Ethics and Economics

Most accounts of Sidgwick’s influence in the history of economics do seek to frame his political economy in the context of the ethical claims of the Methods, and it is consequently important to address that work.

The revival of interest in the Methods later in the twentieth century owed much to J.B. Schneewind’s Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Schneewind 1977). Schneewind underscored Sidgwick’s debts to Kant, Joseph Butler, Samuel Clarke, and Aristotle, and to the intuitionism of such Cambridge moralists as F.D. Maurice, John Grote, and William Whewell, the Master of Trinity College when Sidgwick was an undergraduate there. This historical contextualizing of Sidgwick compellingly demonstrated just how much Sidgwick had appropriated from nonutilitarian sources and how the Methods was not meant to be primarily a defense of utilitarianism, but an impartial inquiry into the merits of rival ‘methods’ for determining what it is right to do, of the leading ethical contenders, at that particular historical juncture. Moreover, Schneewind rightly recognized that like the Cambridge moralists, Sidgwick was trying to find in moral experience some basis for religious belief, even if he was much less optimistic about his results.

Sidgwick primarily focused on three methods of ethics—rational egoism (one ought to promote one’s own greatest good), rational benevolence or utilitarianism (one ought to promote the greatest good of all), and commonsense or intuitional morality, which encompasses such familiar duties as promisekeeping and truth-telling, and the more refined versions of these found in the works of such philosophers as Whewell, author of the Elements of Morality (1845) and Mill’s great rival. Much of the Methods attempts to show not that commonsense morality is altogether wrong or misguided but only that it is too vague, rough, inconsistent, and incomplete, depending on utilitarian calculations to refine and clarify its rules, resolve moral dilemmas, and cast it in a more systematic, scientific form. For Sidgwick, it seemed clear on reflection that there were utilitarian exceptions to the rule of, for example, veracity, such that it would be ethically allowable to ‘speak falsely to an invalid’ (Sidgwick 1907: 316) to avoid a fatal shock. But just what degree of nonfatal shock veracity might demand also remains obscure without appeal to utilitarian considerations. The same holds for benevolence, justice, good faith, and other duties—so much so that in the end ‘the Utilitarian estimate of consequences not only supports broadly the current moral rules, but also sustains their generally received limitations and qualifications’ (ibid.: 425). In cases of

marked diversity of moral opinion on any point, in the same age and country, we commonly find manifest and impressive utilitarian reasons on both sides: and...the remarkable discrepancies found in comparing the moral codes of different ages and countries are for the most part strikingly correlated to differences in the effects of actions on happiness, or in men’s foresight of, or concern for, such effects (ibid.: 425—426).

Given the way in which commonsense morality initially presents its precepts as self-evident, the task, for Sidgwick, takes the form of demonstrating that those precepts are only apparently—not truly—self-evident. As he put it to the intuitionist Henry Calderwood, if ^[1]

they saw those of Equity and Rational Benevolence (Sidgwick quoted in Schultz

et al. 1999: 565).

Genuinely self-evident claims, on Sidgwick’s account, must be (1) clear and precise, (2) able to withstand careful critical reflection, (3) consistent and coherent with each other, and (4) capable of generating a genuine consensus of experts, since serious disagreement among experts would necessarily diminish our confidence in the apparently self-evident maxim in question. These criteria might be thought of, Sidgwick sometimes suggests, as criteria for reducing the risk of error, rather than for establishing final truth. In any event, his epistemological or ‘philosophical’ intuitionism (not to be confused with the intuitional morality of commonsense) is highly fallibilistic and only Cartesian in a limited sense.

The sustained examination of commonsense or intuitional morality takes one from consideration of particular acts to commonsense duties to this more refined intuitionism, where the better axioms are more abstract than immediate guides to action: that the good of one is no more important than the good of another, that future good is as important as present good, that it is right to promote the good generally, and that what is right for one must be right for anyone similarly circumstanced. As that last suggests, although Sidgwick rejected Kantian, intuitionist, and idealist appeals to free will, he did not dismiss Kantianism in toto but instead argued that the idea of universalizability was consistent with utilitarian (or egoist) content.

In this way, Sidgwick’s intuitionism is indeed the intellectual ancestor of Parfit’s ‘non-metaphysical non-naturalist cognitivism’, recognizing objective, value-based reasons for acting and desiring (Parfit 2011). For both, the notion of ‘right’ or ‘ought’ is sui generis, normative all the way down, rather than reducible to any natural property or properties, and this without resort to subjective, emotive, or expressive accounts of ethical ‘truth’, since these all miss the ways in which ethical judgments are simply not about one’s psychological states or the expression of them, but concern what is ‘really right’ for all minds. Sidgwick also rejected not only the epistemology of the earlier utilitarians, but their philosophical psychology as well, agreeing with Joseph Butler that ‘psychological egoism’ (that people were by nature driven exclusively by self-interest) was simply false.

Even Sidgwick’s hedonistic interpretation of ultimate good as pleasurable consciousness was distanced from that of his utilitarian predecessors. That pleasurable consciousness is the ultimate good is, he urged, an i nformative, non-tautological claim—one can after all question whether pleasurable consciousness really is good, and it takes some argument to show that the hedonistic standard is better than excellence, perfection, or virtue at sorting out and weighing one good against another. One must ask, say, whether the life of virtue or excellence would still recommend itself if it were invariably conjoined to extreme pain (Crisp 2011: 26-44). For all that, Sidgwick’s subtle hedonistic account of pleasurable or desirable consciousness did make it patently clear how difficult yet unavoidable interpersonal comparisons of utility could be. This conception would form the basis for Edgeworth’s attempted ‘hedonometry’, or quantification of hedonism, revived in recent years by Kahneman and others (Edgeworth 1881 [2003]; Kahneman 2013).

