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to any restraints on the pursuit of their interests is “essentially immoral.”
Thus, for a state, “as for an individual, the ultimate end and standard
of right conduct is the happiness of all who are affected by its actions,”
though of course, “for an individual no less than for a State – as the lead-
ing utilitarian moralists have repeatedly and emphatically affirmed . . . the general happiness is usually best promoted by a concentration of effort
on more limited ends.” National interest, like self-interest, thus has a cer-
tain limited role to play as an indirect means to the greatest happiness.
But in the “exceptional cases in which the interest of the part conflicts
with the interest of the whole, the interest of the part – be it individual or
State – must necessarily give way. On this point of principle no compromise
is possible, no hesitation admissible, no appeal to experience relevant.”
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(EP ) Again, Sidgwick was as horrified by neo-Machiavellian global
politics as he was by narrowly egoistic party politics, and he favored fed-
eration in part because he recognized and feared other tendencies, those
making for strife. As usual, on his view of the reconciliation project, egoism
was supposed to get lifted up to high utilitarian duty.
Indeed, some nineteen years after Sidgwick’s death, in the immediate
aftermath of the first World War, Bryce and Eleanor edited a small volume
entitled National and International Right and Wrong, consisting of two
of Sidgwick’s essays from Practical Ethics – “Public Morality” and “The
Morality of Strife.” It was a touching tribute to Sidgwick’s continuing
relevance:
Sidgwick had already perceived more than twenty years ago that the current of
German thought, beginning to run in an anti-moral direction, was returning to
the doctrines promulgated by Machiavelli but provided with a new basis by the
Hegelian doctrine of the omnipotent state. Some of us had latterly observed that
not in Germany only was there a decline from the moral standards of eighty years
ago, but no one (so far as I know) has explained with so much ingenuity the causes
that have contributed to this change.
Sidgwick pointed out “in words that ought to be pondered to-day
what may be hoped for from the sedulous cultivation of what he
calls the spiritual methods of avoiding both international and industrial
strife.”
Bryce’s reading was certainly shared by Eleanor. In “The Morality of
Strife in Relation to the War,” she quoted her late husband’s observation
that the affirmation of national egoism almost always had the practical
aim of emancipating “the public action of statesmen from the restraints of
private morality.” This was followed by the observation that when “it is
deliberately maintained by a powerful State that Might makes Right, that
a nation is a law to itself, and not only has no duties to other nations but is
bound to aim solely at what it conceives to be its own interests irrespective
of all considerations of justice, veracity, and good faith – when a State
holds this it is obvious that trouble is bound to come.” Individual egoism
and national egoism, both apt to be much less than rational or Goethean,
were parallel problems. Small wonder that Sidgwick felt the urgent need
to write a book on “Kant and Kantism in England.”
Here it might also be recalled how the Methods had stressed the necessity
of coming to terms with narrower circles of sympathy and attachment, and
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had even made reference to race, as well as nationality, as a commonsense
criterion for partiality:
We should all agree that each of us is bound to show kindness to his parents and
spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree: and to those who
have rendered services to him, and any others whom he may have admitted to
his intimacy and called friends: and to neighbors and to fellow-countrymen more
than others and perhaps we may say to those of our own race more than to black
or yellow men, and generally to human beings in proportion to their affinity to
ourselves. (ME ).
Now, predictably, as an intermediate principle, the national one – or
the racial one, for that matter – must be as qualified as the individual
one. Certainly, no such thing could serve as an absolute, as opposed to a
qualified indirect means to achieve the greatest happiness. For Sidgwick,
According to the national ideal, the right and duty of each government is to
promote the interests of a determinate group of human beings, bound together
by the tie of a common nationality – with due regard to the rules restraining it
from attacking or encroaching on other States – and to consider the expediency
of admitting foreigners and their products solely from this point of view.
