Henry Sidgwick

English educator

• Born: May 31, 1838
• Birthplace: Skipton, Yorkshire, England
• Died: August 28, 1900
• Place of death: Terling, Essex, England

A proponent of higher education for women and an advocate of research into paranormal phenomena, Sidgwick attempted in philosophy to reconcile an intuitive approach to morality with that of utilitarianism. His reasoned defense of the resulting ethical method produced one of the most significant works on ethics in English, the capstone of nineteenth century British moral philosophy.

Early Life

Henry Sidgwick was the son of William and Mary (Crofts) Sidgwick, both from northern England. His father, an Anglican clergyman and headmaster of the Skipton, Yorkshire, grammar school, died in 1841. Henry’s early life was characterized by frequent moves (which apparently brought on a kind of stammer that never left him), but in 1852 Henry was sent to Rugby School; the rest of the family, his mother and three other surviving children, settled in Rugby the following year.

Sidgwick was strongly influenced in his early life by one of his Rugby masters, Edward White Benson, a cousin nine years older than he. Benson soon joined the Sidgwick household; he would later marry Sidgwick’s sister, Mary, and would be the archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 until the year of his death. The precocious Henry came to idolize his cousin and followed his advice by enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge, after his graduation from Rugby in 1855. Cambridge was to be his home for the rest of his life.

Sidgwick’s early university experience brought a host of academic awards, and as an undergraduate he was elected to the Apostles Society. The Apostles were dedicated to the pursuit of truth, wherever it might be found, and Sidgwick found himself taken by the spirit of honest inquiry into religion, society, and philosophy. He would devote his life to the great philosophical questions, seeking always for honesty and truth to triumph over rhetoric. Indeed, Sidgwick’s writing is characterized by a kind of zealous balance, the author being at pains to give each aspect of an argument or counterargument its due.

Some readers of Sidgwick have taken this balancing effort as a fault and have yearned for the simple dogmatic statement that Sidgwick was loathe to make. He was not a system builder in philosophy; his was the task of honest elucidation and tentative judgment.

In curious contrast to the stodgy feel of his major works, Sidgwick the man was a witty conversationalist (using his stammer at times as a dramatic device) and a lover of poetry. Small in stature, his large silken beard flapping in the breeze as he ran along the streets of Cambridge to his lectures, he was vigorous, sturdy, and good-humored. The academic life suited him perfectly.

Life’s Work

Sidgwick was twenty-one in 1859. In that year, his sister married Edward Benson; Henry himself was elected a fellow of Trinity and appointed to an assistant tutorship in classics and thus began his career as a teacher and writer. It was a time of ferment in the intellectual world; that same year, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin first saw publication, as did On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Mill became a major influence on Sidgwick, though the two often took differing philosophical positions. Through his contact with the Apostles, Sidgwick became convinced that the truth of Christianity was an open question. The influence of Benson’s Anglican orthodoxy had begun to wane.

Sidgwick did not lightly dismiss the Christian story, yet even an intense study of the ancient Semitic texts left him unsatisfied. He realized that he was dealing with philosophical issues: If the miracle stories from the Scriptures were true, then reports of miracles from all ages must be considered, but then the accuracy of science itself (which admits of no supernatural interventions in its descriptions of the regularities of the world) is called into question. It appeared to Sidgwick that the probability of a real miracle was much less than the likelihood that witnesses were erroneous, untruthful, or credulous. “I still hunger and thirst after orthodoxy,” he wrote, “but I am, I trust, firm not to barter my intellectual birthright for a mess of mystical pottage.” However, Sidgwick, never given to fanaticism, produced no anti-Christian propaganda. He recognized the value of the faith for others, but honesty compelled him to a skeptical view of Christianity. He would wrestle with the idea of theism for the rest of his life.

