In a recent article in this journal, John DeighFootnote 1 argues that Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics Footnote 2 ‘was not perceived during his lifetime as a major and lasting contribution to British moral philosophy’ (438), 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’ (439). In this article I dispute these claims.
I
Deigh argues that Sidgwick's Methods ‘was not perceived during his lifetime as a major and lasting contribution to British moral philosophy’ (438). However, this is far from clear. First, to make his point Deigh relies on an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica and an obituary in Mind by Leslie Stephen.Footnote 3 These are not decisive. Stephen announces at the outset of his obituary that he is not concerned to provide an estimate of Sidgwick's work in philosophy, though he notes that Methods is a ‘great book’ and that Sidgwick's work in ethics gave ‘the most important of all modern contributions towards a clear realisation of the conditions of approaching the problems involved’.Footnote 4 The encyclopaedia article does not deny that Methods is a major contribution; instead, it merely fails to single it out.Footnote 5 Second, a number of important philosophers were sent copies of Methods when the first edition was published in 1874, including John Caird, J. E. Carines, Alexander Bain and T. R. Birks. All praised the book. In a letter thanking Sidgwick for a copy of Methods, Bain claimed that ‘no work in Ethics ever impressed me so much’ and that what will make the work ‘live’ is the ‘triumphant way that Utility is erected in the basis of Common Sense’.Footnote 6 Although he had not read Methods in its entirety, when Cairnes wrote to thank Sidgwick for his copy he claimed that the writing was a ‘rare treat’.Footnote 7
Third, the praise continued in various reviews. Henry Calderwood declared that despite his misgivings about Sidgwick's account of intuitionism the latter had ‘rendered a great service to Intuitionalism by the line of criticism he has followed in treating of the several virtues’ and that he admired ‘the ability manifest everywhere throughout the book’.Footnote 8 Alexander Bain maintained that it is ‘one of the best volumes of the present generation’ and that it is a ‘great work’.Footnote 9 To an article on Methods by Alfred Barratt in Mind the editor attached a note stating that the interest that ‘continues to be excited by The Methods of Ethics . . . is a notable fact in English philosophy at the present day, and there should remain due record of it in the pages of this Journal’.Footnote 10 In his critical notice of the third edition of Methods, Hastings Rashdall claimed that the work ‘has long been recognised as a philosophical classic’ and that
It is one of those books of which it is safe to prophesy that no advance in philosophic doctrine will ever render them obsolete. It is not merely a piece of acute and subtle philosophical criticism but a work of art with a unity and beauty of its own as much as a Dialogue of Plato or of Berkeley.Footnote 11
In his review of the fourth edition of Methods, G. von Gizycki writes that ‘few books deserve to the same degree as this to be recommended to students of ethics; for few to a like degree constrain us to clear and exact thinking’.Footnote 12
Fourth, during Sidgwick's lifetime a number of important moral philosophers took pains to come to grips with Methods. T. H. Green devoted considerable attention to Sidgwick's views in Prolegomena to Ethics.Footnote 13 F. H. Bradley devoted both a small part of Ethical Studies and a whole pamphlet, Mr. Sidgwick's Hedonism, to Methods.Footnote 14 Herbert Spencer dealt at length in The Data of Ethics with some of Sidgwick's views.Footnote 15 F. Y. Edgeworth did the same in New and Old Methods of Ethics, and in his Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences he writes that Methods is a ‘great work’ in which ‘the distinction between egoism and utilitarianism has been drawn with matchless skill by Mr. Sidgwick’, and that his aim in part is to ‘confirm Mr. Sidgwick's proof that Greatest Happiness is the end of right action’.Footnote 16
II
Deigh claims that ‘attention to and interest in the ideas and arguments in Methods greatly diminished after Sidgwick's death’ (438). This is, however, hard to accept. In 1901, F. H. Hayward opined that
