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William Godwin and the Defence of Impartialist Ethics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Peter Singer ,
Leslie Cannold  and
Helga Kuhse
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Extract

Impartialism in ethics has been said to be the common ground shared by both Kantian and utilitarian approaches to ethics. Lawrence Blum describes this common ground as follows:

Both views identify morality with a perspective of impartiality, impersonality, objectivity and universality. Both views imply the ‘ubiquity of impartiality” – that our commitments and projects derive their legitimacy only by reference to this impartial perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 67 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

1

The research on which this essay is based was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. We thank Justin Oakley for helpful comments.

References

2 Blum, Lawrence, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Domain of the Moral”, Philosophical Studies, 1 (1986), 344.Google Scholar Blum notes that the term ‘impartialism” derives from Darwall, Stephen's Impartial Reason, Ithaca, 1983Google Scholar, although Darwall applies it only to Kantianism.

3 See Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good, London, 1970Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism”, Utilitarianism For and Against, ed. Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Cambridge, 1973Google Scholar; Stocker, Michael, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories”, The Journal of Philosophy, lxxvi (1976), 453–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blum, Lawrence, Friendship, Altruism and Morality, London, 1980Google Scholar; Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 132Google Scholar; Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge, Mass., 1982Google Scholar; Noddings, Nel, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986Google Scholar; Nagel, Tom, The View from Nowhere, New York, 1986.Google Scholar The importance of Murdoch's work for the contemporary debate is emphasized by Blum in the work referred to in note 2, above.

4 Hazlitt, William, The Spirit of the Age (1825), Oxford, 1954, pp. 19–20Google Scholar, as cited by St Glair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family, London, 1989, p. 91.Google Scholar

5 Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness [1793], ed. and abr. Preston, Raymond, New York, 1926, pp. 41–2.Google Scholar Henceforth this work will be referred to simply as Political Justice. (We refrain from commenting here on Godwin's reason for holding ‘a man” to be of more worth than ‘a beast”.)

6 Political Justice, p. 43.Google Scholar

7 Ibid.

8 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn., London, 1907, pp. 428–9Google Scholar; Smart, J. J. C., ‘An outline of a system of utilitarian ethics”, in Utilitarianism For and AgainstGoogle Scholar, Smart, and Williams, , pp. 53–6.Google Scholar

9 Political Justice, p. 52Google Scholar; see also p. 44.

10 Ibid., pp. 44–5.

11 Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: With selections from Godwin's other writings, ed. Carter, K. Codell, Oxford, 1971, p. 71.Google Scholar

12 Raymond Preston, in his Introduction to Political Justice, p. xxx.Google Scholar

13 Monro, D. H., ‘Archbishop Fénelon versus My Mother”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, xxviii (1950), 154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Philp, Mark, Godwin's Political Justice, London, 1986, p. 209.Google Scholar

15 St Clair, , p. 175.Google Scholar

16 Political Justice, ed. Carter, K. Codell, pp. 72–3.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 72.

18 See Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, British Moralists 1650–1800, ed. Raphael, D. D., 2 vols., Oxford, 1969, i. 86Google Scholar, and Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, i. 226.Google Scholar

19 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1981, pp. 44–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 For the terminology of ‘agent-neutral” and ‘agent-relative” see Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 143Google Scholar; for further discussion see Nagel, , pp. 152ff.Google Scholar

21 Godwin, William, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd edn., ch. 6, p. 90Google Scholar, quoted in Godwin, William, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr's Spital Sermon, (1801)Google Scholar, reprinted in Uncollected Writings (1785–1822) by William Godwin, ed. Marken, J. and Pollin, B., Florida, 1968, pp. 314–5.Google Scholar As K Codell Carter notes (op. cit., p. 320n. 2) the passage italicized in the original is from Terence (Heautontimorumenos, I. 77Google Scholar), and is usually translated as ‘nothing human is alien to me”. Godwin's argument for the importance of ‘individual attachments” is reminiscent of Aristotle's discussion of the need for friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, Bk IX, § 9.

22 Godwin, William, St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, p. viiiGoogle Scholar, quoted in Godwin, William, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr's Spital Sermon, pp. 314–5.Google Scholar

23 For details on the life of Samuel Parr, see Derry, Warren, Dr Parr: A Portrait of the Whig Dr Johnson, Oxford, 1966.Google Scholar

24 Parr, Samuel, A Spital Sermon preached at Christ Church upon Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1800, to which are added notes, London, 1801.Google Scholar Henceforth cited as A Spital Sermon.

