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The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics

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The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics THE COSMOS OF DUTY THE COSMOS OF DUTY henry sidgwick’s METHODS OF ETHICS ROGER CRISP CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Roger Crisp 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014956615 ISBN 978–0–19–871635–8 Printed and Bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. For Harriet and Elizabeth Preface As Socrates says (Plato 2003: 352d6–7), how we should live our lives is no ordinary question. Indeed, it is prior to any other practical question we might ask, and the history of philosophical ethics—in so far as it is practi- cal—can be seen as a series of attempts to answer it. Why should we study those attempts? They might be of purely historical interest, of course. But from the point of view of philosophical ethics itself, they matter primarily in so far as they provide resources for answering the Socratic question. Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics might seem an especially strong can- didate for such study. C. D. Broad famously said that it seemed to him ‘the best treatise on moral theory that has even been written’ (1930: 143), an opinion recently echoed by Derek Parfit (2011: xxiii). Parfit claims—rightly, I believe—that the Methods contains ‘the largest number of true and impor- tant claims’ of any book in the history of ethics. In my view, Sidgwick is largely correct in his quietist non-naturalist (or perhaps broadly naturalist (Crisp 2012a)) metaethics, his intuitionist epistemology, his placing of con- sequentialist ethics ahead of deontology, his giving weight to both impartial and personal perspectives in the ‘dualism of practical reason’, and his hedon- istic view of well-being. But more broadly he excels in seeing which con- cepts, distinctions, arguments, and positions are of most ethical significance, and in elucidating them. The Methods is unarguably Sidgwick’s most significant contribution to philosophy. Its publication marked an important move away from the neg- ative tone of much work on utilitarianism in the period, written in response to J. S. Mill’s widely read essay Utilitarianism, published in book form in 1863 (of course, Mill had his defenders). The last significant edition of the Methods was the seventh (1907), and, because that is now the standard edition, it will be my primary text throughout this book. But it should be remembered that Sidgwick also wrote several important essays in ethics and a classic his- tory of ethics. Indeed, Sidgwick’s published work as a whole covers many of the most significant issues in philosophy, as well as politics, economics, viii preface religion, and even parapsychology, and one should always be prepared to read the Methods as merely one element in Sidgwick’s overall world view. Further thought, sometimes in writing these other pieces, often led Sidgwick to make important changes to the Methods, and they anyway cover many issues discussed in the Methods. I shall not engage with this work directly, but will frequently do so indirectly in the hope of clarifying the argument of the Methods. When Sidgwick died in 1900, he was widely seen as among the leading moral philosophers of his day.1 But his reputation was eclipsed by that of G. E. Moore, and the attention paid to his work decreased. That work was nevertheless highly influential on some of the most significant moral phi- losophers of the twentieth century, including, in addition to Moore himself, W. D. Ross, William Frankena, John Rawls, and of course Parfit.2 The shape and nature of contemporary philosophical ethics owe a huge amount to Sidgwick. In more recent years, awareness of and interest in Sidgwick have increased.3 But I believe the Methods receives nowhere near the attention it deserves, and one of my aims in this book is to demonstrate, through close attention to Sidgwick’s arguments, how much there is to learn from him. Much of what I say will be exegetical; and much will be critical. But this is only to treat Sidgwick as generations have treated Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and other great moral philosophers. Though there is much to gain from Sidgwick directly, we can also make progress in ethics through study- ing his arguments even when we believe them to be in some way misguided or mistaken. Sidgwick himself is reported to have said that he set out to write a book in which the first word would be ‘ethics’, and the last ‘failure’, that failure consisting in his inability to reconcile egoism and hedonistic utilitarianism (Hayward 1901a: xxi n).4 I shall argue that, had Sidgwick allowed a greater 1. Seth 1901: 172; Sorley 1901: 168. Note the remarks of Myers (1904: 108): ‘It has been said of Sidgwick that “although he was the most influential man in Cambridge, he founded no school.” Not at Cambridge only, but over all the civilised world, I think that there are many of us who will say that he did found a school, and that we are his scholars.’ For a different view, see Deigh 2007; and for a response to Deigh, Skelton 2010b. 2. See Skelton 2010b: 72–7; de Lazari-Radek and Singer 2014: 12–13. Skelton notes that in Ross we find almost as many citations of Sidgwick as of Aristotle, Kant, Moore, and Broad. But there was a decline: Deigh 2010: 88. In 1963, T. Y. Mullins could say that he was ‘[o]ne of the least popular of the nineteenth-century writers in the field of ethics’ (584). 3. See e.g. Schneewind 1977; Schultz 1992b; 2004; Nakano-Okuno 2011; Phillips 2011; de Lazari- Radek and Singer 2014. 4. The page number is in fact misprinted as a second ‘xix’. preface ix role in his ethics for the idea that agents must exercise judgement in indi- vidual cases, that particular failure could have been avoided. But another failure would have been all too clear: his attempt to dismiss a reflective form of pluralistic deontology of the kind defended by Aristotle (1894) and devel- oped by Ross (1930; 1939). The most serious objections Sidgwick makes to such a view can be avoided through reference to practical judgement, and this would leave Sidgwick’s hedonistic utilitarianism depending on the pos- itive arguments Sidgwick provides for it. As I have said, I find Sidgwick’s position plausible. But his own account of the epistemic implications of disagreement requires me, and indeed other moral theorists, to suspend judgement on the question of which ethical view is correct. In other words, though something like Sidgwick’s position seems to me plausible, I accept that I am no more justified in my belief than a non-hedonistic deontologist is in hers. This is another failure of practical reason, one much harder to resolve than Sidgwick’s own. I shall suggest also that, despite Sidgwick’s recognition of the importance of clarifying ethical concepts, he was insufficiently parsimonious in his use of them. As Bernard Williams points out (1986: 19), the Socratic question is best understood as about our reasons to live—in particular, I would add, our reasons to act. The question itself does not use the notions of morality, of right or wrong, ought (except as equivalent to ‘should’), duty, requirement, permission, demand, and so on. Had Sidgwick seen that his own answer to the Socratic question did not require him to use these concepts to any- where near the extent to which he does use them, when stating his own positive views he could have avoided both having to clarify them and the various problems that arise from his own conceptions of them. In particular, he might have distanced himself sufficiently from the conceptual scheme of the morality of common sense to see that any commitment to the idea that ethics is especially concerned with the voluntary was not only unnecessary, but unwise. Not all of Sidgwick’s main claims, then, are true, and several, I shall argue, are not required for his central project, in so far as they incorporate what, for him, are superfluous concepts. I shall claim in general that Sidgwick’s pursuit of this central project could have been more streamlined. He could, for example, have left aside most of the long discussion of common-sense morality in book 3.
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