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On Sidgwick's Demise: A Reply to Professor Deigh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2010

ANTHONY SKELTON
ANTHONY SKELTON*
Affiliation:
The University of Western Ontarioaskelto4@uwo.ca
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Abstract

In ‘Sidgwick's Epistemology’, John Deigh argues that Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics ‘was not perceived during his lifetime as a major and lasting contribution to British moral philosophy’ and that interest in it declined considerably after Sidgwick's death because the epistemology on which it relied ‘increasingly became suspect in analytic philosophy and eventually [it was] discarded as obsolete’. In this article I dispute these claims.

Type
Debate
Information
Utilitas , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 70 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Deigh, John, ‘Sidgwick's Epistemology’, Utilitas 19 (2007), pp. 435–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All bare parenthetical references in the text are to this work.

2 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London, 1907)Google Scholar. Hereinafter ME.

3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th–10th edns. (London, 1903), vol. 32, p. 618 and Leslie Stephen, ‘Henry Sidgwick’, Mind 10 (1901), pp. 1–17.

4 Stephen, ‘Henry’, pp. 7 and 15.

5 I owe the point in this sentence to Robert Shaver.

6 Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, Add.Ms.c.93.22.

7 Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, Add.Ms.c.93.71.

8 Calderwood, Henry, ‘Mr. Sidgwick on Intuitionalism’, Mind 1 (1876), p. 206Google Scholar.

9 Bain, Alexander, ‘Mr. Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics’, Mind 1 (1876), pp. 185 and 195Google Scholar.

10 Barrett, Alfred, ‘The “Suppression” of Egoism’, Mind 2 (1877), p. 167nCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Rashdall, Hastings, ‘Professor Sidgwick's Utilitarianism’, Mind 10 (1885), p. 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 von Gizycki, G., Review of The Methods of Ethics, 4th edn., International Journal of Ethics 1 (1890), p. 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Green, T. H., Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. Brink, David (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar. See especially §§ 364–82.

14 Bradley, F. H., Ethical Studies (Oxford, 1876)Google Scholar and Mr. Sidgwick's Hedonism (London, 1877).

15 Spencer, Herbert, The Data of Ethics (London, 1879)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Edgeworth, F. Y., New and Old Methods of Ethics (Oxford, 1877)Google Scholar and Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London, 1881), pp. 104, 102 and vii (italics in original).

17 Hayward, F. H., The Ethical Philosophy of Sidgwick: Nine Essays, Critical and Expository (London, 1901), p. 15Google Scholar.

18 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903)Google Scholar.

19 Moore, Principia, p. 17; see also p. 59. The truth of Moore's statement will not concern me here.

20 See Moore, G. E., Ethics (London, 1912)Google Scholar, chs. 2–3. W. D. Ross (with acknowledgement) and A. J. Ayer (without acknowledgement) do the same. See Ross, W. D., The Right and The Good (Oxford, 1930), pp. 7–8Google Scholar and Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1936), ch. 6. For Sidgwick's arguments, see ME, pp. 26–35Google Scholar.

21 McTaggart, J. M. E., ‘The Ethics of Henry Sidgwick’, Quarterly Review 205 (1906), pp. 398–419Google Scholar.

22 Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907). See also Rashdall, Hastings, Ethics (London, 1913)Google Scholar, where much attention is paid to Sidgwick, and Is Conscience an Emotion? (Boston, 1914), in which Rashdall expresses agreement with many of Sidgwick's doctrines; see pp. 42, 113–14, 128, 130 and 183.

23 Rashdall, Theory, vol. 1, p. 83.

24 Barbour, G. F., ‘Green and Sidgwick on the Community of the Good’, The Philosophical Review 17 (1908), p. 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Prichard, H. A., ‘Manuscript on Morals’, Moral Writings, ed. MacAdam, Jim (Oxford, 2002), pp. 114–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Carritt, E. F., The Theory of Morals: An Introduction to Ethical Philosophy (Oxford, 1928), p. 143Google Scholar.

27 Lamont, W. D., Introduction to Green's Moral Philosophy (London, 1934), p. 172Google Scholar.

28 Lamont, Green's, p. 21. Lamont is referring to Broad's suggestion that Green ‘probably made far more undergraduates into prigs than Sidgwick will ever make into philosophers’. See Broad, C. D., Five Types of Ethical Theory (London, 1930), p. 144Google Scholar.

29 Lamont, Green's, p. 21.

30 Lamont, Green's, p. 21.

31 Ross, W. D., The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939), p. 27Google Scholar.

32 A decade and a half later, Ross remarks on the ‘careful criticism by Sidgwick’ of ‘Kant's use of the term “freedom”’. See Ross, W. D., Kant's Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1954), pp. 83–4Google Scholar.

