35 Facts About Henry Sidgwick

Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist.

Henry Sidgwick was the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death, and is best known in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics.

Henry Sidgwick 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.

In 1856, Sidgwick joined the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society.

Henry Sidgwick was educated at Rugby, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Henry Sidgwick retained his lectureship and in 1881 he was elected an honorary fellow.

Besides his lecturing and literary labours, Henry Sidgwick took an active part in the business of the university and in many forms of social and philanthropic work.

Henry Sidgwick was a member of the General Board of Studies from its foundation in 1882 to 1899; he was 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.

Henry Sidgwick was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, and was a member of the Metaphysical Society.

Henry Sidgwick helped to start the higher local examinations for women, and the lectures held at Cambridge in preparation for these.

When, in 1880, the North Hall was added, Henry Sidgwick lived there for two years.

Henry Sidgwick's wife became principal of the college after Clough's death in 1892, and they lived there for the rest of his life.

In 1892 Henry Sidgwick was the president of the second international congress for experimental psychology and delivered the opening address.

Henry Sidgwick, who died an agnostic, is buried in Terling All Saints Churchyard, Terling, Essex, with his wife.

Henry Sidgwick summarizes his position in ethics as utilitarianism "on an Intuitional basis".

Henry Sidgwick developed this position due to his dissatisfaction with an inconsistency in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, between what he labels "psychological hedonism" and "ethical hedonism".

Henry Sidgwick believed neither Bentham nor Mill had an adequate answer as to how the prescription that someone ought to sacrifice their own interest to the general interest could have any force, given they combined that prescription with the claim that everyone will in fact always pursue their own individual interest.

Ethical intuitions, such as those argued for by philosophers such as William Whewell, could, according to Henry Sidgwick, provide the missing force for such normative claims.

For Henry Sidgwick, ethics is about which actions are objectively right.

Henry Sidgwick tries to achieve this by formulating methods of ethics, which he defines as rational procedures "for determining right conduct in any particular case".

Henry Sidgwick identifies three methods: intuitionism, which involves various independently valid moral principles to determine what ought to be done, and two forms of hedonism, in which rightness only depends on the pleasure and pain following from the action.

Henry Sidgwick argues that this is possible for intuitionism and utilitarianism.

Henry Sidgwick's meta-ethics involve an explicit defense of a non-naturalist form of moral realism.

Henry Sidgwick is committed to moral cognitivism: that moral language is robustly truth-apt, and that moral properties are not reducible to any natural properties.

Allen Wood describes Henry Sidgwick-inspired comparative methodology as the "standard model" of research methodology among contemporary ethicists.

John Deigh disputes Schultz's explanation, and instead attributes this fall in interest in Henry Sidgwick to changing philosophical understandings of axioms in mathematics, which would throw into question whether axiomatization provided an appropriate model for a foundationalist epistemology of the sort Henry Sidgwick tried to build for ethics.

Henry Sidgwick worked in economics at a time when the British economics mainstream was undergoing the transition from the classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill to the neo-classical economics of William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall.

Henry Sidgwick believed self interest to be a centerpiece of human motivation.

Henry Sidgwick believed that this self interest had immense utility in the economic world, and that people should not be blamed for wanting to sell a good for the highest possible price, or buy a good for the lowest possible price.

Henry Sidgwick distinguished though a difference between the ability for an individual to properly judge their own interests and the ability of a group of people to properly come to a point of maximum group happiness.

Henry Sidgwick found two divergences in the outcomes of the decisions of the individual and of the group.

Henry Sidgwick would have a major influence on the development of welfare economics, due to his own work on the subject inspiring Arthur Cecil Pigou's work The Economics of Welfare.

Henry Sidgwick would connect his concerns with parapsychology to his research in ethics.

Henry Sidgwick believed the dualism of practical reason might be solved outside of philosophical ethics if it were shown, empirically, that the recommendations of rational egoism and utilitarianism coincided due to the reward of moral behaviour after death.

Henry Sidgwick was sister to Arthur Balfour, and a member of the Cambridge Ladies Dining Society.