We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
How practical can ethics be? To what extent is it possible to put ethics ‘to the use of life’, in the words of Samuel Johnson? In Practical Ethics, Henry Sidgwick offers the distillation of a lifetime of reflection on how to relate moral theory and practice. This book provides both a model and a cautionary example. Its lucid, urbane, and broad-gauged approach to practical moral issues is exemplary; but its very lucidity also exposes the moral risks in Sidgwick's attempt to isolate deliberation about these issues from fundamental moral premises, including the interlocking intuitionist, utilitarian, and paternalist premises buttressing his conclusions about legitimate practices of violence and deceit.
1 I draw, in this article, on my introduction to the reissue of Sidgwick's, Henry Practical Ethics: A Collection of Essays, New York, 1998 [1898], pp. v–xixGoogle Scholar.
2 Johnson, Samuel, The Rambler, New York, 1957 [1750], p. 31 Google Scholar.
3 Long ignored in ethics courses, textbooks, and discussions in the growing field of practical ethics, this book has also gone unmentioned by Peter Singer and other authors of later books with the very same title: Samuels, Herbert, Practical Ethics, London, 1935 Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics Cambridge, 1979, 2nd edn., 1993Google Scholar; Shea, Gordon, Practical Ethics, New York, 1988.Google Scholar Just as these authors may well not have known of Sidgwick's book with the same title as theirs, so he himself may not have known of a work preceding his, by the German theologian and philosopher Wette, Wilhelm de, entitled Human Life; or Practical Ethics, Boston, 1856 Google Scholar.
4 Sidgwick, Arthur and Sidgwick, Eleanor M., Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, London, 1906, p. 467 Google Scholar.
5 McLellan, D., (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford, 1977, pp. 568 fGoogle Scholar.
6 Bradley, F. H., Ethical Studies, 1876, London, 1962, p. 193 Google Scholar. Sidgwick reviewed this work critically in Mind, i (1876), 545 Google Scholar. Bradley replied in Mind, ii, 1877, 122 Google Scholar. Sidgwick replied, in turn, ibid., 125 f.
7 See Spiller, G., The Ethical Movement in Great Britain, London, 1934 Google Scholar.
8 Sidgwick, , Practical Ethics, p. 7 Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., p. 22.
10 Kant, Immanuel, The Doctrine of Virtue, tr. Gregor, Mary, Philadelphia, 1964 [1797], p. 133 Google Scholar. See also Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Dowdell, Victor Lyle, Carbondale, Illinois, 1978 [1798], p. 119 Google Scholar.
11 Sidgwick, Henry, ‘The Philosophy of Common Sense’, Mind, n.s., iv (1895), 145 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Sidgwick, Henry, ‘Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies’, Mind, xiv (1889), 485 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Sidgwick, , Practical Ethics, pp. 113 fGoogle Scholar.
14 Ibid., p. 114.
15 Ibid., p. 37. See also Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn., 1907, New York, 1966, p. 404.
16 Sidgwick, , Practical Ethics, p. 6 Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., p. 4.
18 Ibid., p. 8.
19 Sidgwick, , Methods of Ethics, p. 461 Google Scholar, referring in a footnote to ch. 2 of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.
20 Methods of Ethics, pp. 463–7.
21 Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, London, 1925 (1845), p. 568 Google Scholar. In his essay ‘Bentham’ Mill writes: ‘As mankind are much more nearly of one nature, than of one opinion about their own nature, they are more easily brought to agree in their intermediate principles-vera ilia et media axiomata, as Bacon says-than in their first principles.‘ See Mill, John Stuart, ‘Bentham’, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill: Ethical, Political, and Religious, ed. Cohen, M., New York, 1961, pp. 1–53 Google Scholar.
22 Bacon, Francis, Novum Organon, 1620 Google Scholar, i; reissue, ed. Joseph Devey, St Louis, 1901, p. 82.
23 Practical Ethics, p. 22.
24 Ibid.
25 I have discussed values thus broadly shared in Common Values, Columbia, Missouri, 1996.
26 Henry Sidgwick, letter to Bishop Creighton, August 30,1898, quoted in Sidgwick, A. and Sidgwick, E., Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, p. 569 Google Scholar.
27 Practical Ethics, pp. 36 f.
28 The first two were reissued in a separate volume as National and International Right and Wrong: Two Essays, London, 1918 Google Scholar. A Preface by Viscount Bryce stresses their importance as providing clear thinking and careful analysis regarding issues of morality, greatly needed in Britain during the Great War.
29 Practical Ethics, pp. 49, 58.
30 Practical Ethics, p. 58, presumably referring to the conventions enacted at Geneva in 1864.
31 Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost, Boston, 1998 Google Scholar.
32 Sidgwick, Henry, The Elements of Politics, London, 1919, pp. 322 Google Scholar f. Quoted in Bart Schultz, Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Quest for Certainty, forthcoming, ch. 8, ‘Colours’. See that chapter, more generally, for a discussion of Sidgwick's approach to issues of colonization, differences of‘civilization’, and the treatment of‘aborigines’.
33 Practical Ethics, p. 57.
34 Ibid., p. 36. Sidgwick's endorsement of Machiavelli's near-limitless claim to justify violence goes considerably beyond the comment by John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971, p. 26, that for the classical utilitarian, ‘there is no reason in principle why the violation of the liberty of a few might not be made right by the greater good shared by the many”.
35 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty [1859], in Cohen, (ed.), Philosophy of John Stuart Mill p. 198 Google Scholar.
36 This paragraph draws on ch. 4, ‘Paternalistic Lies’, in my book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 3 rd edn., New York, 1999 Google Scholar.
37 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York, 1993, p. 110 Google Scholar.
38 Practical Ethics, pp. 65; 73 f.
39 Maitland, F. W., quoted in Leavis, Q. D., ‘Henry Sidgwick' Cambridge’, Scrutiny, xv (1947), p. 10 Google Scholar.
40 Practical Ethics, p. 74.
41 Ibid. For a discussion of this passage, see Bart Schultz's review of Practical Ethics, Ethics, cix (1999).
42 North, Oliver, quoted in Time Magazine, 3 08, 1987, p. 14 Google Scholar.
43 Sidgwick, , The Methods of Ethics, IV. 5 Google Scholar.
44 Bok, Sissela, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, New York, 1989, pp. 112 fGoogle Scholar.
45 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘On Publicity”, Essay on Political Tactics, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John, Edinburgh, 1843, ii, pp. 310–17Google Scholar.
46 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, ch. 2, para. 23, in Cohen, (ed.), p. 349 Google Scholar.
47 Kant, Immanuel, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, Kant's Political Writing, ed. Reiss, Hans, Cambridge, 1970, p. 123 Google Scholar. For discussion, see my article ‘Kant's Arguments in Support of the Maxim “Do What Is Right Though the World Should Perish”“, Argumentation, ii (1988)Google Scholar.
48 Price, Richard, Review of the Principal Questions in Morals in A Guide to the British Moralists (ed. Monro, D. H., London, 1972 1758; 3rd edn., [1787], p. 184 Google Scholar.
49 Kant, , Anthropology, p. 207 Google Scholar; Butler, Bishop, Sermon X, ‘Upon Self-Deceit’, Works, ed. Gladstone, W. E., Oxford, 1896, ii, pp. 168–84Google Scholar.
50 Johnson, , The Rambler, p. 31 Google Scholar
51 In preparing this article, I have benefited from reading the other articles on Sidgwick in this issue, and am especially grateful for comments and suggestions by Bart Schultz, Roger Crisp, and Robert Shaver.