Sidgwick’s honesty became a cause célèbre in 1869 when he resigned his Fellowship at Cambridge rather than continue to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, which was required by law for the post. Though by 1869 affirmation of the Anglican doctrines was an empty formality in academic circles, it is characteristic of Sidgwick that he took the matter seriously. It is further a recognition of his abilities as an instructor that, far from being relieved of his duties, Sidgwick was appointed to a special post at Cambridge that did not require doctrinal subscription and reappointed as a fellow when such tests were abolished in 1871. In 1872, he was passed over for the Knightsbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy but was elected to the post in 1883 after the death of the incumbent. Sidgwick continued teaching at Cambridge, in one post or another, until his death, with only occasional lectures elsewhere. (Several collections of his lectures were published posthumously.)

Sidgwick began his academic duties as a lecturer in the classics, but his interests soon encompassed moral and political philosophy, economics, and epistemology. His most enduring contribution came in The Methods of Ethics , first published in 1874, which ran to seven editions (the last, published after his death, came in 1907).

The Methods of Ethics does not seek to build a theoretical system of ethics but rather to discover if some coherence can be brought to the moral judgments actually made by men and women and if two apparently conflicting sources of moral imperatives can be reconciled. One source, intuitionism, was exemplified by the “common sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid, who made conscience the self-evident supreme authority in moral choices, and William Whewell, who allowed for a progressive intuition of moral concepts. Ethics must be based on principles derived by reason (the so-called moral faculty) and not on some calculation of the consequences of an action. This, the second source, is utilitarianism (or “universal hedonism”), which calls those actions right that produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Its varied exemplars included William Paley, who disavowed some inherent moral sense, Jeremy Bentham, associated with political reform movements and a secular approach to ethics, and John Stuart Mill, who deprecated intuitionism as merely the consecration of deep-seated prejudices.

Sidgwick agreed with the intuitionists that the common moral judgments of humankind could only be ordered by some self-evident first principle, but he attempted to demonstrate that this first principle was none other than the utilitarian dictum. Thus, moral choices are actually made on the basis of the self-evident principle of maximizing the good. However, there were really two kinds of utilitarianism: universal hedonism (or rational benevolence), which strived to maximize the universal, or societal, good, and egoism (or prudence), which strived for maximizing the agent’s good. When these two forms of utilitarianism are in conflict (when, for example, an agent must choose to save either himself or his fellows), can a rational choice be made between them? Is it possible to determine the cases in which egoism should take precedence over altruism?

For Sidgwick the answer was no. Without bringing in additional assumptions (for example, that God exists and will ultimately reward the altruistic choice), it is impossible to pronounce egoism or altruism the more rational way. Sidgwick was left with a kind of fundamental dualism of the practical reason, needing some cosmic postulate in which to ground ethical choice. However, God’s existence is far from self-evident, and the mere desire that virtue be rewarded is not proof that it will be. Here The Methods of Ethics concludes, leaving for others the task of placing ethics in a larger context and so avoiding Sidgwick’s dilemma.

Sidgwick’s interest in psychic phenomena paralleled his quest for some evidence that might justify belief in another realm of existence and so provide the “cosmic postulate” for practical ethics. He had become interested in the paranormal when he was twenty-one; in 1882, in response to a sustained fascination with the subject, Sidgwick became the first president of the newly formed Society for Psychical Research. Though he would often observe purported mind readers or those with “second sight,” Sidgwick’s greatest contribution was in validating the very existence of such an organization. As he put it, “My highest ambition in psychical research is to produce evidence which will drive my opponents to doubt my honesty or veracity.”

Sidgwick married Eleanor Mildred Balfour, the sister of Arthur James Balfour, in 1876; as a couple, they became deeply involved in probing supposed psychic events. Eleanor was perhaps the more credulous; she was convinced that telepathy was a reality, while her husband was never quite certain.