If thoughts and suggestions can be regarded for the moment as entities capable of enumeration, the Methods of Ethics probably contains a greater number than any other ethical work of the size that has ever been written. It is a rich mine of thought from which moralists will borrow (with or without acknowledgement) for years to come.Footnote 17
He was right. G. E. Moore cited Sidgwick more than any other philosopher in Principia Ethica.Footnote 18 Moore went so far as to claim that ‘only one ethical writer’, i.e. Sidgwick, avoided committing the naturalistic fallacy.Footnote 19 In Ethics, he reproduced (without acknowledgement) Sidgwick's arguments against definitional or analytical naturalism.Footnote 20 J. M. E. McTaggart wrote the now underappreciated and little read ‘The Ethics of Henry Sidgwick’.Footnote 21 Hastings Rashdall devoted considerable attention to Sidgwick's view in his The Theory of Good and Evil.Footnote 22 He was particularly impressed by Sidgwick's discussion and evaluation of common-sense morality. ‘The loose statements of Intuitionists as to the clearness, certainty, adequacy, and self-evidence of the ordinarily received rules of conduct have never been subjected to so searching, so exhaustive, and so illuminating an examination.’Footnote 23 In 1908, in a paper comparing aspects of Green and Sidgwick, G. F. Barbour described both Green and Sidgwick as ‘rival leaders of English ethical thought’.Footnote 24 H. A. Prichard began writing about him in the 1920s, though in work that was not at the time published.Footnote 25 In 1928, E. F. Carritt described ME as ‘The best exposition of the rationalist or altruistic utilitarian theory.’Footnote 26 In 1934, W. D. Lamont maintained that ‘Any criticism of Utilitarianism would be more incomplete than need be, if it neglected to take account of the development of the principles of that school by Professor Sidgwick.’Footnote 27 Lamont chastises C. D. Broad for the derogatory statements he makes about Sidgwick in comparing him to Green: ‘No worthy follower of Green would so under-rate Sidgwick's influence’.Footnote 28 He adds that Sidgwick has ‘many distinguished disciples, past and present’.Footnote 29 He goes on to discuss the quality that gives Sidgwick's work a ‘permanent disciplinary value for students of philosophy’; he does not impugn Broad's positive claims about Sidgwick.Footnote 30 In 1939, Ross suggested that he is the ‘clearest-headed of the hedonists’.Footnote 31 In the same work Ross cites Sidgwick nearly as many times as he cites Aristotle, Kant, Broad and Moore.Footnote 32 So, pace Deigh, Broad was not the only Englishman who admired Sidgwick's work (439).Footnote 33
Finally, it is dubious to claim that the decline of the epistemology that Sidgwick relied on was the reason for Methods's putative decline. Deigh maintains that Sidgwick subscribed to philosophical intuitionism, the view according to which there are (a) abstract self-evident propositions or intuitions and (b) a set of derivatively justified propositions justified by argumentative appeal to the non-derivatively justified or self-evident propositions.Footnote 34 Deigh argues that this epistemology, the traditional intuitionist conception of epistemology, fell into philosophical disrepute following Sidgwick's death and with it went interest in Methods (439–43).Footnote 35 His argument seems to be as follows. Premiss One: The conception of epistemology to which Sidgwick subscribed was impugned in the domain in which it was held to be most plausible, i.e. mathematics, owing to the development of non-Euclidean geometry and Gödel's second incompleteness result. These developments meant that self-evidence ‘ceased to be a property that one needs to attribute to some mathematical propositions in order to explain mathematical knowledge’ (445). Premiss Two: If an epistemology loses credibility/is impugned in the domain in which it is thought to be most plausible, then it loses credibility/is impugned in additional domains in which it is utilized. Conclusion: Therefore, because defenders of the sort of epistemology to which Sidgwick appealed could ‘no longer invoke it [Euclidian geometry] to substantiate their conception of knowledge’ it developed a shady reputation in ethics and with it went concern about Methods (442).
