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Henry Sidgwick's Practical Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Sissela Bok
Sissela Bok*
Affiliation:
Harward Center for Population and Development Studies, [email protected]
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Abstract

How practical can ethics be? To what extent is it possible to put ethics ‘to the use of life’, in the words of Samuel Johnson? In Practical Ethics, Henry Sidgwick offers the distillation of a lifetime of reflection on how to relate moral theory and practice. This book provides both a model and a cautionary example. Its lucid, urbane, and broad-gauged approach to practical moral issues is exemplary; but its very lucidity also exposes the moral risks in Sidgwick's attempt to isolate deliberation about these issues from fundamental moral premises, including the interlocking intuitionist, utilitarian, and paternalist premises buttressing his conclusions about legitimate practices of violence and deceit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , November 2000 , pp. 361 - 378
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

1 I draw, in this article, on my introduction to the reissue of Sidgwick's, Henry Practical Ethics: A Collection of Essays, New York, 1998 [1898], pp. v–xixGoogle Scholar.

2 Johnson, Samuel, The Rambler, New York, 1957 [1750], p. 31 Google Scholar.

3 Long ignored in ethics courses, textbooks, and discussions in the growing field of practical ethics, this book has also gone unmentioned by Peter Singer and other authors of later books with the very same title: Samuels, Herbert, Practical Ethics, London, 1935 Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics Cambridge, 1979, 2nd edn., 1993Google Scholar; Shea, Gordon, Practical Ethics, New York, 1988.Google Scholar Just as these authors may well not have known of Sidgwick's book with the same title as theirs, so he himself may not have known of a work preceding his, by the German theologian and philosopher Wette, Wilhelm de, entitled Human Life; or Practical Ethics, Boston, 1856 Google Scholar.

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21 Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, London, 1925 (1845), p. 568 Google Scholar. In his essay ‘Bentham’ Mill writes: ‘As mankind are much more nearly of one nature, than of one opinion about their own nature, they are more easily brought to agree in their intermediate principles-vera ilia et media axiomata, as Bacon says-than in their first principles.‘ See Mill, John Stuart, ‘Bentham’, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill: Ethical, Political, and Religious, ed. Cohen, M., New York, 1961, pp. 1–53 Google Scholar.

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24 Ibid.

25 I have discussed values thus broadly shared in Common Values, Columbia, Missouri, 1996.

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29 Practical Ethics, pp. 49, 58.

30 Practical Ethics, p. 58, presumably referring to the conventions enacted at Geneva in 1864.

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33 Practical Ethics, p. 57.

34 Ibid., p. 36. Sidgwick's endorsement of Machiavelli's near-limitless claim to justify violence goes considerably beyond the comment by John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971, p. 26, that for the classical utilitarian, ‘there is no reason in principle why the violation of the liberty of a few might not be made right by the greater good shared by the many”.

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51 In preparing this article, I have benefited from reading the other articles on Sidgwick in this issue, and am especially grateful for comments and suggestions by Bart Schultz, Roger Crisp, and Robert Shaver.