On the “cosmopolitan ideal, its business is to maintain order over the
particular territory that historical causes have appropriated to it, but not
in any way to determine who is to inhabit this territory, or to restrict
the enjoyment of its natural advantages to any particular portion of the
human race.” But the latter, Sidgwick owns, “is perhaps the ideal of the
future,” since it “allows too little for the national and patriotic sentiments
which have in any case to be reckoned with as an actually powerful po-
litical force, and which appear to be at present indispensable to social
wellbeing.” Indeed, these sentiments cannot at present find a substitute
“in sufficient diffusion and intensity” in the “wider sentiment connected
with the conception of our common humanity.” (EP –)
Thus, for example, the “governmental function of promoting moral
and intellectual culture might be rendered hopelessly difficult by the con-
tinual inflowing streams of alien immigrants, with diverse moral habits
and religious traditions.” And of course, the “efficient working of the po-
litical institutions of different States presupposes certain characteristics
in the human beings to whom they are applied; and a large intermixture
of immigrants brought up under different institutions might inevitably
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introduce corruption and disorder into a previously well-ordered State.”
(EP )
Still, the conclusion is that even if it might not at present be “in the
interest of
humanity at large” to “impose upon civilised States generally,
as an absolute international duty, the free admission of immigrants,” this
path is to be encouraged, since such free admission “will generally be
advantageous to the country admitting them.” The admitting state would
be “thus enabled to share the advantage of the special faculties and em-
pirical arts in which other countries excel,” which is partly a matter of
“the diffusion of mutual knowledge and sympathy among nations.” Once
again, Sidgwick suggests a brighter future: “Over a large part of the earth’s
surface the union of diverse races under a common government seems to
be an almost indispensable condition of economic progress and the spread
of civilisation; in spite of the political and social difficulties and drawbacks
that this combination entails.” (EP ) At one level, at least, this was
indeed a shrewd recognition of how nationalism had evolved far beyond
the earlier, often Romantic proto-nationalistic identity politics that had
inspired so many mythical accounts of the spiritual bonds uniting Celts,
or Gauls, or Teutons (etc.) – or Boädicea’s kinsfolk.
But the cosmopolitan ideal would appear to welcome emigration as well
as immigration, and on this it sounds rather less enlightened. In discussing
the matter of “increase of population as a subordinate end at which a states-
man should aim, with a view to the promotion of the general happiness,”
Sidgwick rehearses the shifting attitudes from the pre-Malthusian period
down to the present one, noting that it would be “generally agreed” that
“emigration apart,” a “government that took measures for the direct pur-
pose of adding to the population of a country as fully peopled as England
or France, would be assuming too great and dangerous a responsibility;
owing to the danger that the increase of numbers would be accompanied
by a lowering of the average quality of life in the increased population.”
He continues:
Indeed, since Malthus, an important group of thinkers have urged that measures
should be taken tending to restrict the growth of the population: and it seems not
improbable that at some future time the governments of civilised countries will
have to face this problem, unless measures of this kind are spontaneously adopted
by the governed. But in the present condition of the world any such measures
would seem to be objectionable so far as they tend to check the expansion of
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civilised humanity; – assuming that the increase of the amount of human life in
the world, under its present conditions of existence in civilised countries, is a good and not an evil; except so far as increase of numbers tends to be accompanied by
increase of disease, or even of physical discomfort not involving disease. If this
assumption be granted, we may clearly regard as a benefit to humanity the stimulus
to population which organised emigration and colonisation would tend to give –
accompanied as it would be with a tendency to improve the average condition of
the human beings in the colony and mother country taken together. (EP –)
Puzzlingly, in a rare inconsistency, in these passages Sidgwick keeps
referring to the “average quality of life,” rather than to the total utility
criterion that he had defended in the Methods.
At any rate, the claim that colonization was a vehicle for utilitarian policy
in this respect was also something of a fixture of Sidgwick’s thought. As
early as , he had written to Dakyns:
I forget whether you agree with Mill’s population theory. I think the way he blinks
the practical morality of the question is the coolest thing I know. And I know many
cool things on the part of your thorough-going theorists. I believe in ‘Be fruitful
and multiply.’ I think the most crying need now is a better organised colonisation.
