Henry Sidgwick

Henry Sidgwick
Born	(1838-05-31)31 May 1838 Skipton, Yorkshire
Died	Cambridge
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Utilitarianism
Main interests	Ethics, Politics
Notable ideas	Ethical Hedonism, paradox of hedonism
Influences Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, John Stuart Mill
Influenced R M Hare, Mordecai Kaplan, John Rawls, Alfred Marshall, Peter Singer, Derek Parfit, J. J. C. Smart, Hastings Rashdall

Henry Sidgwick (/ˈsɪdʒwɪk/; 31 May 1838 – 28 August 1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence. He also founded Newnham College in Cambridge in 1875. Newnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College. The co-founder of the college was Millicent Garrett Fawcett. He joined the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society in 1856.

Biography

He was born at Skipton in Yorkshire, where his father, the Reverend W. Sidgwick (d. 1841), was headmaster of the local grammar school, Ermysted's Grammar School. His mother was Mary Sidgwick, née Crofts, 1807–1879.

Henry himself was educated at Rugby (where his cousin, subsequently his brother-in-law, Edward White Benson – later Archbishop of Canterbury – was a master), and at Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Trinity, Sidgwick became a member of the Cambridge Apostles. In 1859 he was senior classic, 33rd wrangler, chancellor's medallist and Craven scholar. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity, and soon afterwards became a lecturer in classics there, a post he held for ten years. The Sidgwick Site, home to several of the university's arts and humanities faculties in the university, is named after him.

In 1869, he exchanged his lectureship for one in moral philosophy, a subject to which he had been turning his attention. In the same year, deciding that he could no longer in good conscience declare himself a member of the Church of England, he resigned his fellowship. He retained his lectureship, and in 1881 was elected an honorary fellow. In 1874 he published The Methods of Ethics (6th ed. 1901, containing emendations written just before his death), by common consent a major work, which made his reputation outside the university. John Rawls called it the "first truly academic work in moral theory, modern in both method and spirit."

In 1875, he was appointed praelector on moral and political philosophy at Trinity, and in 1883 he was elected Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. In 1885, the religious test having been removed, his college once more elected him to a fellowship on the foundation.

Besides his lecturing and literary labours, Sidgwick took an active part in the business of the university, and in many forms of social and philanthropic work. He was a member of the General Board of Studies from its foundation in 1882 till 1899; he was also a member of the Council of the Senate of the Indian Civil Service Board and the Local Examinations and Lectures Syndicate, and chairman of the Special Board for Moral Science.

He married Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, who was a member of the Ladies Dining Society in Cambridge, with 11 other members.

Bart Schultz's 2005 biography of Sidgwick sought to establish that Sidgwick was a lifelong homosexual, though it is unknown whether he ever expressed his inclinations in intercourse. According to Schultz, Sidgwick struggled internally throughout his life with issues of hypocrisy and openness in connection with his own forbidden desires.

He was an agnostic.

He is buried in Terling All Saints Churchyard, Terling, Essex, with his wife.

Eusapia Palladino

Eusapia Palladino.

In July 1895, the medium Eusapia Palladino was invited to England to Frederic William Henry Myers' house in Cambridge for a series of investigations into her mediumship. According to reports by the investigators Myers and Oliver Lodge, all the phenomena observed in the Cambridge sittings were the result of trickery. Her fraud was so clever, according to Myers, that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill."

In the Cambridge sittings the results proved disastrous for her mediumship. During the séances Palladino was caught cheating in order to free herself from the physical controls of the experiments. Palladino was found liberating her hands by placing the hand of the controller on her left on top of the hand of the controller on her right. Instead of maintaining any contact with her, the observers on either side were found to be holding each other's hands and this made it possible for her to perform tricks. Richard Hodgson had observed Palladino free a hand to move objects and use her feet to kick pieces of furniture in the room. Because of the discovery of fraud, the British SPR investigators such as Sidgwick and Frank Podmore considered Palladino's mediumship to be permanently discredited and because of her fraud she was banned from any further experiments with the SPR in Britain.

In the British Medical Journal on 9 November 1895 an article was published titled Exit Eusapia!. The article questioned the scientific legitimacy of the SPR for investigating Palladino a medium who had a reputation of being a fraud and imposture. Part of the article read "It would be comic if it were not deplorable to picture this sorry Egeria surrounded by men like Professor Sidgwick, Professor Lodge, Mr. F. H. Myers, Dr. Schiaparelli, and Professor Richet, solemnly receiving her pinches and kicks, her finger skiddings, her sleight of hand with various articles of furniture as phenomena calling for serious study." This caused Sidgwick to respond in a published letter to the British Medical Journal, 16 November 1895. According to Sidgwick SPR members had exposed the fraud of Palladino at the Cambridge sittings, Sidgwick wrote "Throughout this period we have continually combated and exposed the frauds of professional mediums, and have never yet published in our Proceedings, any report in favour of the performances of any of them." The response from the Journal questioned why the SPR wastes time investigating phenomena that are the "result of jugglery and imposture" and not urgently concerning the welfare of mankind.