25 Galatians 6:10.Google Scholar

26 A Spital Sermon, p. 6Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 4.

28 Mackie, , p. 132.Google Scholar Mackie takes the useful term ‘self-referential altruism” from C. D. Broad, but without giving a source, and we have been unable to find the reference.

29 Noddings, , p. 86Google Scholar; for a related passage see also p. 112.

30 A Spital Sermon, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

32 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, (1853, London), ch. 4.Google Scholar (We owe this reference to Christina Hoff Sommers: ‘Filial Morality”, Women and Moral Theory, ed. Kittay, Eva Feder and Meyers, Diana T., Totowa, NJ, 1987, p. 72.)Google Scholar

33 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins ‘The Unnatural Mother”, The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ed. Lane, Ann J., New York, 1980, p. 65Google Scholar; first published in The Forerunner, 11 1916, pp. 281–5.Google Scholar We thank Erin McKenna for drawing our attention to this story.

34 A Spital Sermon, pp. 33–4.Google Scholar

35 Plato, , The Republic, trans. Lee, Desmond, 2nd edn., Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 247 (462c–e).Google Scholar

36 Aristotle, , Politics, Bk II, 1262bGoogle Scholar; ed. and trans. John Warrington, London, 1959, p. 33.

37 Godwin, , Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr's Spital SermonGoogle Scholar, in Uncollected Writings. Henceforth cited as Thoughts, with the first set of page numbers referring to those in the original, and the second set, preceded by ‘M”, to the Marken and Pollin edition.

38 Thoughts, pp. 27–8 (M 316–17).Google Scholar

39 Ibid., pp. 32–4 (M 321–3). Godwin's argument that I am entitled to give more attention to my child because ‘I best understand his character and his wants” can be found later in Sidgwick, , pp. 432–4Google Scholar, and in Jackson, Frank, ‘Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection”, Ethics, ci (1991), 461–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see especially 474–5.

40 Stocker, , 459Google Scholar; the example of Smith's visit is on 462.

41 Sidgwick, , p. 413.Google Scholar In ‘Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View”, Journal of Philosophy, lxxxiii (1986), 417–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 421n. 13, David Brink employs this distinction in his defence of utilitarianism, meets objections to it, and provides references to several other statements of the same point. The earliest of these – Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons (see Sermon XII, § iv, par. 31) – precedes Godwin, having been first published in 1726. See also Jackson, 465ff.

42 Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xiii (1984), 153.Google Scholar The example of John is to be found on 135, and of Juan on 150.

43 Thoughts, p. 41 (M 330).Google Scholar

44 For a selection of key articles in the modern debate on act- and rule-utilitarianism, see Contemporary Utilitarianism, ed. Bayles, Michael, New York, 1968Google Scholar, or Consequentialism, ed. Pettit, Philip, Aldershot, 1993Google Scholar, Pt. IV. See also Lyons, David, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1965CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hare, , Moral Thinking.Google Scholar Godwin was not, however, the first to point to the distinction between judging on the basis of the utility of each act, and judging on the basis of conformity to a rule or habit that is itself productive of utility. For a discussion of earlier comments along similar lines by David Hume and Richard Price, see Harrison, Jonathan, ‘Utilitarianism, Universalisation and Our Duty to Be Just”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, liii (1952–1953), 105–34Google Scholar; reprinted in Contemporary Utilitarianism, Bayles.

45 Gilligan, , p. 28.Google Scholar

46 Thoughts, p. 41 (M 330).Google Scholar

47 A Spital Sermon, p. 52.Google Scholar

48 That view could, for example, be taken of Samuel Scheffler's attempt to reconcile consequentialism and partiality in The Rejection of Consequentialism, Oxford, 1982Google Scholar, or of Peter Railton's ‘sophisticated consequentialism”, defended in his ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality”. For recent discussion of the issue of consequentialism and personal relationships, see Badhwar, Neera Kapur, ‘Why it is wrong to be always guided by the best: consequentialism and friendship”, Ethics, ci (1991), 483–504Google Scholar; see also Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Badhwar, Neera Kapur, Ithaca, 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially the editor's introduction at pp. 28–32.

49 Thoughts, p. 46 (M 336).Google Scholar

50 Monro, , ‘Archbishop Féneleon”, 171Google Scholar; also in Monro, D. H., Godwin's Moral Philosophy, London, 1953, p. 33.Google Scholar

51 The novel is Caleb Williams, or Things as they are; the significance of its sub-title is pointed out by Monro, ‘Archbishop Féneleon”, 167.Google Scholar