ABSTRACT
A good case can be made for regarding Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics as the most important work on moral philosophy to be published in English in the nineteenth century. A text of great richness, it has illuminating things to say on almost all the major issues of theoretical ethics: the nature of motivation, the justification of first principles, the problem of egoism, the reality of benevolence, justice, the virtues, the meaning of happiness and the shape of the good life for man. No attempt will be made here to summarise more than a few of Sidgwick’s arguments and conclusions; readers who wish for a more detailed survey of his ideas may consult J.B.Schneewind’s excellent study Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1977). Sidgwick (1838-1900) published The Methods of Ethics in 1874, one year after Mill’s death and nine before his own appointment as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge; the book went through several extensively revised editions in his lifetime. An exceptionally careful and fair-minded thinker, Sidgwick was influenced by several schools of moral thought without becoming a partisan of any. But his final if somewhat tentative position is a utilitarian one, though it depends on an intuitional account of moral knowledge which would have disconcerted Bentham and J.S.Mill.
