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Sidgwick and Whewellian Intuitionism: Some Enigmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alan Donagan
Alan Donagan*
Affiliation:
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; and University of Chicago
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Extract

Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics appears to defend a revised utilitarianism against both egoism and intuitionism, while conceding that the practical results of enlightened egoism largely coincide with those of utilitarianism, and that the utilitarian greatest happiness principle can be justified only as a fundamental intuition. It is true that Sidgwick was distressed by the description of his treatment of intuitional morality as ‘mere hostile criticism from the outside', and protested that that morality ‘is my own … as much as it is any man's; it is, as I say, the “Morality of Common Sense”, which I only attempt to represent so far as I share it’ (ME, x). However, he could not well have denied that, in The Methods of Ethics, the endorsement tentatively accorded to intuitional morality as a system is in the end withdrawn. Ultimately it is concluded that utilitarianism can define and correct what intuitional morality is vague or mistaken about, and can complete what common sense does not venture to treat at all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 447 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

* My research has been supported by the john Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (through a grant from the National Science Foundation) and by the University of Chicago, to all of whom I desire to express my gratitude.

1 Page references to two of Sidgwick's books are incorporated in the text under the following abbreviations: ME = The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., London: Macmillan (1907); and OHE = Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers, 6th ed., reprinted Boston: Beacon Press (1960).

2 In particular, his relation to Whewell, William The Elements of Morality including Polity (4th ed., Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1864)Google Scholar, hereafter abbreviated as’ EMP'. The first edition of EMP was published in 1845; the second in 1848; and the third, with an important supplement containing replies to critics, in 1854. In his Whewell, William D.D.: an Account of his Writings with Selections from his Literary and Scientific Correspondence (2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1876)Google Scholar, Isaac Todhunter gives the following information (vol. i, 249): ‘[T]he work assumed in its second edition the form which it permanently retained. It will be sufficient to cite it by the numbers of the Articles, for this suits any edition after the first. Dr. Whewell regretted that the American booksellers [who were not obliged to respect copyright, and did not] stereotyped his first edition, and so would not adopt the improvements of his later editions.' References to EMP will be by article and page (in the fourth edition): Thus’ EMP,97; p. 59’ will mean’ EMP, article 97, page 59.’ The best introduction to Whewell's work in ethics is Schneewind, J. B. ‘Whewell's Ethics’ in Studies in Moral Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly Monographseries, No. 1 (1968), 108-141.Google Scholar

3 Sidgwick, Henry The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription (London: Williams and Norgate, 1870),Google Scholar hereafter abbreviated as ‘ECS'. For enabling me to use the original, and not the version republished by Sidgwick, in Practical Ethics: a Collection of Addresses and Essays (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898),Google Scholar I thank J. B. Schneewind, who, after first drawing my attention to its importance, kindly supplied me with a Xerox copy of it.

4 In ‘Whewell, 's Elements of Morality', journal of Philosophy 71 (1974), 724-736,Google Scholar esp. 731, I have tried to show that a less hostile reading of Whewell than Sidgwick's yields just such an ‘improved’ theory.

5 Letter to F. Myers, 6 Sept. 1845, in Mrs. Douglas, Stair The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell, D.D. (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 328.Google Scholar

6 For what follows about the successful agitation for the abolition of religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge, I am chiefly indebted to Winstanley, D. A. Later Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: University Press, 1947).Google Scholar For Sidgwick's part in it, I have used A[rthur] S[idgwick] and E[leanor] M. S[idgwick], Sidgwick:, Henry A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1906).Google Scholar

7 Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge, 63.

8 Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, 172-173.

9 Letter of June 13, 1869, to E. W. Benson (Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, 198).

10 Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge, 67.

11 In a letter of February 22, 1869, to James Martineau, Sidgwick wrote of Jowett:’ … he seemed to think (1) that Anglican clergymen ought to take the Church of England for their sphere of liberalising work; (2) that the union between enlightened Christians of all denominations, although very real, was too ethereal to be expressed in the concrete form of an association.’ (Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, 191).

12 Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, 199-200.

13 Sidgwick reaffirmed this opinion, with the same empty utilitarian gestures, in a letter of May 16, 1881, to J. R. Mozley: ‘I am decidedly of opinion that no one who rejects [so definite and important a part of the Apostles’ Creed as the virgin birth of Jesus] can hold any position of profit or trust, of which membership of the Church of England is a condition, without a grave breach of the ordinary rule of good faith. That such a breach is under all circumstances wrong a utilitarian like myself will shrink from affirming; but that it would require strong special grounds to justify it I feel no doubt’ (Henry Sidgwick:A Memoir, 355).

14 I desire to express my gratitude to J. B. Schneewind for correcting some early follies of mine about Sidgwick, for helping me by his writings and in correspondence to such understanding of Whewell and Sidgwick as I have attained, and for proposing many of the themes of this paper.