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Henry Sidgwick
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 Philosopher
of the Month
July
2001 - Henry Sidgwick
Bart
Schultz
August
28, 2000 will mark the hundreth anniversary of the death of Henry
Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher and educational reformer who
authored The Methods of Ethics (1874). Rivalling Jeremy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill as an architect of the classical utilitarian
doctrine that the ultimate normative standard in ethics and politics
ought to be the greatest happiness, Sidgwick was also a guiding
spirit in the causes of women's higher education and parapsychology,
a founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Society for Psychical
Research.
Unfortunately,
on the centenary of his death, Sidgwick's life and work are still
studied in a highly misleading way. J.B. Schneewind's famous Sidgwick's
Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1977) mainly demonstrated
how Sidgwick's Methods reflected not only an advance in utilitarianism,
but also a sensitive engagement with and appropriation of the leading
mid-Victorian alternatives, such as the ethics and epistemology
of William Whewell (1794-1866), the Cambridge philosopher who insisted
on the crucial role of fundamental, a priori intuitions in
both morality and science. Sidgwick came to think that intuitions
had to be invoked as the rational ground of fundamental principles.
Moreover, he went beyond Mill in arguing that many of the common-sense
moral rules that the intuitionists sought to refine and defend -
for example, that promises ought to be kept - could be defended
as by and large conducing to the greatest happiness, at least for
the ordinary purposes of ordinary people.
But
when it comes to questions of sexuality and gender, race and imperialism,
and the bearing these may have on Sidgwick's ethics, previous scholarship
is useless. True, in 'The Point of View of the Universe' (1982),
Bernard Williams wittily labelled Sidgwick's view 'Government House'
utilitarianism, because it might justify a form of paternalistic,
esoteric morality agreeable to colonial administrators. But Williams
framed the issue only in abstract terms, with no reference to Sidgwick's
actual political contexts. And even attempts to situate Sidgwick
within the broader framework of cosmopolitan, pragmatist progressivism,
such as James Kloppenberg's Un certain Victory (1986), have
wholly failed to address the most troubling aspects of his legacy.
Sidgwick
himself was nervous about his views. Often cited as one of those
Victorians whose religious doubts did not undermine their ethical
rectitude, he actually worried endlessly that without a defensible,
theistic conception of the moral order of the world, philosophical
ethics ended up in a conflict - a 'dualism of practical reason'
- between the utilitarian view that reason dictates promoting the
general happiness and the egoistic view that it dictates promoting
one's own happiness. This concern motivated both his parapsychological
investigations into the possibility that the human personality might
somehow survive physical death - which would provide some evidence
for theism - and his determined refusal to promulgate the sceptical
arguments that led to his religious and ethical agnosticism, since
such conclusions were not, he thought, likely to contribute to human
happiness and could well imperil social order.
Still,
agnosticism and egoism were not the only subjects on which Sidgwick
was less than forthcoming, and his psychical research was not the
only matter his philosophical reception avoided. Sidgwick was very
much a part of the intimate circle of John Addington Symonds (1840-93),
the controversial poet, literary critic, and cultural historian,
who became a pioneer of gay studies. Symonds's candid explorations
of the nature of homosexual identity - such as his collaboration
with Havelock Ellis on the book Sexual Inversion (1897),
or his remarkable, long unpublished Memoirs, detailing his
struggles with his own tendencies, which he thought inherent - set
the agenda for twentieth century debates over nature v. nurture
in questions of sexual identity.
Sidgwick's
support for Symonds was admirable. This cannot be said of his support
for such figures as Sir John Seeley (1834-94) and Charles Henry
Pearson (1830-94). Seeley promoted one of the most influential legitimating
philosophies of British imperialism. His The Expansion of England
(1883), stressing England's civilizing, cultural mission in the
world, was a prime text for the new, liberal imperialists of the
1880s. Sidgwick's political theory drew heavily on the views of
his Cambridge colleague, and he edited and introduced Seeley's posthumous
Introduction to Political Science (1896).
Pearson
had been brought to Cambridge by Sidgwick in the late 1860s, to
lecture in history, and he went on to become a leading figure in
Australian politics and educational administration. His National
Life and Character (1893) was praised by Sidgwick as the 'most
impressive book of a prophetic nature which has appeared in England
in many years.' What Sidgwick did not do, amidst his criticisms
of the book's method, was distance himself from Pearson's racist
thesis that 'our science, our civilisation, our great and real advance
in the practice of government are only bringing us nearer to the
day when the lower races will predominate in the world, when the
higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask
nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but that we
may not deteriorate.' (p. 343). Pearson fanned Australian fears
about the 'Yellow Peril.'
Sidgwick's
publications never descended into such crude prejudice, but on the
other side, they never plainly disclaimed it. His Elements of
Politics (1891) only managed a guarded, evasive agnosticism
when it came to the subject of 'debasement of the race' and the
claims for segregative measures. Consequently, it would appear that
Sidgwick's agnostic silences had a more sinister turn than his philosophical
admirers have heretofore been willing to admit.
Suggested
Reading
The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick
Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Quest for Certainty,
Bart Schultz (Forthcoming)
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Previous
Philosophers of the Month
November 2000 - David Hume
December 2000 - Thomas Paine
January 2001 - J. S. Mill
February
2001 - Thomas Kuhn
March 2001
- Thomas Aquinas
April 2001
- George Berkeley
May
2001 - Michel Foucault
Jun
2001 - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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