When Henry Sidgwick died, in the last year of the nineteenth century, he was widely thought to be the preeminent moral philosopher of his age. Sidgwick himself was deeply influenced by earlier utilitarian thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, but he took utilitarian ethics to an unrivaled level of sophistication. Discussion around his work, especially his magisterial The Methods of Ethics (first published in 1874), continued for about a decade after his death, by which time the focus in utilitarian ethics had shifted onto G.E. Moore. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, there were signs of renewed interest in Sidgwick, and he significantly shaped the moral and political philosophy of the latter half of that century through his influence on John Rawls, Derek Parfit, and others. Sidgwick’s main contribution to philosophy was, without doubt, the Methods, which went through several editions. Its publication marked an important move away from the negative tone of much work on utilitarianism in the period, written in response to J.S. Mill’s widely read essay Utilitarianism, published in book form in 1863 (of course, Mill had his defenders). The last significant edition of the Methods was the seventh (1907), and, because that is now the standard edition, it will be my primary text throughout this chapter. But it should be remembered that Sidgwick also wrote several important essays in ethics and a classic history of ethics. I shall begin with an examination of Sidgwick’s views on the nature of philosophical ethics, before moving onto his hedonistic theory of well-being and his intuitionist moral epistemology. I shall then discuss his version of utilitarianism and its relation, as Sidgwick saw it, to the common-sense morality of his day. It is misleading to describe Sidgwick as an unqualified utilitarian, since he remained undecided between utilitarianism (or “universalistic hedonism”) and egoism (or “individualistic hedonism”). That topic – his so-called “dualism of practical reason” – will be discussed in my final section.
