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WorkHenry Sidgwick

Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau

Sidgwick tests his own ethics against three rivals: Green's idealism, Spencer's evolutionism and Martineau's appeal to conscience.

by Henry Sidgwick396 passages held

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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
English

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Overview

By the 1880s the rivals Henry Sidgwick took most seriously were no longer the old intuitionists but two newer schools. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher of evolution, had set out an evolutionary ethics in The Data of Ethics in 1879. T. H. Green, Oxford's professor of moral philosophy, died in 1882, and his idealist Prolegomena to Ethics appeared the following year. A third book came from James Martineau, whose Types of Ethical Theory was, in the judgement of Sidgwick's editor, the most influential recent defence of conscience as a direct judge of right and wrong. All three were published after the early editions of The Methods of Ethics, and Sidgwick answered them in his Cambridge lectures, explaining to his students that, having set out his own system in his book, he could best clarify it now by criticising other people's. Against Spencer and Green he makes one argument from two sides. Spencer tried to rest ethics on science and Green on metaphysics; Sidgwick holds that what ought to be done cannot be read off from what is, has been or will be, so that ethics has to stand on principles of its own. Martineau ranked human motives on a scale from lower to higher and judged an action by the motive behind it, and Sidgwick denies that any fixed ranking holds good without regard to what the motives lead to. He never prepared the lectures for print and left no instructions about them. E. E. Constance Jones of Girton College, to whom he had left his ethical papers, published them in 1902, printing them much as they were delivered and adding the passages he used to read aloud from the books under discussion.

Key concepts

What does Green mean by a non-competitive good?

A good that one person can gain without anyone else losing it, so that pursuing it never sets people against each other. Green holds that the true good is of this kind, and that a society can therefore pursue it as a common good. Sidgwick tests the claim against Green's own wider account of the good as the realisation of human capabilities.

What is the difference between absolute and relative ethics?

It is Spencer's distinction. Absolute ethics describes perfect conduct: what ideal men would do in an ideal society, where right action produces pleasure unmixed with pain. Relative ethics deals with the imperfect conduct of actual people in actual societies, where even the best available act brings some pain. Spencer holds that the first must be worked out before the second.

What is Martineau's 'scale of springs of action'?

A ranking of the motives that move people to act, from lower to higher, which Martineau thinks conscience recognises directly. When two motives compete, the right act is the one prompted by the higher. On this view the moral worth of an action lies in the motive behind it, not in its outward benefits, which count only as signs of the goodness they spring from.

What does 'self-realisation' mean in Green's ethics?

The idea that a person's true good lies in the fullest development of their capabilities as a self-conscious being, rather than in pleasure. Green ties it to society: a person realises themselves through interests that cannot be satisfied without the good of others. Sidgwick takes it as the centre of Green's ethics and tests it against Green's claim that the true good is shared.

What is evolutionary ethics, as Spencer presents it?

Ethics treated as the last chapter in the evolution of conduct. In the lowest forms of life, actions are so little adjusted to ends that life lasts only while the surroundings happen to be favourable; higher up, conduct is ever better adjusted to sustaining life. Spencer takes the most evolved conduct to be the best, conduct that sustains life and yields a surplus of pleasure.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Green's Common Good

Can there be a good that no one gains at another's expense? Green says the true good is of that kind, and Sidgwick asks what it has to shrink to before the claim holds.

Green defines a person's good as the realisation of their capabilities, and he also holds that the true good is common, something no one can gain at another's loss. Sidgwick finds the two claims pulling apart. When Green wants the good to be full realisation, it includes art, taste and knowledge of every kind; when he wants it non-competitive, it shrinks to virtue and goodness of will. Nor can Green's metaphysics of a spiritual principle supply an ethical ideal: nothing in it, Sidgwick finds, shows that principle to be holy or to have a will.

  • common good
  • self-satisfaction
  • self-consciousness
  • virtue
  • virtue ethics
  • metaphysics
  • aristotle
  • reason

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Spencer's Ethics of a Perfect Society

Should ethics begin with the conduct of perfect people in a perfect society? Spencer says yes, and Sidgwick answers that such a code cannot guide anyone living here and now.

Spencer separates absolute ethics, the code of ideal men in an ideal society, from relative ethics for actual people now, and in Social Statics he went further: the philosophical moralist treats only of the straight man, and a problem with a crooked man in it is insoluble. Sidgwick compares that to an astronomer who would study no planet that did not move in a perfect ellipse. We cannot picture an ideal society definitely enough to reason from it, he argues, and evolution alone cannot tell us what ought to be.

  • evolutionary ethics
  • social evolution
  • absolute ethics
  • altruism
  • sympathy
  • property rights
  • justice

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Martineau's Scale of Motives

Can motives be ranked from lower to higher, so that the higher should always win? Martineau thinks conscience reads such a scale directly; Sidgwick doubts any ranking holds without looking at what motives lead to.

Martineau judges an action by the motive behind it and ranks the springs of action on a fixed scale, asking us to grade our approval by the purity of the source rather than the size of the result. Sidgwick objects that when a motive is judged morally, the consequences it tends to produce are always in view, however little the agent thought of them. Even Martineau's example, that eating for the palate's sake is meaner than eating to satisfy hunger, depends on what each tends to lead to.

  • moral motivation
  • motivation
  • desire
  • intention
  • moral psychology
  • moral judgment
  • hedonism
  • pleasure
  • happiness
  • utilitarianism
  • consequentialism
  • moral obligation
  • moral responsibility
  • ethical theory

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Within this work

passages held
396
distinct concepts
538
by passages held, corpus-wide
#185

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “desire” and “moral psychology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
desiremoral psychology15
happinessutilitarianism12
desirepleasure7
evolutionary ethicsmoral psychology6
moral judgmentmoral psychology6
evolutionary ethicshappiness5
evolutionary ethicsjustice5
evolutionary ethicsutilitarianism5
moral judgmentutilitarianism5
pleasureutilitarianism5
moral psychologyutilitarianism4
happinessmoral judgment3
justicemoral psychology3
justiceutilitarianism3
moral psychologypleasure3
desireutilitarianism2
evolutionary ethicspleasure2
happinesspleasure2
justicemoral judgment2
evolutionary ethicsmoral judgment1
happinessjustice1
happinessmoral psychology1
moral judgmentpleasure1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1870 The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription

    His answer in print to the question his own resignation from Trinity had raised the year before, published four years before The Methods of Ethics.

     EN
  2. 1874 The Methods of Ethics

    Revised through five editions in Sidgwick's lifetime, this is the book he is read for; his editor called his later Cambridge lectures on Green, Spencer and Martineau supplementary to it.

     EN
  3. 1886 Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers

    The historical companion to The Methods of Ethics: Sidgwick telling the story of the moral debates that book had tried to settle by argument.

     EN
  4. 1891 The Elements of Politics

    A two-part treatise — the principles of legislation first, then the structure of government — that carries the utilitarian reasoning of The Methods of Ethics from private conduct into politics.

     EN
  5. 1898 Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays

    Written mostly for the ethical societies of London and Cambridge between 1888 and 1897, these are Sidgwick's applications of his ethics to questions of everyday conduct, for listeners outside the university.

     EN
  6. 1902 Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau you are here EN
  7. 1902 Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations

    Where The Methods of Ethics works inside ethics, these lectures map how ethics, metaphysics, psychology and history fit together — the frame around the rest of Sidgwick's philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1905 Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures and Essays

    The fullest record of Sidgwick's work outside ethics — on Kant, on the theory of knowledge and on the Scottish philosophy of common sense.

     EN
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