The Methods of Ethics.

SIDGWICK, Henry.

Item Number: 126408

London: Macmillan and Co., 1874.

First edition of Sidgwick’s magnum opus, which “in many ways marked the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Octavo, original brown pebbled cloth with gilt titles and ruling to the spine, triple black ruling to the front panel, supplied endpapers and pastedowns, rebacked. In very good condition. Ownership inscription. Scarce in the original cloth.

Referred to as the first truly academic work in moral philosophy and "the clearest and most accessible formulation of 'the classical utilitarian doctrine'" by noted moral philosopher John Rawls, Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics ranks among the ethical treatises of Aristotle, Hume, and Kant. Like Aristotle, Sidgwick believed that systematic reflection on ethics should begin with the way ordinary people think about moral behavior, or “commonsense morality". His main goal in the Methods was to offer a systematic and precise “examination, at once expository and critical, of the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are found—either explicit or implicit—in the moral consciousness of mankind generally” (Methods, p. vii). He defined methods of ethics as rational procedures "for determining right conduct in any particular case", claiming that there were, in fact, three general methods of making value choices that are commonly used in ordinary morality: intuitionism, egoism, and utilitarianism. Intuitionism is the view that we can see straight off that some acts are right or wrong, and can grasp self-evident and unconditionally binding moral rules. Egoism, or “Egoistic Hedonism,” claims that each individual should seek his or her own greatest happiness. Utilitarianism, or “Universalistic Hedonism,” is the view that each person should promote the greatest amount of happiness on the whole. Although, he claimed, intuition and utilitarianism could be in harmony, the problem lies in squaring utilitarianism with egoism. Though earlier utilitarians like William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill had sketched versions of utilitarian ethics, Sidgwick was the first to develop the theory in detail and to investigate how it related both to other popular ethical theories and to conventional morality. As Sidgwick scholar J. B. Schneewind has noted, the Methods “is widely viewed as one of the best works of moral philosophy ever written. His account of classical utilitarianism is unsurpassed. His discussions of the general status of morality and of particular moral concepts are models of clarity and acumen. His insights about the relations between egoism and utilitarianism have stimulated much valuable research. And his way of framing moral problems, by asking about the relations between commonsense beliefs and the best available theories, has set much of the agenda for twentieth-century ethics.”