Kantian and Sidgwickian Ethics

The Cosmos of Duty Above and the Moral Law Within

Tyler Paytas, Tim Henning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351016971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Immanuel Kant and Henry Sidgwick are towering figures in the history of moral philosophy. Kant's views on ethics continue to be discussed and studied in detail not only in philosophy, but also theology, political science, and legal theory. Meanwhile, Sidgwick is emerging as the philosopher within the utilitarian tradition who merits the same meticulous treatment that Kant receives. As champions of deontology and consequentialism respectively, Kant and Sidgwick disagree on many important issues. However, close examination reveals a surprising amount of consensus on various topics including moral psychology, moral epistemology, and moral theology.

This book presents points of agreement and disagreement in the writings of these two giants of philosophical ethics. The chapters will stimulate discussions among moral theorists and historians of philosophy by applying cutting-edge scholarship on each philosopher to shed light on some of the more perplexing arguments and views of the other, and by uncovering and examining points of agreement between Sidgwick and Kant as possible grounds for greater convergence in contemporary moral philosophy. This is the first full-length volume to investigate Sidgwick and Kant side by side. It will be of major interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy and its history.

Part I
From Theory to Practice

1 Practical Ethics in Sidgwick and Kant

Anthony Skelton

Sidgwick engaged both Kant’s theoretical and his practical philosophy. The effect of the engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy was not insignificant. Sidgwick opined that post-Kantian German metaphysics was “a monstrous mistake,” and that “we must go back to Kant and begin again from him” (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906, 151).¹ Sidgwick found the study of Kant’s metaphysics edifying, declaring “I shall always look on him [Kant] as one of my teachers” (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906, 151; also 159) and that the study of Kant’s theoretical system provides “a most valuable metaphysical education” (1905, 30). He was, however, unwilling to call himself a Kantian in metaphysics (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906, 151).

He described the Critique of Pure Reason as putting forward a “false system” (Sidgwick and Sidgwick 1906, 386) and Kant’s work in the book as “deficient in … self-criticism” (1883, 72). While Kant is, Sidgwick said, “one of the most original, penetrating, ingenious, and laboriously systematic of modern thinkers … he is a profoundly inconsistent thinker, profoundly unaware of his own inconsistency” (1905, 30–31). Because Sidgwick’s work on Kant’s metaphysics focuses mostly on these inconsistencies rather than on building a rival system with Kantian inspiration, it is unsurprising to find it described as “not of the first importance” (Passmore 1975, 195).

Sidgwick’s engagement with Kant’s practical philosophy is, while critical, more central to his main research preoccupations and therefore likely of more enduring interest. He claimed Kant as one of his moral philosophical “masters” (ME xx) and he addresses many of Kant’s most important views in ethics. Sidgwick worked out a comprehensive rival ethical system in which he was clear about what he did and did not accept in Kant’s practical philosophy and why.

Many of Sidgwick’s criticisms of Kant are of lasting value. Sidgwick’s objection that in his ethics Kant unwittingly relies to his peril on two distinct conceptions of freedom, good freedom and neutral freedom, is among the most noteworthy (ME 512).²

One is free on the first conception only when one is motivated to do the right thing because it is the right thing and not because of some desire one has for some end (e.g., KpV 5:78; G 4:446–447).³ But, Sidgwick argues, if one is free only when one acts from duty, one cannot be held responsible for wrong actions since such actions are never done from duty; they always involve motivation by inclination, in which case one is determined by sensible motives and therefore not free.

One is free on the second conception when one has the power to choose right or wrong (e.g., KpV 5:98). Kant requires this kind of freedom, Sidgwick contends, in order to hold agents responsible for wrongdoing. The difficulty, for Kant, is that neutral freedom implies that one is free even when one acts wrongly, and if Kant admits this, he has to agree “the scoundrel must exhibit and express his characteristic self-hood in his transcendental choice of a bad life, as much as the saint does in his transcendental choice of a good one” (ME 516). In this case the “spirit-stirring appeal to the sentiment of Liberty [that Kant gets by connecting freedom and motivation by reason] must be dismissed as idle rhetoric” (ME 516).