33 See also Hayward, F. H., ‘The True Significance of Sidgwick's “Ethics”’, International Journal of Ethics 11 (1901), pp. 175–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, E. E. Constance, ‘Mr. Hayward's Evaluation of Professor Sidgwick's Ethics’, International Journal of Ethics 11 (1901), pp. 354–60Google Scholar; Hayward, F. H., ‘A Reply’, International Journal of Ethics 11 (1901), pp. 360–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seth, James, ‘The Ethical System of Henry Sidgwick’, Mind 10 (1901), pp. 172–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Albee, Ernest, ‘An Examination of Professor Sidgwick's Proof of Utilitarianism’, The Philosophical Review 10 (1901), pp. 251–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barker, Henry, ‘A Recent Criticism of Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics’, The Philosophical Review 11 (1902), pp. 607–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bosanquet, Bernard, ‘Hedonism Among Idealists (I.)’, Mind 12 (1903), pp. 202–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, E. E. Constance, ‘Professor Sidgwick's Ethics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 4 (1903–4), pp. 32–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seth, James, A Study of Ethical Principles, 12th edn. (New York, 1911)Google Scholar; Sorley, W. R., ‘Henry Sidgwick’, International Journal of Ethics 11 (1901), pp. 168–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pigou, A. C., ‘Some Remarks on Utility’, The Economic Journal 13 (1903), pp. 58–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For a rival account of Sidgwick's epistemology, see Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 51Google Scholar and Schneewind, J. B., Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar. For an account of Sidgwick's epistemology which has some similarities to Deigh's view, see my ‘Henry Sidgwick's Moral Epistemology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming).

35 Deigh does not, however, cite anyone who dismisses Methods for this reason.

36 For an account of Sidgwick's philosophical intuitions and the role they play in his argument for utilitarianism, see my ‘Sidgwick's Philosophical Intuitions’, Etica & Politica/Ethics and Politics 10 (2008), pp. 185–209. This paper can be found at <http://www2.units.it/~etica/2008_2/SKELTON.pdf>.

37 Whether these philosophers subscribe to all aspects of the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge is open to dispute, though this will not concern me here.

38 It is far from clear that the differences between Moore and Ross on the one hand and Sidgwick on the other are as stark as Deigh suggests. For a different view, see Hurka, Thomas, ‘Moore in the Middle’, Ethics 113 (2003), pp. 599–628CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sidgwick's denial that moral claims are descriptive of the natural world may be enough, if Deigh is right, to help him avoid the problems that Deigh points out for the traditional intuitionist conception of epistemology.

39 It is noteworthy that Ross and Prichard claim that there are analogies between mathematical and moral knowledge. See H. A. Prichard, ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’, Moral Writings, ed. Jim MacAdam (Oxford, 2002), p. 13, and Ross, Good, pp. 32–3.

40 Deigh discusses the possibility that a Euclidean could insist that her postulates are self-evident even in light of non-Euclidean alternatives. He rejects this move as ‘unscientific’, since it would entail that we have a ‘special faculty for directly apprehending the nature of physical space’ and ‘natural science cannot allow appeals to faculties beyond the senses as sources of evidence of the nature of the physical world’ (443). His view appears to be that appeals to special faculties in ethics are unproblematic because there is no constraint in ethics on allowing faculties beyond the senses as sources of evidence of the nature of the moral world.

41 See Laurence Bonjour, In Defense of Pure Reason (Cambridge, 1998). Bonjour is a Platonist. He does not hold the view that an appeal to Platonist metaphysics helps him defend the intuitionist epistemology against objections. See Bonjour, p. 158. It should be noted that in contemporary ethics the tack is to defend the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge in part by renouncing special faculties and non-natural properties. See, for example, Crisp, Roger, ‘Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism’, Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations, ed. Stratton-Lake, Philip (Oxford, 2002), pp. 56–75Google Scholar, and Robert Audi, The Good in the Right (Princeton, 2004).

42 Deigh maintains that Russell believes that the axioms of logic are known intuitively (443). Perhaps Russell's thought is that the problems with the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge are confined to mathematics.

43 Russell, Bertrand, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (New York, 1955), p. 93Google Scholar; italics in original. In the same place he notes agreement with some of Sidgwick's views; see pp. 96–7 and 99.

44 Ewing, A. C., Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy (New York, 1959), p. 66Google Scholar. Around the same time, A. J. Ayer was defending reliance on intuition in both mathematics and logic; see The Problem of Knowledge (London, 1956). At the very least this weakens Deigh's claim about the decline of the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge.

45 Ewing, Second Thoughts, p. 66.

46 Nor is the worry addressed in Oliver A. Johnson's defence of an intuitionist position that has much in common with Sidgwick's view. See Johnson, Oliver A., ‘Ethical Intuitionism – A Restatement’, The Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1957), pp. 193–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his defence Johnson appeals to neither special moral faculties nor non-natural properties.

47 Strawson, P. F., ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, Philosophy 24 (1949), pp. 23–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 I wish to thank Bart Schultz and, especially, Robert Shaver for helpful comments on an earlier draft, the librarians at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University and at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto for research assistance, and the University of Western Ontario's Academic Development Fund and International Research Award programmes for generous research support.