Henry Sidgwick

1838-1900 · English · Ethics, Metaethics, Political Philosophy

The Cosmos of Duty is thus really reduced to a Chaos.

Henry Sidgwick wrote what C.D. Broad called, on the whole, the best book on moral theory ever written — The Methods of Ethics (1874) — and he wrote it against his own hopes. He wanted ethics to be a rational science, as certain in its foundations as arithmetic. He spent the book testing the three great "methods" by which people actually reason about what they ought to do: egoism (seek your own greatest happiness), intuitionism (follow the moral rules that common sense holds self-evident), and utilitarianism (promote the greatest happiness of all). His procedure was scrupulous to a fault — he…

Topics Henry Sidgwick addresses

• the methods of ethics
• rational egoism
• universalistic hedonism
• utilitarianism
• intuitionism
• the dualism of practical reason
• the self-evident axioms
• philosophical intuitionism
• the axiom of justice
• the axiom of prudence
• the axiom of rational benevolence
• the point of view of the universe
• ethical hedonism
• psychological hedonism
• the paradox of hedonism
• pleasure as the ultimate good
• common-sense morality
• unconscious utilitarianism
• the systematization of common sense
• esoteric morality
• government-house utilitarianism
• the reconciliation of methods
• the conditions of a self-evident intuition
• impartiality and the good of all

Converse with Henry Sidgwick on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Henry Sidgwick's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.