely to
win sufficient recognition and praise from Common Sense. For, whether it be
true or not that the whole of morality has sprung from the root of sympathy, it
is certain that self-love and sympathy combined are sufficiently strong in average
men to dispose them to grateful admiration of any exceptional efforts to promote
the common good, even though these efforts may take a somewhat novel form.
To any exhibition of more extended sympathy or more fervent public spirit than
is ordinarily shown, and any attempt to develop these qualities in others, Com-
mon Sense is rarely unresponsive; provided, of course, that these impulses are
accompanied with adequate knowledge of actual circumstances and insight into
the relation of means to ends, and that they do not run counter to any recognised
rules of duty. And it seems to be principally in this direction that the recent spread of Utilitarianism has positively modified the ideal of our society, and is likely to
modify it further in the future. Hence the stress which Utilitarians are apt to lay
on social and political activity of all kinds, and the tendency which Utilitarian
ethics have always shown to pass over into politics. For one who values conduct
in proportion to its felicific consequences, will naturally set a higher estimate on
effective beneficence in public affairs than on the purest manifestation of virtue
in the details of private life: while on the other hand an Intuitionist . . . still commonly holds that virtue may be as fully and as admirably exhibited on a small as
on a large scale. A sincere Utilitarian, therefore, is likely to be an eager politician.
(ME )
Sidgwick concludes, however, that it is not within the scope of his trea-
tise to show “on what principles” this kind of “political action ought to be
determined.” Rather, that issue would be at the core of his next two major
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treatises, The Principles of Political Economy and The Elements of Politics, which would extend his utilitarian method into a truly comprehensive
practical philosophy.
Given this denouement, Williams is correct to suggest that it is pro-
foundly ironic that a treatise that had started out by carefully defining
ethics in terms of the problem of what one ought to do here and now
should by the end have left practical ethics in such a state of doubt and
uncertainty on “all questions of practical interest.” This much Sidgwick
roundly admitted, but without concluding that the reflective excursion
was without interest or value, at least for the philosophical few. What is
truly ironic, however, is the way in which Sidgwick, the high-minded util-
itarian saint who had a reputation for scrupulous honesty and a detestation
of hypocrisy, was here theorizing in detail the justification for an esoteric
morality.
Indeed, the passages quoted here should suggest how the question of
esoteric morality must be pursued through a consideration of Sidgwick’s
larger psychological, social, and political theory, as an extension of his util-
itarianism or dualism and, of course, of his personal struggles with “the
deepest problems.” Surely, he meant himself to be one of those exemplary
utilitarians winning the praise of plain persons and contributing to the
development of the utilitarian elements in common sense. Williams’s pre-
sentation of Sidgwick’s position makes it sound too much like that of a
Victorian-era Plato, thoroughly persuaded of the permanent limitations of
nonphilosophers. Sidgwick, one wants to say, was more truly Socratic, al-
beit with less Socratic irony and more Millian sympathy. Furthermore, his
stress on harmonization and positive infatuation with matters of hypocrisy
and integrity point to the curious ways in which Williams’s critique of the
demandingness of utilitarianism is in fact highly Sidgwickian, and does
not respond to Sidgwick’s own efforts at reconciliation.
Perhaps this provides at least some oblique support for the picture of
a less elitist Sidgwick painted by Schneewind’s Kantian interpretation,
though it would nonetheless seem to be true that Sidgwick’s notion of
a method of ethics, by encompassing such indirect strategies, differed in
fundamental respects from any Kantian decision procedure. He took his
esotericism very seriously, and it must be allowed that Williams gets closer
to the heart of the matter. In fact, Williams’s take on Sidgwick has been
given a very important feminist turn by Margaret Urban Walker in her
book Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. Like Williams,
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Walker pays Sidgwick a backhanded compliment, declaring that he was at
least clearer about how to negotiate the different levels of moral thinking
than recent indirect utilitarians. Her claim is that Sidgwick advanced a
perversely elitist and patriarchal epistemological project.
Walker, as we shall see, misses crucial aspects of Sidgwick’s epistemol-
ogy and of his practical politics, including his feminism and the way in
which his life and work brought the problem of esotericism into connec-
tion with that of the “epistemology of the closet” – the distinctive ethical
and political dilemmas about publicity associated with same-sex erotic
love. However, she does, like Williams, raise many of the crucial questions
about the ultimate meaning of the Methods. After all, to the degree that
the book did embody Sidgwick’s Apostolic quest, might it not also reflect
the highly elitist and highly gendered perspectives – not to mention Eu-
rocentric perspectives – of so many of the actually existing Apostles?
As sophisticated and defensible, in narrowly analytical terms, as many of
Sidgwick’s arguments may be, they clearly need to be fleshed out in more
concrete terms – in terms, that is, that really capture the notions of ex-
perts and expertise that went into his much-sought-after “consensus of
experts.” What if the Mauricean and Millian efforts on behalf of the higher
education of women were of a piece with their views about civilizing the
so-called “lower races”? And what were their views, and Sidgwick’s, about
the larger mission of “civilization”?
A last reiteration. What is missing even from quite sympathetic treat-
ments of the Methods is an adequate appreciation of the importance, in
Sidgwick’s overall project, of the notion of inquiry, of the ways in which his
philosophical intuitionism was cast in a fallibilist epistemology that also
underscored the social dimensions of knowledge and relied upon Apostolic
notions of friendship and integrity. On Rawls’s reading, Sidgwick’s epis-
temology is as individualistic as that of Descartes or Kant – that is, there
is insufficient appreciation of Sidgwick’s conviction that his method can
only reduce the risk of error and can do this only by also working to estab-
lish coherence and consensus. What the Rawlsian description of “rational
intuitionism” misses is the Millian and Mauricean vitality of ethical in-
quiry, as a matter of the larger culture. Manifestly, Sidgwick’s conception
of free, critical inquiry was not that of the pure and attentive mind ab-
sorbed in its own individual study. Nor was it that of the solipsistic self
of the empiricist, reducing all knowledge claims to its own sense-data.
No, to build the educating society and the new culture would take much
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