# Inbox Questions for him: - What methods should we use for thinking about ethics? - What is this "point of view of the universe"? People related to him: - Point of view of the Universe Singer book - Crisp Sidgwick book - Tom Hurka On Sidgwick Longlist: - Bernard Williams: an essay on Sidgwick included in The Sense of the Past, and in ‘The Primacy of Dispositions’ and ‘The Structure of Hare’s Theory’ in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sidgwick/ - [The Methods of Ethics](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46743/46743-h/46743-h.htm) - Alt: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/sidgwick1874.pdf - The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics Roger Crisp - A bunch of other stuff from [[=Roger Crisp]] - Hurka on Sidgwick. - SEP on "reason in philosophy"? / meta philosophy / method ? - Tyelr recommends: Bart Schulz’s [Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521829674/qid=1102174133/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8159096-1074401?v=glance&s=books/marginalrevol-20) - Singer, P. & de Lazari-Radek, K. (2014). [_The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics_](https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603695.001.0001/acprof-9780199603695). Oxford: Oxford University Press. - On What Matters - vol 2? Parts 1 & 6? - Utilitarianism VSI by singer and radek - [Henry Sidgwick](http://henrysidgwick.com/biography.eng.html) on henrysidgwick.com - joe cm on aliénation reread - Singer “Ethics and Intuitions,” - Jonathan Ree: Ethics, utilitarianism and positive boredom.pdf - ’HS, Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, publishedposthumously (London:Macmillan, 1902), 13 - N and the morality critics, Leiter - N's critique of utilitarianism https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717848 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism - Roger Crisp Sidgwick on virtue https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2014-1-page-21.htm - Parfit on Objectivity and “The Profoundest Problem of Ethics” Intuition and the Morality of Common Sense Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek Peter Singer DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603695.003.0003 Sidgwick distinguished three different stages of intuitionism: perceptional intuitionism, common sense morality, and philosophical intuitionism. His examination of the morality of common sense is especially noteworthy and is here discussed using the examples of benevolence and truth-telling. Sidgwick concluded that only philosophical intuitionism constitutes a sufficiently precise method of ethics. This chapter considers all three forms of intuitionism and their contemporary or recent exponents. Particularism, as espoused by Dancy, is today the leading form of perceptional intuitionism, while Ross, Gert, and Bok are taken as defenders of the morality of common sense. The chapter defends Sidgwick’s view that neither perceptional intuitionism nor the morality of common sense is philosophically adequate. Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek Peter Singer DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0013 Parfit, like Sidgwick, believes that there are objective normative reasons. Yet Sidgwick found himself unable, in The Methods of Ethics, to put ethics on a rational basis. Reason points, he thought, in two distinct directions: we have reason to act from universal benevolence, which leads to utilitarianism, and we have reason to act from self-interest, which leads to egoism. Given that utilitarianism and egoism fail to coincide, this leads to a “dualism of practical reason.” Sidgwick describes this as “the profoundest problem of ethics.” It poses a problem for defenders of the claim that some ethical judgments are based on reason and therefore objectively true. In our view, Parfit’s response does not fully resolve Sidgwick’s problem. We argue that it can be resolved by an evolutionary debunking argument, which has the additional advantage of showing how objectivists can overcome Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma.” Singer on ME: Going back further, I regret the fact that Mill’s Utilitarianism is much more widely read than Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, despite the fact that Utilitarianism is a hastily-written work, full of doubtful arguments. The Methods of Ethics, which Sidgwick painstakingly revised 7 times over a thirty year period, is simply the best book on ethics ever written. It’s difficult to think of any major issues in normative ethics that are not already touched upon there, and often it is hard to improve on what Sidgwick says. If students find it too long to read, then they should at least be referred to **the last two chapters of Book III, all of Book IV, and the Concluding Chapter.** But more people read Mill, no doubt in large part because Mill was the more concise and elegant writer. # On intuition Three kinds: 1. Perceptual: it seems wrong 2. Dogmatic / categorical: that's a lie, therefore it's wrong 3. Philosophical: attaching value to consequences, pain is bad, pleasure is good. Not about particular cases. It's judgement about ultimate values. # Highlights ## Toby Ord comment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions?commentId=f29ChNcYdr9f5mMhF#f29ChNcYdr9f5mMhF There is a lot of bad moral philosophy, but there is also a fair amount of very good moral philosophy tucked away in there -- more than one lifetime worth of brilliant insights. [...] I could certainly understand people thinking it is all rubbish by taking a reasonably large sample and coming away only with poorly thought out ethics (which happens all too often), but there really is some good stuff in there. My advice would be to read Reasons and Persons (by Derek