To think of the latent world-civilisation in our swarms of fertile Anglo-Saxon
pauperism.
A follow-up letter flatly puts it: “colonisation is unanswerable, I think; if
not, please answer it.” (M –)
Sidgwick was the first to admit that England was the great colonizer,
and he appreciated the complex forms it had taken. In a broadly sympa-
thetic review of Cairnes’s Essays, he especially complimented the one on
“Colonisation,” which
presents very effectively in sharp outline and impressive contrast the three stages
of English colonisation: the first period, closed by the war of American Indepen-
dence, when the aims of colonisation were commercial, while in other matters
the habits and genius of our race produced an unwatched and half-unwarranted
freedom of self-government; the second period, of Colonial-Office control and
convict settlement; the third period, ‘initiated by an event as obscure as the War
of Independence was famous,’ the formation of the Colonisation Society in .
Mr. Cairnes . . . dwells with justifiable pride on the success of this latter movement, certainly one of the “most remarkable triumphs of constructive theorising
that English history has to show.” He does allow, however, that the “bursting of the
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Wakefield bubble” with the early bankruptcy of South Australia and Wakefield’s
failures in New Zealand were serious setbacks. Still, he concludes “we may fairly
attribute the present prosperity of Australia and New Zealand to the Colonisation
Society of . (CWC)
But ultimately, Sidgwick’s bottom line on colonization is not quite so
simple:
Experience, however, seems to show that, generally speaking, taking into account
the risk of conflict with aborigines and of collisions with other civilised states,
the cost of founding a colony will outweigh any returns obtainable to the public
treasury of the mother country; and that the extra cost cannot be thrown on the
colonists, since, so long as the colony is weak, it is too poor to bear it, while,
when it has grown richer, it will also have grown stronger, and will refuse to
pay. Still . . . even where colonisation is a bad investment from the point of view of public finance, it may still be remunerative in one way or another to the community
as a whole. (EP )
On the economic side, then, Sidgwick would seem to align himself more
closely with the skeptical approach to colonies taken by Smith, Turgot,
and Bentham and by eighteenth-century political economy generally, ac-
cording to which the economic gains from colonies are doubtful. He allows,
however, the possibility that “substantial gains are likely to accrue to the
conquering community regarded as an aggregate of individuals; through
> the enlarged opportunities for the private employment of capital, the
salaries earned in governmental service, and especially, in the case of a
commercial community, through the extended markets opened to trade.”
Moreover, he thinks they may be of doubtful help in terms of war and
national defense, noting that the British possession of India was, if any-
thing, a handicap in this respect.
So it is with this mass of qualifications and warnings that Sidgwick at
last broaches more directly the relations between “civilized” and other
states or peoples:
As between old fully-peopled States like those of Western Europe and civilised
States like the American, with a large amount of unoccupied land, the transfer
of population tends to be more extensive and one-sided; the old States – even
when they are growing in numbers and wealth – send to the newer countries
a considerable excess of both over what they receive. When, however, emigra-
tion takes place from civilised States into regions uninhabited except by savage
tribes – whose political organisation would hardly be held to justify the name of
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‘States’ – it is in modern times normally combined with extension of the terri-
tory of the State from which it takes place, and may be regarded as a process of
Expansion of the community as a whole. (EP )
The term “colonisation,” he explains, often refers to “the occupation by
a civilised community of regions thinly inhabited by uncivilised tribes;
in which, accordingly, even supposing the ‘aborigines’ to be treated with
equity and consideration, there is room for a new population of immigrants
far exceeding the old in numbers” (EP ). But this does not apply to
all cases, and some colonization has involved conquest of not-so-thinly
populated areas. And he allows that
The case is different when the conquered, though not uncivilised, are markedly
inferior in civilisation to the conquerors. Here, if the war that led to the conquest can be justified by obstinate violation of international duty on the part of the
conquered, the result would generally be regarded with toleration by impartial