This Friday from 7.40pm at the Friends Meeting House, Dr Andrew Pyle will be speaking on ‘Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics’.
Dr Andrew Pyle of Bristol University will be talking on a philosophical classic, a book ‘so striking and original in character and of such fundamental importance as fairly to entitle the work to be regarded as epoch- making’. In recent years Sidgwick has been highly praised by no less than Peter Singer and Derek Parfit both of whom consider his Methods of Ethics as the finest exposition of Utilitarianism, a work that has stood the test of time.
I hope to see you there.
Philosophy in Swindon - click here for next talk 
Dear Andrew,
Many thanks for your talk on Sidgwick. As always, it is a pleasure to listen to you, but, as I said on the night, I am totally out of sympathy with his line of thought and I want to explain what I meant when I said that justification couldn’t be reduced to calculation.
I should say that I have not read Sidgwick, but I have read a book about him, – “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick & Contemporary Ethics”, by Katarzyna Lazari-Radek and the indefatigable Peter Singer, kindly lent me by John Little, which convinces me, however unintentionally, that I do not need to read the original.
These authors consider the scenario (pp. 297-8) in which a surgeon could kill one patient during an operation so that the victim’s organs could be used to save the lives of four other patients, and they agree that utilitarianism would justify doing this so long as there were no chance of its being detected. There are two points to be made about this.
First, on a purely arithmetical basis, there is an even more attractive option for the surgeon, who could save not four lives only for the cost of one, but five, – by completing the operation successfully and then committing suicide, thereby making his own organs available for the other four, – and with no requirement for secrecy! (Of course, it might be objected that the surgeon’s life was more valuable than that of any one of his patients, but this consideration is expressly disallowed in the scenario which specifies that the surgeon knows nothing about the lives of his patients, all of which might in various ways be more valuable than his own.)
It is not surprising that an author like Singer, who has spent his whole life studying and writing about utilitarianism, should have missed this rather obvious point, because the central focus of utilitarian thinking, since at least as early as Macchiavelli, has always been to rationalise the exercise of power, and its unspoken imaginative appeal has always been to the thrill of transgression, of boldly going beyond good and evil to think the unthinkable.
Second, the idea that “justification” (in any sense that would deserve our respect) for the exercise of power over others could be reduced, as in this example, to a calculation performed by an individual in the privacy of his own mind implies that the individual has a responsibility to himself to ensure that his own behaviour satisfies what these authors regard as objective requirements and that he is in a position to determine conclusively whether or not he has discharged that responsibility; but this is absurd, as can easily be demonstrated.
A responsibility is a constraint from which the one who owes it cannot release himself, but can be released by the one to whom he owes it; so, if one could have a responsibility to oneself, one would be both the one who owed it and the one to whom it was owed; but such a responsibility would be one from which, therefore, one both could and could not release oneself; and this is an obvious contradiction, from which we may conclude that one cannot meaningfully be said to have a responsibility to oneself, but only to others; and, if this is so, then the interpersonal responsibility of justification cannot meaningfully be reduced to a calculation performed by an individual in the privacy of his own mind.
If there is a fault in this reasoning, I very much hope you will be able to point it out.
Very best wishes,
Chris Eddy
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