Sentiment & Utility

Six steps through the British answer to Glaucon: that morality springs from fellow-feeling, and its whole content is the impartial promotion of happiness — and the terrible cases that test it.

A course on the thought of Ethics.

What you will learn

  • Locate the tradition against its predecessors: not virtue's flourishing soul nor a heaven of Forms, but sentiment as the ground and happiness as the content of morality.
  • State the two-part wager: morality springs from feeling (sentimentalism), and its whole content is the impartial promotion of happiness (utilitarianism).
  • See why this answer to Glaucon is at once the most democratic (anyone can feel, anyone can count) and the most exposed (it will be forced to sacrifice the one for the many).
  • State the is/ought gap: no set of purely descriptive premises entails a normative conclusion without a further normative premise — so morality is not deduced by reason from facts.
  • Explain 'reason is the slave of the passions': reason discovers truths and means but never, alone, motivates; the ends come from sentiment, so morality must too.
  • Meet the 'sensible knave' — Hume's version of Glaucon's ring — and see why sentimentalism makes the challenge harder to answer than a rationalist morality would.
  • Explain how the impartial spectator corrects sympathy's partiality: we judge our own and others' conduct by imagining how a well-informed, disinterested observer would feel about it.
  • Distinguish the love of praise from the love of PRAISEWORTHINESS — wanting to BE good rather than merely to be thought good — and see how it answers Glaucon's man with the good reputation.

Course outline

  1. The Cool English Answer — The program's third answer to Glaucon, framed: the British moralists cool the question down, ground morals not in reason or the Forms but in a feeling every human being has — fellow-feeling — and…
  2. No Ought From Is — Hume takes the lectern to lay the foundation: reason alone cannot move us or ground morality; you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; moral distinctions are felt, not inferred. And his own Ring of…
  3. The Man Within the Breast — Adam Smith takes the lectern to solve Hume's problem: how partial, wavering sympathy becomes an impartial standard. The impartial spectator — the man within the breast — and the famous test of our…
  4. The Arithmetic of Happiness — Bentham takes the lectern and strips the tradition to its engine: nature has placed us under pleasure and pain; the right act is the one that produces the most happiness; and this can be MEASURED.…
  5. Higher Pleasures & the Cost of Counting — Mill saves the doctrine from the pigsty — pleasures differ in quality, and the competent judge decides — and offers his proof. Then the tradition meets its executioners: framing the innocent, the…
  6. The Cosmos Reduced to a Chaos — Sidgwick takes the lectern for the tradition's most rigorous reckoning — and its most honest defeat. The attempt to ground utilitarianism on self-evident axioms, the discovery that egoism is just as…

Works read in this course

  • Hume, Treatise of Human Nature & Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals — sentiment as the ground of morals; the is/ought gap; reason the slave of the passions; the sensible knave
  • Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments — sympathy and the impartial spectator; the man of humanity and the earthquake in China
  • Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation — the principle of utility; the felicific calculus; 'the question is not, Can they reason? but, Can they suffer?'
  • Utilitarianism — Mill's defense: higher and lower pleasures, the competent judge, the proof of the principle, and the place of justice
  • Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics — the rigorous grounding of utilitarianism on self-evident axioms — and the dualism of practical reason it could not close

Terms introduced

sentimentalism, the is/ought gap, reason is the slave of the passions, sympathy, the impartial spectator, the principle of utility, hedonism, the felicific calculus, higher and lower pleasures, act vs rule utilitarianism, the separateness of persons, the dualism of practical reason

Part of the Simposeum course library.