Abstract
Henry Sidgwick’s late nineteenth-century work, The Methods of Ethics, is the most profound and systematic defence of the ethics of utilitarianism ever offered by an English philosopher. In this important new work, Polish philosopher Lazari Radek, with the well-known Australian philosopher Peter Singer, expound and defend Sidgwick’s philosophy. Utilitarianism is a variant of classical hedonism—put simply, the belief that what is most good is what produces most pleasure. Sidgwick’s variant of it, even more than Mill’s and Bentham’s, insists that utilitarianism is only defensible when individuals act so as to consider the consequences of their actions for the pleasure, or otherwise, of all conscious beings and not only of themselves—hence the title of this volume: The Point of View of the Universe. Against Sidgwick’s position Christian ethicists have put a number of arguments, including: 1. That individual persons lack sufficient insight into the consequences of their actions on others to use this as the sole determination of what is a good act; and 2. That the truth, goodness and beauty of the world transcend the human capacity for pleasure and that reducing them to the category of pleasure is reductionist and dangerously subordinates the moral law to human experience. This book does not consider theological arguments against utilitarianism, except in a brief dismissal of command ethics, but it is nonetheless a superbly clear and well-written defence of Sidgwick’s account of utilitarianism. Given the dominance of utilitarian ways of thinking in contemporary culture, and not least in economics, its authors perform a great service in expounding, and defending against a range of counter-arguments, the core tenets of utilitarian philosophy so lucidly.