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WorkHenry Sidgwick

Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays

Moral philosophy taken out of the lecture hall and into public meetings, on luxury, culture and clergymen who recite creeds they doubt.

by Henry Sidgwick202 passages held

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First published
(aged 60)
Original language
English

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Overview

At the first meeting of the Cambridge Ethical Society, in May 1888, Henry Sidgwick told the new members that he thought the society more likely to fail than to succeed. He had sat for years in the Metaphysical Society in London, among statesmen, lawyers, journalists and bishops, and had watched its discussions end with every member exactly where he started. His advice was to stop trying to agree on first principles and to work instead on the broad agreement that already existed about particular duties. He even asked them to leave aside free will and the conflict between a person's own good and everyone's, the problem his own Methods of Ethics had ended on. The ethical societies of London and Cambridge, partly modelled on the American Societies for Ethical Culture, heard most of the addresses in this book, which Swan Sonnenschein published in London in 1898. They include talks on luxury and on the pursuit of culture, and a paper on why sane people act against their own better judgement. In its sharpest pages, from an 1895 lecture to the West London Ethical Society, Sidgwick argued that a clergyman who recites in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus was born of a virgin, while believing him the son of two human parents, tells a plain falsehood every Sunday. The Reverend Hastings Rashdall, of Hertford College, Oxford, replied at length in the International Journal of Ethics in January 1897. Sidgwick's rejoinder, "Clerical Veracity", was printed in this volume for the first time, with his conclusions unchanged.

Key concepts

How does Sidgwick tell luxuries from comforts and decencies?

Comforts protect against slight pains and annoyances that do not injure health or efficiency; decencies are what people consume to avoid not discomfort but social disrepute; luxuries are sources of positive pleasure whose absence would cause neither. All three lines shift: habit turns luxuries into comforts, and the customs of a class decide what counts as decent.

What does Sidgwick mean by 'unreasonable action'?

Action that a sane person in a normal state takes while judging, at that very moment, that some other course is reasonable. The opposing judgment need not be moral: it may be one of prudence, or an intuitive conviction rather than a reasoned one. Sidgwick separates cases where the conflict is clearly conscious from those where it is absent or only obscurely present.

What does Sidgwick mean by culture?

Not a store of facts, nor every kind of spiritual perfection, but the love of knowledge: the ardour of curiosity that keeps absorbing new facts and ideas and fitting them into a living, growing system of thought, together with the trained faculty of doing so. A load of facts memorised for an examination does not give it. He arrives there by working through Matthew Arnold's shifting uses of the word.

What does Sidgwick mean by 'public morality'?

The morality of conduct in government and public life. In a democracy it reaches beyond ministers to every citizen who shares responsibility for what government does, and where parties govern it includes the morality of party conflict. Sidgwick's question is whether government and private life answer to one moral standard or to two.

Themes of the book

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

Agreement on Duties, Not First Principles

Can people who disagree about the foundations of morality still work together on what to do? The opening addresses say they can, if they stop trying to settle the foundations first.

Sidgwick had watched the Metaphysical Society's debates leave every member where he began, and he warned the Cambridge Ethical Society against copying it. Its aim, in Aristotle's phrase, was not knowledge but action, so it should leave the highest good alone and build on the broad agreement that already existed about particular duties. That agreement deserves respect: rules that grew up through social evolution should be handled delicately, and a refined sense of justice honours tacit understandings as well as written contracts.

  • practical ethics
  • moral philosophy
  • moral knowledge
  • moral progress
  • ethics
  • morality
  • practical reasoning
  • justice

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Truthfulness in Church and State

Do clergymen and statesmen live under a looser rule of honesty than everyone else? Sidgwick argues that neither the pulpit nor patriotism licenses a plain falsehood.

In 'Public Morality' Sidgwick asks why statesmen's breaches of justice, veracity and good faith are not only forgiven but defended in general maxims by eminent historians, and he finds the fault of Machiavellianism not in judging acts by their consequences but in narrowing the end to one nation's interest. The essays on religious conformity and 'Clerical Veracity' hold the clergy to the same plain standard: reciting that Jesus was born of a virgin while believing otherwise is a falsehood, and Hastings Rashdall's dispensing power cannot be confined.

  • truthfulness
  • veracity
  • religious conformity
  • religion and morality
  • religion
  • political ethics
  • moral judgment

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Luxury and the Pursuit of Culture

When is spending on pleasure defensible, and what is culture actually for? Two addresses try to give both words a precise sense before passing judgement.

Sidgwick defines luxuries as sources of positive pleasure whose absence would cause no discomfort, and shows how the line moves: habit turns luxuries into comforts, and custom turns them into the decencies a class must keep up. A real defence of luxury must show some service the luxurious render to everyone else. In 'The Pursuit of Culture' he takes Matthew Arnold as his guide, then parts from him: culture is the love of knowledge and the trained faculty of fitting it into a living system of thought, not every spiritual perfection at once.

  • luxury
  • consumption
  • culture
  • aesthetics
  • knowledge
  • science

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Acting Against One's Better Judgement

How can a sane person knowingly choose what they judge unreasonable? The last essay treats it as a fact to be observed, not a paradox to be explained away.

Bentham's psychology, and in another way Green's, left little room for wilful wrongdoing, the conscious choice of what one still judges wrong. Sidgwick thinks the common moral experience of mankind too clear to deny it, and tries to observe the process in himself soon after it happens, noting that the attention itself tends to prevent it. Often the judgment is only obscurely present: anger or appetite perverts it for the moment, and a person sincerely persuades himself that the rule does not apply to this case.

  • akrasia
  • weakness of will
  • moral psychology
  • habit
  • moral responsibility

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Within this work

passages held
202
distinct concepts
345
by passages held, corpus-wide
#349

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: “akrasia” and “moral psychology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 7 pairings. 96 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
akrasiamoral psychology5
aestheticsculture4
aestheticsmoral psychology2
cultureluxury2
religious conformitytruthfulness2
culturemoral psychology1
moral psychologypolitical ethics1

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

    Course lectures never meant for print, in which Sidgwick defended the position of The Methods of Ethics against the schools that had risen since it first appeared.

     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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