Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)

Bart Schultz

Introduction

Henry Sidgwick, best known today as the author of The Methods of Ethics (first edition 1874) and the most philosophically sophisticated of the classical, hedonistic utilitarians, was a many-sided, reluctantly agnostic Victorian intellectual, a moral philosopher, classicist, political economist, political and legal theorist, parapsychologist, educational reformer, literary critic, and much else besides. A product of Rugby, he spent his entire adult professional life at Cambridge University, starting out, after a brilliant undergraduate career there in classics and mathematics, as a Fellow and Lecturer in Classics. After much agonized soul searching in the 1860s, he famously resigned his Fellowship out of a guilty agnostic conscience about having sworn belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, as the position required. But he nonetheless continued in his then role as a Lecturer in the Moral Sciences and in due course, in 1883—after subscription ceased to be required—rose to the position of Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, although by that time he was already one of the brightest intellectual stars of the era (Schultz 2004).

During his lifetime, Sidgwick published widely, contributing many essays and reviews to both popular and academic journals, and producing

B. Schultz (h)

Senior Lecturer in the Humanities (Philosophy) and Director of the Civic Knowledge Project, University of Chicago, USA e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_15

The Methods of Ethics, The Principles of Political Economy (first edition 1883), Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers (first edition 1886), The Elements of Politics (first edition 1891), and Practical Ethics (first edition 1898). A number of important works appeared posthumously— for example, The Development of European Polity (1903)—and his widow and brother also published Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (1906), composed largely of Sidgwick’s letters and journals (Schultz et al. 1999).

Although in the 1860s he left the Anglican faith of his childhood behind, he always hoped to defend a more rational, theistic religious outlook, and he took an expansive view of philosophy as an effort to go beyond special sciences and piecemeal, technical inquiries to gain a comprehensive vision. If he was inspired by a certain vision of science, it was that of science as a cooperative and collaborative critical inquiry, not science as antireligious, reductive materialism (as in the works of T.H. Huxley). As he put it in his pamphlet on ‘The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription’, which appeared in 1870:

What theology has to learn from the predominant studies of the age is something very different from advice as to its method or estimates of its utility; it is the imperative necessity of accepting unreservedly the conditions of life under which these studies live and flourish. It is sometimes said that we live in an age that rejects authority. The statement, thus qualified, seems misleading; probably there never was a time when the number of beliefs held by each individual, undemonstrated and unverified by himself, was greater. But it is true that we only accept authority of a particular sort; the authority, namely, that is formed and maintained by the unconstrained agreement of individual thinkers, each of whom we believe to be seeking truth with single-mindedness and sincerity, and declaring what he has found with scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exactness and precision (Sidgwick quoted in Schultz et al. 1999: 14-15).

This attitude was given emphatic expression during his resignation crisis of 1869, but it manifested itself in all of Sidgwick’s work and ultimately reflected the outlook that he had absorbed when he first joined the Apostles, the exclusive, secret discussion society that he had been invited to join when an undergraduate at Cambridge. The pure, sincere pursuit of truth, with an intimate group of fellow seekers, a true community of inquiry or the ‘companions of Socrates’ (Schultz 2004: 510), was an ideal that Sidgwick pursued through one interdisciplinary discussion society after another for the rest of his life, notably The Metaphysical Society and the Synthetic Society. This was invariably part of a quest to tackle the deepest and toughest questions life could present, philosophical and religious, an effort to grasp the cosmos or find an underlying unity in the various regions of inquiry. However much he may have criticized the idealist metaphysics of his friend T.H. Green and his critic F.H. Bradley, rejecting arguments purporting to show, at least for Green, how the divine spirit or eternal consciousness was reproducing itself in human minds, he was no more in the camp of any form of materialistic utilitarianism than they were, as is evident from his posthumous work Philosophy: Its Scope and Relations:

[I]t seems best that the general investigation of the grounds of our belief in such conclusions as are held to be based on experience should be combined with the study of what may be known, or has been thought to be known, by a nonempirical method about mind, matter, and their relations, or about the ‘absolute reality’ that ‘underlies’ or is ‘implied in’ the world empirically known: especially since...the notion of ‘verification by experience’ appears to be inadequately analysed and defined in ordinary thought (Sidgwick quoted in Schultz et al. (1999): 118).