Parfit) and The Methods of Ethics (by Henry Sidgwick). They are good starting places and someone like Eliezer would probably enjoy reading them too. ## https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/henry-sidgwick “We think of a philosopher as **trying to do more than merely define and formulate the common moral opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men not what they do think but what they ought to think**; he is expected to go beyond common sense in his premises, and is allowed some divergence from it in his conclusions. (...) his task is to state in full strength and clarity the primary intuitions of reason which can, handled scientifically, systematise and correct the common moral thought of mankind.” ([The Methods of Ethics](https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/sidgwick1874.pdf), 1884, p. 182) https://blog.oup.com/2014/06/the-point-of-view-of-the-universe/ If objective moral reasoning is possible, how does it get started? Sidgwick’s answer is, in brief, that it starts with a self-evident intuition. **He does not mean by this, however, the intuitions of what he calls “common sense morality.**” To see what he does mean, we must draw a **distinction between intuitions that are self-evident truths of reason, and a very different kind of intuition**. The ability to reason has, of course, evolved, and clearly confers evolutionary advantages on those who possess it, but it does so by making it possible for us to discover the truth about our world, and this includes the discovery of some non-natural moral truths. We argue that the evolutionary critique of some moral intuitions can be applied to egoism, but not to universal benevolence. **The principle of universal benevolence can be seen as self-evident, once we understand that our own good is, from “the point of view of the universe” of no more importance than the similar good of anyone else. This is a rational insight, not an evolved moral intuition.** ## Peter Singer Under Fire See [[=Peter Singer]] ## Jonathan Ree: Ethics, utilitarianism and positive boredom.pdf as Sidgwick himself was concerned, the relevant dramatis personae were slightly different, as he showed in an essay of 1899 where he presented himself at one point ‘as a Professor of ethics’, and at another, ‘as a ~tilitarian’.~Ifhe was subject to a conflict of roles, it may be that it depended on the difference between ethics, in the traditional and elevated sense of the word which he had perhaps once given his heart to, and the bathetic utilitarianism which is recognised as its modern nemesis. Sidgwick recalled that the main thing he had learned from Whewell’s teaching was that ‘Intuitional moralists [such as Whewell] were hopelessly loose’, which made him realise that the ‘moral rules’ he had been ‘educated to obey’ might be ‘doubtful and confused’ or indeed ‘dogmatic, unreasoned, incoherent’. It was then that he encountered John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, which gave him ‘relief’ for a while. But then he realised that Mill was unable to fend off the threat of egoism, in other words the habit of valuing one’s own interest, however slight, more highly than the most vital interests of everyone else. ‘No doubt it was, from the point of view of the universe, reasonable to prefer the greater good to the lesser,’ Sidgwick wrote, but ‘it seemed to me also undeniably reasonable for the individual to prefer his own. Collini attributes the intensification of Sidgwick‘s boringness partly to this professorship, but he also assigns it to another source: ‘somewhere along the way,’ he says (p. 45),‘I blame philosophy.’ In particular he blames the slyly selfdenying ordinance by which philosophers have cast themselves as ‘under-labourers’ engaged in nothing more substantial than ‘reflective analysis’ of ideas devised by others, and he quotes Sidgwick‘s gloomy comment, in 1887, about having ‘philosophised himself into a conviction of the unprofitableness of philosophy’ (p. 18). Sidgwick was disappointed by philosophy’s past achievements, he still entertained hopes for its future. He noted that philosophy was ‘stillafter so many centuries-in a rudimentary condition as compared with the more special studies of the branches of systematised knowledge that we call Sciences’, but he thought that the correct response would be activism rather than despair. Whilst admitting that ‘no one can hope to remove suddenly and quickly so ancient and inveterate a deficiency’, he affirmed that ‘it ought to be the aim of all earnest students of Philosophy to remedy this defect’.’ He made it clear in his autobiographical sketch that Book 111of The Methods ofEthics had been written in conscious imitation of Aristotle, whose discussion of the moral virtues was, he thought, no more than an idealised transcription of ‘the Common Sense Morality of Greece’. The task he set himself in Book IU,he explained, was simply ‘to do the same for our morality here and now’. He had managed, with a certain amount of hermeneutic bullying, to show that the morality of common sense pointed in the same general direction as utilitarianism, but he knew that it also contained the elements of the loose dogmatism which, as a young man, he had found repellent in Whewell. And even if it now approximated to the two great principles to which he now subscribed, namely Kant’s version of the golden rule (that ‘whatever is right for me must be right for all persons in similar circumstances’) and Mill’s version of utilitarianism (that we ‘should act in such a way as to promote universal happiness’), it did not always and necessarily do so. When confronted with better arguments, according to Sidgwick, common sense would always have to yield. The real and excruciating difficulty for Sidgwick was that **he did not think that decisive arguments about the fundamental methods of ethics would ever be found.