Sidgwick was certain that speculative philosophy did not excuse him from practical responsibilities. He had long been interested in the education of women and, after reading On the Subjection of Women (1869) by Mill, laid plans for giving university lectures to women. Victorian thought generally assumed women were by nature unable to reach higher learning, but Sidgwick eventually saw the opening of Newnham Hall for Women, as part of Cambridge, in the year of his marriage. In 1892, Eleanor Sidgwick became president of the college. Childless, the Sidgwicks lived there the rest of their lives.

Sidgwick was a prolific writer. An essay for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1878 was issued in 1886 as Outline of the History of Ethics . In 1883, he published Principles of Political Economy ; Elements of Politics followed in 1891. His life was terminated by cancer on August 28, 1900. He had requested that these words should accompany the simple burial service: “Let us commend to the love of God with silent prayer the soul of a sinful man who partly tried to do his duty.”

Significance

Henry Sidgwick believed he had failed to develop a coherent ethics without reliance on some cosmic postulate that would guarantee a reward for the selfless. Others would attempt to place ethics within the context of evolutionary thought, and still others would ground ethics on metaphysics (idealism, for example). Nevertheless, Sidgwick’s masterwork, The Methods of Ethics, was a hallmark in Victorian philosophy not for its originality but for its clarity and exquisitely precise exploration of reason in ethical decision making. Sidgwick concluded that reason alone could not resolve the conflict facing beings who had an ego life and at the same time a life in community. He had shown in his history of ethics that the Greek idea of the Good involved both pleasure and virtue (or duty); now the two had become separated, with reason powerless to mediate between individual pleasure and one’s duty to society.

Sidgwick has been characterized as the last of the classical utilitarians; in his work he prepared the way for new approaches to ethics by marshaling the data of common sense and articulating how far the principle of universal hedonism could be taken. He embodied in his life, as well as in his writing, the qualities of caution, good sense, an irenic spirit, balance, and the conviction of the supreme importance of moral choices.

Bibliography

Blanshard, Brand. “Henry Sidgwick.” In Four Reasonable Men. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Popular study of Sidgwick, bordering at times on hagiography, by a rationalist philosopher. Blanshard is impressed by Sidgwick’s quiet reasonableness on the printed page and in life.

James, D. G. Henry Sidgwick: Science and Faith in Victorian England. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. A short study of Sidgwick, full of prickly observations about his constant uncertainty and incurable irresolution. Part of the Riddell Memorial Lectures series, the volume remains unfinished because of the untimely death of James, formerly the vice chancellor of the University of Southampton. An entire lecture is devoted to Sidgwick and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

Schneewind, J. B. Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1977. A major technical study of The Methods of Ethics, attempting to place it in the context of Victorian philosophical movements. This volume, which has extensive bibliographies, is useful as a guide to each section of The Methods of Ethics. Clearly written, for the most part.

Schultz, Bart. Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe, An Intellectual Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Comprehensive biography of Sidgwick, offering an accessible explanation of his philosophy within the context of Victorian Britain.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Essays on Henry Sidgwick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The essays, originally presented at a conference held in 1990, analyze various aspects of Sidgwick’s philosophy, including its contemporary relevance, its relationship to nineteenth century British ethical thought, and Sidgwick’s concept of rational egoism.

Sidgwick, Arthur, and Eleanor M. Sidgwick. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir. London: Macmillan, 1906. The standard reference for Sidgwick’s life, compiled by his brother and Henry’s widow. Arranged chronologically, the book contains excerpts from correspondence and diaries and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Sidgwick’s writings. The section on Sidgwick as a teacher contains numerous appreciations.

Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed. London: Macmillan, 1907. Reprint. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981. Sidgwick’s masterwork, complete with analytical table of contents, comprehensive index, and an autobiographical fragment written by Sidgwick later in his life. Difficult to follow for the uninitiated.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Outline of the History of Ethics for English Readers. 6th ed. London: Macmillan, 1931. Reprint. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967. The book contains the enlarged text of Sidgwick’s original article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A final chapter on the work of Sidgwick himself has been added by Alban Widgery of Duke University.