In truth, the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough and Alfred Lord Tennyson captured Sidgwick’s overall worldview much more effectively than the works of Bentham. He broke with his great utilitarian predecessors Bentham and the Mills on many counts, even while favoring a subtle and sophisticated form of utilitarian ethics. Moreover, he also allowed that he was no more able to defend utilitarianism to his satisfaction than he was able to defend the theism with which he also sympathized.

In 1876, he had married Eleanor Mildred Balfour (1845-1936), the sister of the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848-1930, prime minister from 1902 to 1905), who had been one of his students. It was in large measure because of his anxious agnostic grappling with religious issues that he worked with Eleanor to help found the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, hoping to find some possible empirical, parapsychological support for the theistic views that he sought to defend. With her and her brothers Gerald and Arthur, and such friends and colleagues as Edmund Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and William James, Sidgwick devoted endless hours to the investigation of supposed cases of telepathy, hypnotism, mediumship, ghosts, and so on. His investigations did not yield the truth he sought, though psychical research did take some strange turns, and many of those close to Sidgwick, including Eleanor and her brothers, became convinced that he had communicated to them from beyond the grave (Gray 2012: 7-103; Gauld 1968).

Together, Henry and Eleanor also helped found Newnham College, Cambridge, one of England’s first colleges for women (McWilliams Tullberg 1975). Sidgwick’s feminism has been subjected to some scrutiny (Caine 1994; Collini 1989; Walker 1998), but much of the criticism of it has been too narrow and uninformed by consideration of his larger sexual politics (Schultz 2004, 2005a). In any event, Sidgwick had a profound and lasting influence on education at Cambridge generally, having worked diligently not only for women’s access to higher education but also to change various structures of financing and governance and to professionalize academic life. Indeed, he supported an amazing array of educational causes, ranging from Working Men’s Colleges to Extension Courses.

Clearly, Sidgwick’s influence went beyond Cambridge and beyond education, and his reformist activities were wide-ranging and not tightly tied to party loyalty. As an Academic Liberal’, he tended toward a Millian liberalism, which he did not find fully realized in William Gladstone, with whom he would break over Home Rule for Ireland. In later life, he could vote more as an independent, sometimes with the unfortunate prejudices (and racism) of the new imperialism of the late Victorian era (Schultz 2004, 2005b). He was also a supporter of the Ethical Culture movement, hosting Felix Adler at Cambridge and participating actively in various progressive Ethical Societies. He served on a number of government commissions, and even considered running for office, but preferred to act in the role of public moralist and well- placed political adviser.

Sidgwick’s intellectual circles included an amazing range of influential figures, from George Eliot, William James, and F.W.H. Myers to A.V. Dicey, Sir John Seeley, James Bryce, Gladstone, and, of special importance, John Addington Symonds, the erudite cultural historian, poet, and man of letters who was a pioneer in the serious historical study of same-sex love, and a founding father of what would become gay liberation. Many of Sidgwick’s closest friends, such as Symonds, Roden Noel, and H.G. Dakyns, were devoted to the celebration of same-sex love on an ancient Greek or Hellenic model (Dowling 1997; Schultz 2004). Moreover, Sidgwick’s sister Minnie has recently emerged as an important exemplar of Victorian/Edwardian same-sex practices (Schultz 2004; Bolt 2011), despite her life as the wife of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 to 1896.

But of course, Sidgwick’s circles, especially his Cambridge circles, also included such influential economic thinkers as Henry Fawcett, John Neville Keynes (and later his famous son, John Maynard), Herbert Foxwell,

A.C. Pigou, and, especially, Alfred Marshall. He was unquestionably a central figure in the early ‘Cambridge School’ of economics, particularly after the 1883 appearance of his The Principles of Political Economy, though he regularly published works in this field from the late 1870s on. In 1885, he was elected president of the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Association; he also contributed a number of important pieces to the first Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy, advised his University on financial policy, and occasionally appeared as an expert witness for various government committees investigating questions of economic policy (he developed considerable expertise devising intricate taxation schemes).

Sidgwick’s interest in economics and political economy was long-standing, dating back to his undergraduate years, when he was profoundly influenced by the work of Mill. ‘Mill’s influence’, he explained, led him ‘as a matter of duty’ to ‘study political economy thoroughly, and give no little thought to practical questions, social and political’ (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906: 36). In the early 1860s, he was absorbed in the study of Mill’s classic work, Principles of Political Economy, and much influenced by Mill’s Cambridge disciple Fawcett, the blind political economist. Sidgwick’s work as an academic political economist and policy adviser put him in touch with many of the leading economists of the day—not only his Cambridge colleagues but also such figures as Walras, Wicksteed, Senior, Cairnes, Edgeworth, and Jevons. He was even familiar with the work of Karl Marx, at a time when scarcely any trained economists (except Marshall) even knew who Marx was.

