The Methods of Ethics

"I said, in my review of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters for the Times Literary Supplement , that it was the most significant work on ethics written since The Methods of Ethics . That’s consistent with The Methods of Ethics being the greatest work. Parfit himself said that The Methods of Ethics contains more true statements about ethics than any other work: it builds on the work of other great scholars, but it contains more truth than other works. I do think it is a wonderful work, and if it is not the best book written on ethics, I’d like to know what is. Parfit’s works come close, Reason and Persons as well as On What Matters . That’s right. The Methods of Ethics is a very long book: not quite as long as The Phenomenology of Mind , and not as obscure either—it’s reasonably clear. But Sidgwick does write long, carefully-qualified sentences. I said earlier that there is a change between Bentham and Sidgwick, a transition to a more academically careful style of writing. Bentham didn’t worry about qualifications, he just put things very bluntly. Sidgwick qualifies what he says, and his honesty and readiness to acknowledge criticisms and weaknesses sometimes makes it difficult to work out what his own view is. “I do think utilitarianism is the most defensible ethical view, but I don’t claim infallibility about that, and I’m always open for people to try to persuade me that I am wrong” He gives a wonderful analysis of what he calls the morality of common sense: the idea that you can build morality from the intuitions that people have about principles of honesty and gratitude and benevolence, etc etc. He has a critique of that idea: he points out that lurking behind many of these intuitions, when it comes down to difficult cases, is an appeal to utility. He also has an argument that utility can rest on self-evident axioms. This is important because it suggests that there is something objective about morality. No. He would agree with Hume that there is a gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ between facts and values: you can’t derive morality from a psychological study of human beings. It’s an independent normative study. He would compare ethics with mathematics. You don’t empirically investigate whether two plus two equals four. Sidgwick thought there were some self-evident axioms that you could build on. For example, the idea that the interests of any one being in the universe are just as significant as the similar interests of any other. One thing that would follow from this is that Sidgwick would have opposed the kind of racism that we were talking about a moment ago. If you had said that the interests of another person are not as important as mine because of some racial characteristic, such as the colour of his skin, Sidgwick would have said, ‘No, that’s not true’. “ When people think about utilitarianism they think about Jeremy Bentham, they think about John Stuart Mill, but they never think about Henry Sidgwick” Maybe there would have been some other reasons that would have justified differential treatment for Sidgwick, such as that these people couldn’t look after themselves, because he was also part of those Victorian times in which a belief in the superiority of the white race was widespread. But the idea that—just taken on its own—the interests of one person count as much as those of any other, Sidgwick argued was an objective truth that we can see when we reflect carefully on it. Insofar as this involves factual claims about some people having higher capacities, abilities, and so on, than others, I don’t suppose Sidgwick would necessarily oppose that: that’s something that he’d think needs empirical investigation. But the weighting of the interest is what Sidgwick was making an ethical claim about. Your suggestion of Ayn Rand as a counterexample is an interesting one because she was an egoist, in the philosophical sense, who thought that we are morally justified in always doing what is in our own interests. Sidgwick was deeply troubled by egoism. At the end of The Methods of Ethics, where he discusses egoism at length, he finds himself unable to refute it. This is what I meant about his intellectual honesty. At the end of 500 pages, he says that perhaps the whole enterprise to put morality on a rational basis has failed because he can’t show that egoism is irrational. To that extent, he might have thought that in some sense Ayn Rand had a point, although a lot of the things that Ayn Rand said he would not have agreed with. He acknowledges that perhaps there is some fundamental axiom lying behind egoism that he did not claim to be able to refute decisively. Thus there could be a fundamental contradiction in ethics, because egoism clashes with the idea of everyone’s interests counting equally, which he also saw as self-evident. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. The more serious academic study is The Point of View of the Universe which is specifically about Sidgwick; the other is Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction in which Sidgwick plays a part. One of the things we want to do in both these books is to make people more aware of Sidgwick’s work. When people think about utilitarianism they think about Jeremy Bentham, they think about John Stuart Mill, but they never think about Henry Sidgwick, and that’s because The Methods of Ethics is such a difficult, long book to read. But I hope if they read our Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction , they’ll at least have some idea why he is so significant."