Sidgwickian Ethics is a very good book for approaching Sidgwick's problem of the dualism of practical reason. David Phillips starts, in his introduction, with a good description of the problematic issues in Sidgwickian ethics. He says at the outset that Sidgwick is a non-naturalist rather than an error theorist. The problem of Sidgwick's relationship to utilitarianism and egoism is exposed in a clear way. It is obvious that, for Phillips, Sidgwick tried desperately to circumvent the problem of the dualism of practical reason.
Phillips makes numerous interesting contentions, including the claim that Sidgwick overestimates the success of having reconciled utilitarianism and intuitionism and underestimates the compatibility of his criterial argument with common sense. In the second chapter, Sidgwick's metaethics is developed and analysed. Sidgwick's concept of moral epistemology is then explained in the third chapter, which introduces the two main problems treated by Phillips, namely utilitarianism versus dogmatic intuitionism (chapter 4) and utilitarianism versus egoism (chapter 5).
For Phillips, Sidgwick is right to think that non-naturalism supports intuitionism, though Sidgwick is wrong to see it as justifying intuitionism. Intuitively trying to justify any non-naturalistic normative theory is exceedingly problematic. Phillips then shows how Sidgwick tries to avoid such difficulties by basing utilitarianism on individualism and common sense grounded in part on basic rights, including especially the right to freedom from interference (Methods of Ethics, book III, ch. IV, §4).
Phillips discusses Sidgwick's famous criterial argument at length, claiming accurately that while utilitarianism meets the four criteria establishing it as a fundamental moral axiom, common-sense morality fails to satisfy these criteria. Phillips therefore concludes that Sidgwick's use of common sense morality to supplement the validity of utilitarianism is a failure. What the author overlooks is that Sidgwick's goal in deploying common sense is not simply to use it to defend utilitarianism but to show as well that utilitarianism is individualistic. For Sidgwick, the right to freedom from interference best promotes the most happiness for the most people.
Sidgwickian Ethics then turns to Sidgwick's comparison of utilitarianism with rival normative perspectives including deontology and rational egoism. Phillips shows the rival power and appeal that rational egoism also held for Sidgwick. Here Phillips might have explored Sidgwick's possible and surprising debts to the individualistic egoism of physiocrats like François Quesnay and his potential debts to Auguste Comte's altruism.
Further on in his study, Phillips takes up Sidgwick's account of the virtue of justice and similarly undervalues its individualistic connotations for Sidgwick. This misunderstanding stems from his consideration of Sidgwick's discussion of justice. For Sidgwick, justice applies universally and is based on the equal respect that everyone deserves based on the equal right of freedom from interference. Consequently, justice for Sidgwick conflicts with his formal principle of rational egoism more than Phillips realizes.
For Phillips, Sidgwick's argument for the formal principle of rational egoism is more successful than Sidgwick's argument on behalf of the formal principle of utilitarianism. Phillips skilfully shows that Sidgwick was extremely conscious of conflict between utilitarianism and rational egoistic individualism. Sidgwick, of course, struggled to resolve this conflict in The Methods of Ethics, and wondered whether modern society needed to be reinforced by religious belief and teaching demanding benevolence and self-sacrifice. Phillips shows that there is no simple way of resolving Sidgwick's dualism of practical reasoning, which demands that we promote simultaneously both individual happiness and the general happiness of the community. While Phillips does say that Sidgwick conceded that the moral government of the world would require God or some cosmic force that would ensure that individual good and universal good always coincided and that Sidgwick did not apparently believe in God, still he might have taken this opportunity to address Sidgwick's theological views more thoroughly. But whether Sidgwick believed in God or not, his aim remained to discover somehow the simplest and most feasible way to moralize egoistic hedonism and individualism, or, in other words, to accommodate both with universal hedonism.
In short, Phillips underscores just how preoccupied Sidgwick was with resolving the dualism of practical reasoning, namely that ‘it is rationally permissible to do what best promotes universal good and it is rationally permissible to do what best promotes your own good’ (p. 140). This sentence sums up what was for Sidgwick the most intractable philosophical problem of normative ethics. Even if he fully appreciated the extreme difficulties of solving this problem philosophically, he also persisted in trying to find political, economic and social solutions to the dualism of practical reason which combined non-socialistic utilitarianism with an individualistic political economy that best promoted general happiness.
Phillips then considers agent-relative reasons and agent-relative values with Sidgwick in mind. Among other things, he argues that each of us has special reasons to pursue his/her own good, but no special agent-relative kind of good. Maybe we too often pursue our own good without real reasons. That is, we often pursue something we believe to be good when, in fact, it is not. What I happen to believe to be good is not necessarily good. A present need can bring me pleasure in the short term and trouble in the long term. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries provide little inspiring evidence of those who have managed responsibly to combine individual and common good.
Sidgwick's dualism of practical reasoning, as Phillips shows at the end of his book, is certainly contradictory at first sight, especially when Sidgwick's presentation of it is traditionally interpreted as simultaneously requiring that one prefer one's own good to the greater good of another and that one must not prefer one's own good to the greater good of another. Phillips shows how Sidgwick struggled to come to terms with the dilemma, albeit unsuccessfully as far as Sidgwick was concerned. But Phillips's fine study suggests less conventional readings of Sidgwick that cause the dualism to recede in so far as we might reconstruct the dualism as simply stipulating that it is both reasonable to do what is ultimately conducive to one's own good and that it is reasonable to do what is ultimately conducive to universal good. In other words, there is a significant difference between saying we have some reason to promote universal goodness and saying far more demandingly that universal good is the only thing we ought to promote.
Of course, less conventional readings raise the spectre that what we are really doing is putting arguments in Sidgwick's mouth to make dilemmas he thought irreconcilable reconcilable. We risk understanding Sidgwick better than he understood himself, therefore making him into something he never was. Though raising this hermeneutical issue may not have been primary for Phillips, it is an important implication that careful readers of his admirable study will hardly fail to draw.
Notwithstanding whether Phillips's book is primarily a study of Sidgwick's ethics or of Sidgwickian ethics, we cannot avoid concluding what a deeply human conundrum the dualism of practical reasoning has become and remains. Phillips compels us to appreciate just how much the dualism of practical reasoning is not only a formal contradiction but also a deeply existential one as well.
