Henry Sidgwick Quotes on Virtue
Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874) gave late nineteenth-century moral philosophy its most rigorous comparative analysis of the three principal methods through which the cultivated moral consciousness pursues its ends: egoism, utilitarian benevolence, and the dogmatic intuitionism of common-sense morality. The central conclusion — the famous dualism of practical reason — is that the rational claims of egoism and universal benevolence cannot be reconciled within the resources of the moral consciousness alone, and the corresponding analysis of common-sense moral intuitions shows that they tacitly converge on utilitarian considerations under philosophical refinement. The framework, integrating the Cambridge moral-philosophical tradition with the utilitarianism of Mill, shaped the subsequent development of analytic moral philosophy through Moore, Ross, and the contemporary metaethical and normative-ethical traditions.
Quotes
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“The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the universe, than the good of any other.”
Book 3, chapter 13, section 3 (7th ed., 1907) -
Attributed to Henry Sidgwick:
“I see no escape from the conclusion that we ought to be guided by ultimate good, which is happiness.”
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Attributed to Henry Sidgwick:
“Common sense morality is a body of judgements that has grown up in society without systematic reflection.”
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Attributed to Henry Sidgwick:
“Reason supplies us with no premise from which to deduce that another's good ought to be the end of my action; we must take it as a self-evident principle.”
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Attributed to Henry Sidgwick:
“The object of ethical inquiry is to attain systematic and precise general knowledge of what ought to be.”
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Attributed to Henry Sidgwick:
“It is reasonable to take as one's ultimate end one's own greatest good and equally reasonable to take as one's ultimate end the greatest good of all; this is the dualism of practical reason.”
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“Each person is morally obliged to regard the good of anyone else as much as his own good, except when he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him.”
Book 3, chapter 13, section 3 (7th ed., 1907) -
“it is reasonable for a Utilitarian to praise any conduct more felicific in its tendency than what an average man would do under the given circumstances :—being aware of course that the limit down to which praiseworthiness extends must be relative to the particular state of moral progress reached by mankind generally in his age and country; and that it is desirable to make continual efforts to elevate this standard.”
Book 4, chapter 5, section 3 (7th ed., 1907)