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Chapter 9 - Sidgwick

from Part IV - Victorian Anti-naturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2025

Stephen Darwall
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

The forms that utilitarianism took before Sidgwick were almost invariably empiricist and naturalist. To such positions, Sidgwick poses a challenge similar to, but ultimately deeper than, Moore’s more famous charge that such positions inevitably commit a “naturalistic fallacy.” In Sidgwick’s version, empiricist-naturalist theories that attempt to understand ethical concepts and properties in empirical-natural terms all fail to account for their normativity. That can be done, Sidgwick argues, only by recognizing that all ethical judgments contain “the fundamental notion represented by the word ‘ought.’” Sidgwick holds, against Mill and his empiricist predecessors like Hutcheson, that the method of ethics must be “intuitive” rather than “inductive,” in Mill’s terms. Sidgwick’s intuitionism is not, however, the sort that Mill most ardently opposes; it is a “philosophical intuitionism,” by contrast with the complacent commonsense intuitions that Mill seeks to reform with his inductive utilitarianism. This is where Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason” comes in. Sidgwick holds that there are two potentially conflicting ultimate rational intuitions: (a) the “axiom of Prudence,” which counsels agents to pursue their own greatest good and (b) the “axiom of Rational Benevolence.” And both of these are hedonistic, yielding rational egoistic hedonism and hedonistic utilitarianism, respectively.

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  • Sidgwick
  • Stephen Darwall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Modern Moral Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
  • Online publication: 15 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009543835.011
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  • Sidgwick
  • Stephen Darwall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Modern Moral Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
  • Online publication: 15 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009543835.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Sidgwick
  • Stephen Darwall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Modern Moral Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
  • Online publication: 15 November 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009543835.011
Available formats
×