Although Sidgwick sided with hedonism as the best account of the Good on balance, he nonetheless brought out many acute difficulties with the felicific calculus—perhaps, most importantly, the problems with maximizing happiness when not dealing with a fixed population, such that ‘average’ and ‘total’ utility calculations might diverge, which would raise serious difficulties for population policies regarding future generations. Moreover, he recognized, not only that the general happiness might ‘be more satisfactorily attained if men frequently act from other motives than pure universal philanthropy’ (Sidgwick 1907: 413), but also how a consistent utilitarianism might take a still more indirect, even self-effacing, form, allowing at the extreme the justifiability of a wholly esoteric morality, such that the utilitarian standard would be best met by having most, perhaps even all, people thinking and acting in terms of different ethical principles, for example, religious or commonsense ones. Bernard Williams (1982) suggested that Sidgwick, unlike other act utilitarians, might on this basis develop a consistent ‘two level’ system of moral thinking—that is, he might be a ‘Government House’ utilitarian who would have the colonial rulers reasoning by the utilitarian method, but the colonized kept to a more simplistic method, such as commonsense morality. No doubt Sidgwick would have agreed with de Lazari-Radek and Singer (2014) in thinking that an esoteric morality would in all likelihood only be justifiable in a less extreme form, given all the good that self-conscious act utilitarians have contributed to the world. Still, in some passages of his ethical and political work, he does make it all too clear that he was, like his times, too apt to think in terms of ‘inferior races’ needing the beneficent influence of European civilization (Schultz 2004: 509-668).

Just where Sidgwick ultimately came down on the value of commonsense morality, practically and epistemologically, has been a matter of considerable controversy. In practice, he often did his best to treat commonsense sympathetically, and to avoid upsetting the ethical and religious beliefs of ordinary people, persuaded that humanity had not yet evolved to the point where it could happily do without these—all the while steadily working to initiate progressive changes. The same perspective informed his economic thinking.

Powerful as Sidgwick’s rehabilitation of utilitarianism surely was, he nonetheless felt that he had failed to give it a sound intuitional grounding because the method of rational egoism could not ultimately be reconciled with the other apparently self-evident principles grounding utilitarianism. Thus, as he put it in ‘Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies’, along with

(a) a fundamental moral conviction that I ought to sacrifice my own happiness, if by so doing I can increase the happiness of others to a greater extent than I diminish my own, I find also (b) a conviction—which it would be paradoxical to call ‘moral’, but which is none the less fundamental—that it would be irrational to sacrifice any portion of my own happiness unless the sacrifice is to be somehow at some time compensated by an equivalent addition to my own happiness (Schultz et al. 1999: 483).

Each of these convictions has as much clarity and certainty ‘as the process of introspective can give’ and each also finds wide assent ‘in the common sense of mankind’ (ibid.). As the early editions of the Methods put it:

For, if we find an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct, we seem forced to the conclusion that they were not really intuitions after all, and that the apparently intuitive operation of the Practical Reason is essentially illusory. Therefore it is.. .a matter of life and death to the Practical Reason that this premise should be somehow obtained (Sidgwick 1877: 468—469).

A theistic principle of cosmic justice, perhaps achieved in the afterlife, afforded the best chance of harmonizing own good and the good of others, but that, of course, was precisely what Sidgwick’s other inquiries had failed to yield.

There is surely something decidedly peculiar in the way that arguably the greatest work in the utilitarian tradition elaborately revises, refines, and reconciles utilitarianism with intuitional morality only to knock it apart at the end, leaving it much clarified but nonetheless as unjustified as it had been in Mill’s work. Many of Sidgwick’s admirers find him a bit strange on the topic of the dualism, even while allowing that he was on to something important. As Parfit explained in his reformulation of the key point:

When one of our two possible acts would make things go in some way that would be impartially better, but the other act would make things go better either for ourselves or for those to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to act in either of these two ways (Parfit 2011, volume 1: 137).

But Sidgwick was more given to entertaining the bleaker possibilities suggested by the dualism, and he was forever haunted by his inability to fully defend a unitary position. For him, the dualism was no mere philosophical representation of collective action problems, but rather a cosmic calamity, suggesting that reason is an illusion and the Universe absurd.

In a deep sense, Sidgwick wanted it all—the strength of utilitarianism and the strength of egoism harmonized, such that doing the right thing would always comport rather than conflict with self-interest well understood, and the norms of a sensible commonsense morality on which people would often act would have that double-barrelled justification (Edgeworth 1877 [2003]; Schultz 2004). Small wonder that he was haunted by his failures.

• [1] ask myself whether I see clearly and distinctly the self-evidence of any particular maxims of duty, as I see that of the formal principles ‘that what is right forme must be right for all persons in precisely similar circumstances’ and ‘that Iought to prefer the greater good of another to my own lesser good’: I have nodoubt whatever that I do not. However, prior to undergoing the reflective process described in the Methods, I could not always have made this distinction; andI believe that the majority of moral persons do not make it: most ‘plain men’would probably say, at any rate on the first consideration of the matter, that theysaw the obligations of Veracity and Good Faith as clearly and immediately as