Sidgwick’s objection is vexing to Kant’s admirers; accordingly, it has received detailed attention.⁴ Less sustained attention has been paid to Sidgwick’s other interactions with Kant’s ethics. Kant and Sidgwick are noteworthy for having written on both theoretical and practical ethics, making it possible to fruitfully compare and contrast them on a range of ethical issues. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between the two on some issues in practical ethics (broadly understood).

In § I, I outline the main element of Kant’s theoretical ethics that Sidgwick endorsed. In §§ II and III, I outline and adjudicate two of their sharpest disagreements in practical ethics, on the permissibility of lying and on the demands of beneficence. In § IV, I argue that compared to Kant, Sidgwick has a better strategy for dealing with disagreement in practical ethics. §V sums things up.

I

For Sidgwick, claiming someone as a master did not involve hagiography or signal agreement. Of his masters, Mill is perhaps the most prominent. Through Mill, Sidgwick became an adherent of utilitarianism, the view that the sole criterion of morality is the promotion of aggregate happiness (ME xvii; 1998, 8). Sidgwick nevertheless held a dubious opinion of Mill’s work in ethics. In an obituary he wrote for Mill, he remarks that Utilitarianism is “hastily put together, and the system seems incompletely reasoned and even incoherently expounded” (Sidgwick 1873, 193).

Sidgwick was especially dissatisfied with Mill’s proof of utilitarianism. Mill argued that each individual’s happiness is alone good because she desires only it, from which he famously inferred that the sum or aggregate of each individual’s happiness is the only good and therefore what we ought to promote (Mill 1969, 235–239). Sidgwick rightly noted that there is a gap in this argument. From the fact that each individual’s happiness is good it does not follow that the sum of each individual’s happiness is good. This is because no desire for the sum of happiness is present in the aggregate. The gap in Mill’s argument would be closed, on Mill’s own reasoning, only if the aggregate desired its own happiness.

But, Sidgwick complains,

an aggregate of actual desires, each directed towards a different part of the general happiness, does not constitute an actual desire for the general happiness, existing in any individual; and Mill would certainly not contend that a desire which does not exist in any individual can possibly exist in an aggregate of individuals. There being therefore no actual desire … for the general happiness, the proposition that the general happiness is desirable cannot be in this way established.

(ME 388)

Sidgwick disagreed with Mill’s view that one can infer claims about what is valuable from claims about what is desired. The former argued that instead the justification of the claim that happiness is the only good “is properly … reached … by a more indirect mode of reasoning” (ME 389). The manner of reasoning involves, for Sidgwick, appeal to “intuitive judgment after due consideration” and “a comprehensive comparison of the ordinary judgements of mankind” (ME 400). The move from the claim that each individual’s happiness is good to the claim that the happiness of the aggregate is good and therefore what we ought to promote is justified, on Sidgwick’s view, only by appeal to the intuitively known self-evident proposition that one ought to aim at good generally not merely at a particular part of it, giving equal value to equal quantities of happiness (ME 382).⁵ Sidgwick called this the axiom or principle of rational benevolence.⁶

Although Sidgwick appealed to intuition to justify utilitarianism, and so rejected Mill’s empiricism, his appeal did not allay his most pressing concern. He was struck by the difficulty of reconciling duty and self-interest. He fell under the sway of another master, Joseph Butler. Sidgwick rejected the anti-utilitarian elements of Butler’s theory of virtue and vice, thinking that together with a great many other elements of common-sense morality these could be incorporated into utilitarianism (ME xx, 423–459, 496). But he agreed with Butler in holding that there is a self-standing obligation to promote one’s own happiness that competes with other rational demands (ME 7, 119). In some cases, this obligation conflicted in practice with utilitarianism and nothing he read in Mill convinced him of the rationality of sacrificing one’s own happiness in order to promote the aggregate’s happiness.⁷ He was stuck with a dualism of practical reason.

Sidgwick turned to Kant, one of his other masters, for inspiration. He agreed with Kant that there are categorical requirements of reason applying to rational agents irrespective of their desires (ME 7, 35; G 4:414–416). He appears to agree with Kant that the recognition that some act is right arouses in rational agents a motivation to do it (ME 34; KpV 5:47ff.). Sidgwick was, he said, especially “impressed with the truth and importance of… [Kant’s] fundamental [categorical imperative] principle:—Act from a principle or maxim that you can will to be a universal law” (ME xix; italics in original; also 210; G 4:402, 421, 437; KpV 5:69–70).

