Sidgwickian Ethics by David Phillips, and: Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism by Mariko Nakano-Okuno (review)

Although John Stuart Mill was undoubtedly an eminent Victorian, he was not quite eminent enough for Lytton Strachey to take him up in Eminent Victorians (1918); for a witty skewering of Mill, we have had to settle for Henry Sidgwick, whose The Methods of Ethics (1874) carefully took apart Mill’s utilitarianism.

Sidgwick saw two main ethical theories, utilitarianism and intuitionism, with rational egoism hanging on as a third. It was Mill’s utilitarianism that he argued about, and to it he opposed the intuitionism of William Whewell, Mill’s great idealist opponent in metaphysics and the philosophy of science as well as in ethics. When reading Mill and Whewell it is always important to keep in mind the metaphysical background of each. Whewell’s intuitionism was embedded in an idealist and Platonist metaphysics, where Mill’s utilitarianism was rooted in his empiricism. Mill used his empiricism to go after Whewell, as, for example, when he used associationist psychology to criticize Whewell on his claims of a priori truths in ethics (see Mill’s essay “Whewell on Moral Philosohy” [1852]), as in physics and geometry (see Mill’s A System of Logic, books II and III [1843]). Mill likewise appealed to associationism in several places in his essay on “Utilitarianism” (1861) and makes clear, there and elsewhere, that a failure to grasp the empiricist view of the human being and its place in the universe was both wrong and morally pernicious, hindering the utilitarian end of the improvement of mankind. Whewell countered this position with his idealist vision of the human being and its place in the universe. Associationism, according to Whewell’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England (1852), was too easy and too superficial; it gave a view of the human being that was not only false but morally pernicious. It is to be regretted that Sidgwick did not explore this essential metaphysical background. Thus, it is important to understand Mill’s empiricist view that moral statements are imperatives (as Mill makes clear in his A System of Logic) and therefore neither true nor false. This has the immediate implication that Mill’s famous proof of the principle of utility (in the fourth chapter of his essay on “Utilitarianism”) cannot be a proof in the sense in which we speak of proofs in logic or physics, that is, a proof establishing truth, since the principle, as an imperative, can have no truth value. Sidgwick, overlooking this point, took it to be a proof in the usual sense, and as a consequence argued that as a proof it is not very good. And without such a proof, he argued, utilitarianism must rest on something like a Whewellian intuition.

But Sidgwick also overlooks Whewell’s metaphysics, so that Sidgwick’s intuitions lack the support of Whewell’s Platonic metaphysics: Sidgwick’s intuitions are just that, mere intuitions, lacking any metaphysical support and, as Mill would argue, can be nothing more than mere feelings of certainty that moral imperatives are really statements of fact and that some such facts are morally better than others. Mill, of course, does not deny the existence of such feelings, but they can be explained by the principles of associationism and certainly, contrary to Whewell, can provide no foundation for ethics.

Sidgwick’s neglect of the metaphysical background to Mill and Whewell was passed on to George Edward Moore, who also misunderstands Mill’s proof and makes a hash of it in his Principia Ethica (1903). That version of Sidgwick’s ethics, and therefore his narrow version of utilitarianism, has been passed on to present-day moral theorists. (See, for another more plausible version of Mill’s proof, Everett Hall’s “The ‘Proof’ of Utility in Bentham and Mill” in Ethics [1949]. See also my articles “Mill’s Proof...