In 1898, Myers was invited to a series of séances in Paris with Charles Richet. In contrast to the previous séances in which he had observed fraud he claimed to have observed convincing phenomena. Sidgwick reminded Myers of Palladino's trickery in the previous investigations as "overwhelming" but Myers did not change his position. This enraged Richard Hodgson, then editor of SPR publications to ban Myers from publishing anything on his recent sittings with Palladino in the SPR journal. Hodgson was convinced Palladino was a fraud and supported Sidgwick in the "attempt to put that vulgar cheat Eusapia beyond the pale." It wasn't until the 1908 sittings in Naples that the SPR reopened the Palladino file.

Works

He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, and was a member of the Metaphysical Society. Prominently, he took in promoting the higher education of women. He helped to start the higher local examinations for women, and the lectures held at Cambridge in preparation for these. It was at his suggestion and with his help that Anne Clough opened a house of residence for students, which developed into Newnham College, Cambridge. When, in 1880, the North Hall was added, Sidgwick, who in 1876 had married Eleanor Mildred Balfour (sister of A. J. Balfour), lived there for two years. After Clough's death in 1892 Mrs Sidgwick became principal of the college, and she and her husband lived there for the rest of his life. During this whole period Sidgwick took the deepest interest in the welfare of the college. In British politics he was a liberal, and became a Liberal Unionist (a party that later effectively merged with the Conservative party) in 1886. Early in 1900 he was forced by ill-health to resign his professorship, and died a few months later.

Sidgwick was a famous teacher. He treated his pupils as fellow students. He was deeply interested in psychical phenomena, but his energies were primarily devoted to the study of religion and philosophy. Brought up in the Church of England, he drifted away from orthodox Christianity, and as early as 1862 he described himself as a theist, independent from established religion. For the rest of his life, though he regarded Christianity as "indispensable and irreplaceable – looking at it from a sociological point of view," he found himself unable to return to it as a religion.

In political economy he was a utilitarian on the lines of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. His work was characterized by its careful investigation of first principles, as in his distinction of positive and normative reasoning, and by critical analysis, not always constructive. His influence was such that for example Alfred Marshall, founder of the Cambridge School of economics, would describe him as his "spiritual mother and father." In philosophy he devoted himself to ethics, and especially to the examination of the ultimate intuitive principles of conduct and the problem of free will. He adopted a position which may be described as ethical hedonism, according to which the criterion of goodness in any given action is that it produces the greatest possible amount of pleasure. This hedonism, however, is not confined to the self (egoistic), but involves a due regard to the pleasure of others, and is, therefore, distinguished further as universalistic. Lastly, Sidgwick returns to the principle that no man should act so as to destroy his own happiness. However, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes (in After Virtue, 2007), Sidgwick reluctantly had to confess that he had gone in search for Cosmos and found only Chaos, i.e., he could find no rational foundation to basic moral beliefs; where he had hoped to find unity, he could only locate heterogeneity.

See also the Palm Sunday Case.

Bibliography

by Sidgwick

• The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription. 1870.
• The Methods of Ethics. London, 1874, 7th edition 1907.
• The Theory of Evolution in its application to Practice, in Mind, Volume I, Number 1 January 1876, 52–67,
• Principles of Political Economy. London, 1883, 3rd edition 1901.
• The Scope and Method of Economic Science. 1885.
• Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers. 1886 5th edition 1902 (enlarged from his article ethics in the Encyclopædia Britannica).
• The Elements of Politics. London, 1891, 4th edition 1919.
• "The Philosophy of Common Sense", in Mind, New Series, Volume IV, Number 14, April 1895, 145–158.
• Economic science and economics, Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, 1896, v. 1, reprinted in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1987, v. 2, 58–59.
• Practical Ethics. London, 1898, 2nd edition 1909.
• Philosophy; its Scope and Relations. London, 1902.
• Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr Herbert Spencer and J. Martineau. 1902.
• The Development of European Polity. 1903, 3rd edition 1920
• Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses. 1904.
• Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and other philosophical lectures and essays. 1905.
• Sidgwick's writings available online

about Sidgwick

• Schultz, Bart. Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe. An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Schultz, Bart. Henry Sidgwick. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 October 2004.
• Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters. Arrow Books, 2007.
• Dawes, Ann. "Henry Sidgwick". Biograph, 2007
• (French) Geninet, Hortense. POLITIQUES COMPAREES, Henry Sidgwick et la politique moderne dans les Eléménts Politiques, Edited by Hortense Geninet, France, September 2009. ISBN 978-2-7466-1043-9
• Nakano-Okuno, Mariko. Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-32178-6
• Phillips, David. Sidgwickian Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Schneewind, Jerome. Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 1977.

See also

People

• Derek Parfit

Topics

• Analytical Philosophy
• Utilitarianism

External links

• Henry Sidgwick Website
• Henry Sidgwick blog
• Official website of the 2nd International congress : Henry Sidgwick Ethics, Psychics, Politics. University of Catania – Italy
• Henry Sidgwick. Comprehensive list of online writings by and about Sidgwick.
• Contains Sidgwick's "Methods of Ethics", modified for easier reading

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: