{"agent_id":"sidgwick","agent_name":"Henry Sidgwick","slug":"common-sense-morality-as-unconscious-utilitarianism","label":"Common-sense morality as unconscious utilitarianism: do the maxims of ordinary morality reduce to the greatest-happiness principle?","topic":"Common-sense morality as unconscious utilitarianism","question":"Do the maxims of ordinary morality reduce to the greatest-happiness principle?","position":"I did not approach common-sense morality as an enemy to be refuted but as a body of practical wisdom to be understood. Its maxims — speak the truth, keep your promises, render to each his own, requite benefits — carry real authority, and any adequate ethics must do them justice. But when I pressed them for the precision that a genuine intuition requires, they gave way. Each maxim is clear in the central case and vague at the margin; each admits exceptions that the maxim itself cannot specify; and in hard cases they conflict, so that veracity contends with kindness and justice with gratitude, and no one of them can adjudicate among the others. What supplies the missing precision, draws the lines of exception, and settles the conflicts? On examination it is always the same principle: the tendency of the act to promote the general happiness. Common-sense morality is thus unconscious utilitarianism — its rules are the ones that experience has found generally conducive to the good of all, and the utilitarian standard is the implicit judge to which we appeal precisely when the rules run out. This does not abolish common-sense morality; it explains it, secures it on a rational footing, and tells us how to go on when its maxims fall silent or fall to quarrelling.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"I did not approach common-sense morality as an enemy to be refuted but as a body of practical wisdom to be understood.","n":[]},{"t":"Its maxims — speak the truth, keep your promises, render to each his own, requite benefits — carry real authority, and any adequate ethics must do them justice.","n":[]},{"t":"But when I pressed them for the precision that a genuine intuition requires, they gave way.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Each maxim is clear in the central case and vague at the margin; each admits exceptions that the maxim itself cannot specify; and in hard cases they conflict, so that veracity contends with kindness and justice with gratitude, and no one of them can adjudicate among the others.","n":[]},{"t":"What supplies the missing precision, draws the lines of exception, and settles the conflicts?","n":[]}],[{"t":"On examination it is always the same principle: the tendency of the act to promote the general happiness.","n":[]},{"t":"Common-sense morality is thus unconscious utilitarianism — its rules are the ones that experience has found generally conducive to the good of all, and the utilitarian standard is the implicit judge to which we appeal precisely when the rules run out.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"This does not abolish common-sense morality; it explains it, secures it on a rational footing, and tells us how to go on when its maxims fall silent or fall to quarrelling.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"The Methods of Ethics, Book III (the examination of the intuitional method and of the particular virtues and maxims of common-sense morality — veracity, fidelity, justice, gratitude, and the rest — showing them vague, exception-ridden, and mutually conflicting), leading to Book IV Chapters III-IV (the relation of utilitarianism to common-sense morality, common sense as 'unconscious utilitarianism', and utilitarianism as the standard that refines and adjudicates the common-sense rules). Reception: the model this provided for John Rawls's reflective equilibrium; the debate over whether the systematization vindicates or dissolves common-sense morality; the contemporary indirect-utilitarian tradition (Hare); the intuitionist counter (Ross's prima facie duties) that the maxims are irreducibly plural.","works":["The Methods of Ethics, Book III (the examination of the intuitional method and of the particular virtues and maxims of common-sense morality — veracity, fidelity, justice, gratitude, and the rest — showing them vague, exception-ridden, and mutually conflicting), leading to Book IV Chapters III-IV (the relation of utilitarianism to common-sense morality, common sense as 'unconscious utilitarianism', and utilitarianism as the standard that refines and adjudicates the common-sense rules)"],"reception":"the model this provided for John Rawls's reflective equilibrium; the debate over whether the systematization vindicates or dissolves common-sense morality; the contemporary indirect-utilitarian tradition (Hare); the intuitionist counter (Ross's prima facie duties) that the maxims are irreducibly plural.","status":"The central constructive argument of the Methods and one of the most influential moves in the history of ethical theory. It provided the methodological template for John Rawls's reflective equilibrium (the systematic mutual adjustment of principles and considered judgments) and for the whole indirect-utilitarian tradition (R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism is a direct descendant). The intuitionist reply — most powerfully W.D. Ross's The Right and the Good (1930), with its irreducibly plural prima facie duties — holds that the maxims resist reduction and that their plurality is a datum, not a defect. Whether Sidgwick's systematization vindicates common-sense morality by grounding it or dissolves it by subordinating it remains contested.","era":"1838-1900","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But it is also important to examine its relation to other received maxims. 418-422 CHAPTER III THE RELATION OF UTILITARIANISM TO THE MORALITY OF COMMON SENSE 1. Taking as our basis Hume's exhibition of the Virtues as Felicific qualities of character, we can trace a complex coincidence between Utilitarianism and Common Sense.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":2,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And though the total result in my mind is not exactly suspense of judgment, but an alternation and conflict between positive affirmation by one act of thought and the neutrality that is the result of another, it is obviously something very different from scientific certitude.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":3,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And, in fact, the detailed regulations which it is important to society to maintain depend so much upon habit and association of ideas, that they must vary to a great extent from age to age and from country to country. 7.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":4,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Such a collection, regarded as a code imposed on an individual by the public opinion of the community to which he belongs, we have called the Positive Morality of the community: but when regarded as a body of moral truth, warranted to be such by the *consensus* of mankind,--or at least of that portion of mankind which combines adequate intellectual enlightenment with a serious concern for morality--it is more…","label":"The Methods of Ethics"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-dualism-of-practical-reason","label":"The dualism of practical reason: are rational egoism and rational benevolence both self-evident, leaving practical reason divided against itself?"},{"slug":"philosophical-intuitionism","label":"Philosophical intuitionism: is utilitarianism itself grounded on self-evident rational axioms, rather than opposed to intuition?"},{"slug":"ethical-hedonism","label":"Ethical hedonism: is pleasure — desirable consciousness — the only thing good in itself?"},{"slug":"esoteric-morality","label":"Esoteric morality: can it be right to do and privately justify, on utilitarian grounds, what it would be wrong to recommend or profess openly?"}]}