Sidgwick was not that impressed, however. He dissents from Kant’s principle in two main ways. First, he does not think Kant’s maxim is sufficient to cover the whole of morality. Thinking that “all particular rules of duty can be deduced from… [this] one fundamental rule … appears to me an error analogous to that of supposing that Formal Logic supplies a complete criterion of truth” (ME 209–210; also xix). The main function of this fundamental rule is to

protect ourselves against the danger which besets the conscience, of being warped and perverted by strong desire, so that we too easily think that we ought to do what we very much wish to do. For if we ask ourselves whether we believe that any similar person in similar circumstances ought to perform the contemplated action, the question will often disperse the false appearance of rightness which our strong inclination has given to it.

(ME 209; also 319, 380)⁸

Second, Sidgwick says he is keen on the idea that “whatever is right for me must be right for all persons in similar circumstances” (ME xix; also 209, 318). But he concedes that he does not accept this truth in the “precise form in which he [Kant] stated it” (ME 210n2; also 486). What he accepts is in fact a very slim principle:

it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are different individuals, and without there being any difference between the natures or circumstances of the two which can he stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment.

(ME 380; also 209, 496)

He takes this to be self-evident (ME 380; also 318). The practical upshot is that “an act, if right for any individual, must be right on general grounds … for some class of persons” (ME 486; italics in original).

Sidgwick had, of course, turned to Kant for help in trying to deal with the fact that duty and self-interest are in practice often not coincident. As in the case of Mill, and unsurprisingly, the principle Sidgwick agreed to in Kant did not, Sidgwick felt, “meet” the difficulty that perplexed him (ME xx): “it did not settle finally the subordination of Self-Interest to Duty” (ME xix).

On Sidgwick’s reckoning the egoist could easily will his own principle as a universal law for all rational beings:

He might say, “I quite admit that when the painful necessity comes for another man to choose between his own happiness and the general happiness, he must as a reasonable being prefer his own, i.e. it is right for him to do this on my principle. No doubt, as I probably do not sympathise with him in particular any more than with any other persons, I as a disengaged spectator should like him to sacrifice himself to the general good: but I do not expect him to do it, any more than I should do it myself in his place.”

(ME xx)⁹

Moreover, Sidgwick’s qualifications of Kant’s “truth” led to quite significant differences in many of their most important practical moral conclusions. The next two sections outline two of the sharpest of those disagreements.

II

Kant and Sidgwick disagree sharply about the permissibility of lying. Kant holds that lying is always wrong because, on his own understanding of his principle, maxims on which, say, one makes statements one knows to be false in order to get oneself out of a jam, cannot be willed as universal laws (G 4:402–403, 4:422; KpV 5:69). One cannot will that one lie in order to convince someone to lend one money when there is no other way to get it. According to Kant, such a maxim is self-contradictory, for it is impossible to achieve the purpose of getting oneself out of a jam by lying if it is a universal law of nature that people lie in such cases.

Sidgwick has a laxer approach to lying (ME 315–316, 448). He maintains that even when you cannot “Act as though the maxim of your action were to become a universal law of nature,” it does not follow that your action is wrong (ME 318). It might be the case that in one’s circumstances one’s maxim is not (or will not be) universally accepted, making it possible for one to produce more benefit by doing what cannot be willed as a universal law of nature. Sidgwick notes that it may appear that lying is ruled out by the “ethical axiom” that “what is right for me must be right for ‘all persons under similar conditions’ ” (ME 318). But if the situation is such that one’s maxim is not or will not be universally adopted and one’s lie is all told beneficial, then it is permissible to lie by the criterion.

Kant is, of course, unlikely to be moved by this (KpV 5:69–70). Sidgwick’s best tack is to point out that common sense holds that it is permiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on References
• Introduction
• Part I From Theory to Practice
• Part II Metaethics
• Part III Moral Epistemology
• Part IV Freedom of Will
• Part V Ultimate Ends
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index