Moreover, he was long and intimately involved with the work of the Cambridge Charity Organization Society, which worked independently to provide outdoor poor relief (as against the indoor relief of the poorhouses created by the Poor Laws of 1834) in cases where it was deemed appropriate. In that capacity, Sidgwick developed both a robust sense of the facts of poverty and the sophisticated, eclectic theoretical approach to the issue of poor relief, this being evident in his introduction to P.F. Aschrott’s The English Poor Law System, in which he wrote: ^[1]

movement in either direction we require a full and intimate knowledge of the actual working of the poor law, which must necessarily be materially affected by any such movement (Sidgwick 1888: viii).

Regarding both his economics and his ethics, it is a mistake to suppose that Sidgwick was a sterile academic theorist hostile to empirical inquiry and removed from the world of practical experience. He appreciated the value of both analytical/deductive and historical/inductive approaches to economic and political theory.

Sidgwick died, from cancer, on 28 August 1900, and during the first half of the twentieth century, his reputation faded, in part thanks to the growing influence of his students and fellow Apostles, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, commonly regarded as the founders of analytical philosophy (Schultz 2004). But since the 1970s especially, interest in his work has revived, and he has often been celebrated as the most philosophically astute of the great classical, nineteenth-century utilitarians, and as a model of academic ethical philosophizing, given the careful, systematic, critical comparison of competing ethical theories through which he develops the utilitarian arguments. There is a frequently quoted remark by C.D. Broad, one of Sidgwick’s successors to the Knightbridge Chair at Cambridge, that runs, ‘Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics seems to me to be on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has ever been written, and to be one of the English philosophical classics’ (Broad 1930: 143). In recent years, Broad’s claim has been endorsed and elaborated by such prominent philosophers as Derek Parfit, in his epochal On What Matters:

In the Methods, as Broad claims, ‘almost all the main problems of ethics are discussed with extreme acuteness’. And Sidgwick gets very many things right.

He gives the best critical accounts of three of the main subjects in ancient and modern ethics: hedonism, egoism, and consequentialism. And in the longest of his book’s four parts, he also gives the best critical account of pluralistic non- consequentialist common sense morality. Though Sidgwick makes mistakes... he does not, I believe, make many. These facts make Sidgwick’s Methods the book that it would be best for everyone interested in ethics to read, remember, and be able to assume that others have read (Parfit 2011: volume 1: xl).

There is clearly a great deal of Sidgwick in Parfit’s claim that we have good, irreducible normative reasons to act in certain ways and desire certain things— his case for a nonreductive and nonnaturalistic but nonmetaphysical and nonontological form of cognitive intuitionism or rationalism. But the effort to ground something closer to Sidgwick’s favored hedonistic utilitarianism on such a metaethical ground is given better expression in Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick & Contemporary Ethics:

[W]e have followed the main lines of Sidgwick’s thinking about ethics, and tested his views both against our own reasoning and against the best of the vast body of recent and current philosophical writing on the topics he addresses. The overarching question we have sought to answer is whether Sidgwick’s form of utilitarianism can be defended. In most respects we believe it can be (de Lazari- Radek and Singer 2014: 364).

The brilliant reconstructive efforts of Parfit and de Lazari-Radek and Singer are surely vitally important for an informed appreciation of both Sidgwick’s philosophical ethics and his economics. Yet even so, if Sidgwick is reduced strictly to such terms, much is missed. Again, his worldview was deeply colored by Cloughian and Tennysonian religious anxieties, and his attitude was more pervasively and genuine agnostic, religiously and philosophically, than his recent academic philosophical reception would suggest. One finds in his life and work a number of paradoxes and surprises, many of which are especially relevant for grasping his economic views.

[1] conceive, however, that few persons of experience in England would regard itas within the limits of a probable forecast of the future that either self-help,voluntary or compulsory, or private charity, however systematized andsupervised, should enable us to dispense with poor relief obtained from taxes.For a long time to come, at any rate, we shall have to work with a combinationof all three methods. But it seems by no means unlikely that either or both ofthe former methods may be considerably extended; and in order to judge of any