There are three responses to this argument. First, it is far from clear that Sidgwick actually holds to all aspects of the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge. He does suggest at one point that he thinks one can deduce the rules of common-sense morality from his philosophical intuitions (ME 102). He also claims that he relies on his philosophical intuitions and the intuitionist method to arrive at utilitarianism (ME 388, 406–7). However, when he outlines his philosophical intuitions in Book III of ME, he does not in any strict sense deduce common-sense morality or utilitarianism from them. In fact, he denies that you can (ME 379). This suggests that Sidgwick does not see the relationship between his intuitions and various methods of ethics (e.g. utilitarianism) in the way that Deigh's account of Sidgwick's epistemology suggests. In fact, it is quite difficult to ascertain how Sidgwick's philosophical intuitions figure into the argument for utilitarianism. At best they form part of the argument for the view, which includes a negative argument against common-sense morality and its philosophical counterpart, dogmatic intuitionism, and a Millian-style ‘proof’.Footnote 36
Second, it cannot be correct that the rejection of Sidgwick's epistemology contributed to the decline of Methods, for works by E. F. Carritt, W. D. Ross, Hastings Rashdall, G. E. Moore, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, among others, subscribed to a similar epistemology, but did not similarly disappear from philosophical view in that period of time.Footnote 37 Deigh suggests that this is due to the fact that these other thinkers, especially Moore and Ross, ‘could prop up their theories with metaphysical and psychological theses that were alien to Sidgwick's theory’, e.g. that moral properties are non-natural properties and that we have a special moral faculty for intuiting moral facts (443–4).Footnote 38 But this is a poor explanation. How does subscription to these specific views help defenders of the traditional intuitionist epistemology explain ‘why one needs to attribute self-evidence to some ethical propositions in order to explain ethical knowledge’ (445)?Footnote 39 It is not clear how one can ward off worries about the dubiety of the traditional intuitionist conception of epistemology by adopting a specific metaethical or psychological view, and Deigh does not fully explain how one can do so.Footnote 40 If appeal to self-evidence or intuition is sufficient to impugn an epistemology, then this should be true regardless of the ontology or psychology to which an individual subscribes. This is confirmed by recent defences of rational intuitionism in general epistemology, where the tack is to defend the view in light of the worries that Deigh raises and only after a full defence of the view raise the issue of the appropriate ontology to which a rational intuitionist should subscribe.Footnote 41
Third, one can reject premiss two of Deigh's argument. One may well accept that the epistemology did not work out in, e.g., geometry and related areas but reject that this implies that it does not work well or plausibly in ethics. Bertrand Russell, one of the individuals whom Deigh lists as an architect of the putative decline of the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge, presumably thought this at one point.Footnote 42 In 1955, he declared that there is ‘no logical objection to this theory [i.e. ethical intuition], and I am not prepared to reject it decisively’.Footnote 43 He goes on to note that the view has a ‘grave drawback’, that there is a lack of consensus regarding what we ought to do. He does not mention the decline of the view in geometry and other areas of mathematics. In the same period those friendly to the Sidgwickian approach to moral epistemology continued to turn out defenses of it. In his Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy, the later intuitionist A. C. Ewing advances a ‘middle way’ in metaethics. He eschews reliance on non-natural properties and special faculties but not on intuition or, as he preferred to call it, ‘direct cognition’.Footnote 44 He argues that by direct cognition we are able to cognize that ‘certain factual properties or circumstances constitute a reason why certain attitudes ought to be adopted or certain actions done . . . we see immediately that certain factors constitute a reason’.Footnote 45 He does not address the worry that Deigh raises.Footnote 46 Instead, he addresses what he calls ‘one of the most popular arguments’ against appeal to direct cognition, which is expressed by P. F. Strawson, and is not the sort of worry that Deigh discusses. Perhaps the more likely explanation for the decline of the traditional intuitionist conception of knowledge in ethics (though not Methods) is the popularity of Strawson's attack on itFootnote 47 and the development of a plausible rival account of moral epistemology, i.e. Rawlsian coherentist reflective equilibrium.Footnote 48