** Even if common sense tended to converge on utilitarian conclusions, egoism still remained a theoretically viable option. beneath his unyielding exterior he still suffered from the wounds of his discovery that the ‘Moral Truths’ propounded by Whewell were groundless, and of his subsequent realisation that the virtues prized by the various moralities of common sense do not always exactly coincide with the prescriptions of utilitarian calculation. If he was cold, it was not from a lack of inward passion. Rather like John Stuart Mill, he kept himself under severe control for fear of being overwhelmed by intellectual grief. He had no patience with the exquisite theatricality of Matthew Arnold’s sadness, but he would surely not have resented having to share the distinction of dying in 1900 with another great moral philosopher, equally exasperating and no less anguished, **who had also been shattered by his contact with utilitarianism.** Sidgwick would surely have found it ‘interesting’ that **Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged the extraordinary achievements of ‘utilitarian Englishmen’ in their special field of endeavour, which of course was none other than ‘boringness’. The English utilitarians should be encouraged, Nietzsche explained, because ‘to the extent that they are boring, their utility can hardly be exaggerated’.** I2 Nietzsche died on 25 August, Sidgwick three days later-both of them escaping at last from the terrible violence wrought by their philosophical intelligence on the consoling platitudes of morality. # Scratchpad - Consider intuitions about what is intrinsically valuable as quite different in kind from intuitions about what we should actually do. (Mirror the theory of value / normative ethics distinction). - Normative ethics: - how should individuals behave - how should we raise our children - what institutions should we build together - what is the individual vs institution distinction? - partial attachments vs impartial - individual relation: - because you are you - whatever it takes (kinda...) - commitment to special treatment - love, friendship - impartial relation: - because you meet the criteria (e.g. you are citizen, you have health insurance) - whatever our cost effectiveness calculations deem reasonable - commitment to equal treatment - indifference, formality - scenario: spouse of a billionaire needs $100m treatment to buy 20 QALYs. - hospital says: "sorry, the treatment is too expensive" - billionaire says: "you got it". - the act-utilitarian billionaire could say "sorry, I love you and everything, but $100m could buy XXX QALYs and an awful lot of AI safety research". - act-util gets the "maximises value" answer in extreme/high-stakes cases. but are humans capable of thinking like this? maybe we mostly should not, but it's cool to try on act-util perspective in very high-stakes / extreme scenarios. - if the act-util billionaire could forsake their spouse privately, the act would not erode the "privilege special relations" norm. - hmmm - money = easy way to create an impartial API Rational requirements vs moral requirement. Variety of values. Impartial vs ego at level of society not just individual. ## SEP Conservatism Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) arguably belongs in the ranks of modern conservatives. He rejected his utilitarian precursors’ reforming radicalism: When all relevant facts are taken into consideration [he holds] it will scarcely ever be right on Utilitarian grounds for a Utilitarian openly to break or to recommend others to break the rules of morality commonly accepted in his society. (Broad 1930: 157; see also Collini 1992) Sidgwick’s position has been described as a utilitarianism “grown sleek and tame”, as it uses Bentham’s principles to justify those of Burke (Boucher and Vincent 2012: 30). Sidgwick’s The Elements of Politics (1891) exhibits an intellectual and political conservatism, notably its rejection of then-popular social evolutionary approaches; as Collini argues, though sympathetic to socialism, he was drawn to an idiosyncratic variety of conservatism—somewhat perhaps as Ruskin and William Morris were (Collini 1992; see also Kloppenberg 1992). An important issue that connects the conservatism of Hume, Burke, Sidgwick is what people have reason to expect over time. Suppose one holds that justice requires X, but that people have long been doing Y, which is incompatible with X, and have entered into life-plans that assume that X is how things are. If one tries to make society more just by preventing people doing Y, that in itself is an unjust action. Hence what Feinberg called Sidgwick’s paradox of conservative justice (Sidgwick 2011: III.5). As Feinberg writes, insofar as our institutions depart from Rawls’s basic principles of justice, we have a duty, he says, to work toward their reform. But in our actual imperfect world Every reform of an imperfect practice or institution is likely to be unfair to someone …To change the rules in the middle of the game, even when those rules were not altogether fair, will disappoint the honest expectations of those whose prior commitments and life plans were made in genuine reliance on the…old rules. The propriety of changing the rules in a given case depends upon (inter alia) the degree of unfairness of the old rules and the extent and degree of the reliance placed upon them…we must weigh quite legitimate incompatible claims against each other in circumstances such that whichever judgment is reached it will be unfair to someone or other (Feinberg 1973: 268). Rawls admits that intuitive balancing is unavoidable in dealing with problems of non-ideal theory, but Feinberg finds in his work little acknowledgment of the implications of Sidgwick’s paradox.