Henry Sidgwick - Works

Works

Part of a series on
Utilitarianism
Predecessors Epicurus
David Hume
Claude Adrien Helvétius
William Godwin
Francis Hutcheson
Key people Jeremy Bentham
John Stuart Mill
Henry Sidgwick
Richard Mervyn Hare
Peter Singer
Types of utilitarianism Preference · Rule · Act
Two-level · Total · Average
Negative · Hedonism
Enlightened self-interest
Key concepts Pain · Suffering · Pleasure
Utility · Happiness · Eudaimonia
Consequentialism · Felicific calculus
Problems Mere addition paradox
Paradox of hedonism
Utility monster
Related topics Rational choice theory
Game theory
Social choice
Neoclassical economics
Politics portal

He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, and was a member of the Metaphysical Society. Prominently, he took in promoting the higher education of women. He helped to start the higher local examinations for women, and the lectures held at Cambridge in preparation for these. It was at his suggestion and with his help that Anne Clough opened a house of residence for students, which developed into Newnham College, Cambridge. When, in 1880, the North Hall was added, Sidgwick, who in 1876 had married Eleanor Mildred Balfour (sister of A. J. Balfour), lived there for two years. After Clough's death in 1892 Mrs Sidgwick became principal of the college, and she and her husband lived there for the rest of his life. During this whole period Sidgwick took the deepest interest in the welfare of the college. In British politics he was a liberal, and became a Liberal Unionist (a party that later effectively merged with the Conservative party) in 1886. Early in 1900 he was forced by ill-health to resign his professorship, and died a few months later.

Sidgwick was a famous teacher. He treated his pupils as fellow students. He was deeply interested in psychical phenomena, but his energies were primarily devoted to the study of religion and philosophy. Brought up in the Church of England, he drifted away from orthodox Christianity, and as early as 1862 he described himself as a theist, independent from established religion. For the rest of his life, though he regarded Christianity as "indispensable and irreplaceable – looking at it from a sociological point of view," he found himself unable to return to it as a religion.

In political economy he was a utilitarian on the lines of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. His work was characterized by its careful investigation of first principles, as in his distinction of positive and normative reasoning, and by critical analysis, not always constructive. His influence was such that for example Alfred Marshall, founder of the Cambridge School of economics, would describe him as his "spiritual mother and father." In philosophy he devoted himself to ethics, and especially to the examination of the ultimate intuitive principles of conduct and the problem of free will. He adopted a position which may be described as ethical hedonism, according to which the criterion of goodness in any given action is that it produces the greatest possible amount of pleasure. This hedonism, however, is not confined to the self (egoistic), but involves a due regard to the pleasure of others, and is, therefore, distinguished further as universalistic. Lastly, Sidgwick returns to the principle that no man should act so as to destroy his own happiness. However, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes (in After Virtue, 2007), Sidgwick reluctantly had to confess that he had gone in search for Cosmos and found only Chaos, i.e., he could find no rational foundation to basic moral beliefs; where he had hoped to find unity, he could only locate heterogeneity.

See also the Palm Sunday Case.

Read more about this topic:  Henry Sidgwick

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.
    Jean Genet (1910–1986)

    Now they express
    All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
    All actions done in patient hopelessness,
    All that ignores the silences of death,
    Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
    All that grows old,
    Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    The appetite of workers works for them; their hunger urges them on.
    Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 16:26.