Sentiment & Utility

Six steps through the British answer to Glaucon: that morality springs from fellow-feeling, and its whole content is the impartial promotion of happiness — and the terrible cases that test it.

A course on the thought of Ethics.

Course outline

1. The Cool English Answer — The program's third answer to Glaucon, framed: the British moralists cool the question down, ground morals not in reason or the Forms but in a feeling every human being has — fellow-feeling — and…
2. No Ought From Is — Hume takes the lectern to lay the foundation: reason alone cannot move us or ground morality; you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; moral distinctions are felt, not inferred. And his own Ring of…
3. The Man Within the Breast — Adam Smith takes the lectern to solve Hume's problem: how partial, wavering sympathy becomes an impartial standard. The impartial spectator — the man within the breast — and the famous test of our…
4. The Arithmetic of Happiness — Bentham takes the lectern and strips the tradition to its engine: nature has placed us under pleasure and pain; the right act is the one that produces the most happiness; and this can be MEASURED.…
5. Higher Pleasures & the Cost of Counting — Mill saves the doctrine from the pigsty — pleasures differ in quality, and the competent judge decides — and offers his proof. Then the tradition meets its executioners: framing the innocent, the…
6. The Cosmos Reduced to a Chaos — Sidgwick takes the lectern for the tradition's most rigorous reckoning — and its most honest defeat. The attempt to ground utilitarianism on self-evident axioms, the discovery that egoism is just as…

Part of the Symposium course library.