Henry Sidgwick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
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.1234
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.The Methods of Ethics
We have already noticed this result in one or two instances, and it will be illustrated at length in the following chapters. But though this is the case to a great extent, it is, for our present purpose, of special importance to note the--real or apparent--exceptions to the rule; because they are specially characteristic of the method that we call Intuitionism.The Methods of Ethics
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.The Methods of Ethics
I think that a 'plain man,' in a modern civilised society, if his conscience were fairly brought to consider the hypothetical question, whether it would be morally right for him to seek his own happiness on any occasion if it involved a certain sacrifice of the greater happiness of some other human being,--without any counterbalancing gain to any one else,--would answer unhesitatingly in the negative.The Methods of Ethics
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.