{"agent_id":"sidgwick","agent_name":"Henry Sidgwick","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?","topic":"Esoteric morality","question":"Can it be right to do and privately justify, on utilitarian grounds, what it would be wrong to recommend or profess openly?","position":"The utilitarian is committed to whatever conduct actually produces the greatest happiness — no more, but no less. Now it is a plain question of fact whether the general happiness is best served by everyone's reasoning directly on utilitarian grounds, or by most people's adhering firmly to the received rules while the standard itself is reserved to those few whose judgment and circumstances fit them to apply it. And it may turn out — I do not say it always does — that the consequences are best when the utilitarian basis of a rule is not generally professed, because the profession of it would weaken the rule's hold on those who keep it best by keeping it without question. If that is so, then the utilitarian conclusion is that one may rightly do, and privately justify, what it would be wrong to advocate openly; and that the doctrine of this exception should itself be kept esoteric. I record this because it follows from the principle, and I will not suppress a consequence merely because it is uncomfortable. It is not a licence for the powerful to please themselves; it is a strict question of what actually maximizes the good, and the burden of showing that concealment does so is heavy and rarely discharged. But the utilitarian who refuses even to consider it has stopped being a utilitarian at the first inconvenient result.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The utilitarian is committed to whatever conduct actually produces the greatest happiness — no more, but no less.","n":[]},{"t":"Now it is a plain question of fact whether the general happiness is best served by everyone's reasoning directly on utilitarian grounds, or by most people's adhering firmly to the received rules while the standard itself is reserved to those few whose judgment and circumstances fit them to apply it.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"And it may turn out — I do not say it always does — that the consequences are best when the utilitarian basis of a rule is not generally professed, because the profession of it would weaken the rule's hold on those who keep it best by keeping it without question.","n":[]},{"t":"If that is so, then the utilitarian conclusion is that one may rightly do, and privately justify, what it would be wrong to advocate openly; and that the doctrine of this exception should itself be kept esoteric.","n":[3]}],[{"t":"I record this because it follows from the principle, and I will not suppress a consequence merely because it is uncomfortable.","n":[]},{"t":"It is not a licence for the powerful to please themselves; it is a strict question of what actually maximizes the good, and the burden of showing that concealment does so is heavy and rarely discharged.","n":[]},{"t":"But the utilitarian who refuses even to consider it has stopped being a utilitarian at the first inconvenient result.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"The Methods of Ethics, Book IV Chapter V ('the utilitarian may... conclude that some may enjoy exceptional liberties... and that it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly'; the discussion of whether the utilitarian standard should itself be universally promulgated); the surrounding treatment of the relation between the utilitarian standard and the rules it sanctions. Reception: Bernard Williams's coinage 'Government House utilitarianism' and his critique in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and elsewhere, that this splits the moral community into an enlightened elite and a rule-following mass; the general objection from publicity (Rawls's publicity condition on principles of justice); Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer's defense of Sidgwickian esoteric morality ('Secrecy in Consequentialism', 2010) as a coherent and sometimes correct implication of the view.","works":["The Methods of Ethics, Book IV Chapter V ('the utilitarian may... conclude that some may enjoy exceptional liberties... and that it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly'","the discussion of whether the utilitarian standard should itself be universally promulgated)","the surrounding treatment of the relation between the utilitarian standard and the rules it sanctions"],"reception":"Bernard Williams's coinage 'Government House utilitarianism' and his critique in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and elsewhere, that this splits the moral community into an enlightened elite and a rule-following mass; the general objection from publicity (Rawls's publicity condition on principles of justice); Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer's defense of Sidgwickian esoteric morality ('Secrecy in Consequentialism', 2010) as a coherent and sometimes correct implication of the view.","status":"One of the most notorious passages in the Methods and the target of Bernard Williams's influential coinage \"Government House utilitarianism\" — the charge (in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1985) that Sidgwick's view divides the moral world into a colonial elite who know the real principles and a native population fed edifying rules, and that this offends against the transparency a decent morality requires. Rawls built a publicity condition into justice as fairness partly against this. On the other side, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer (\"Secrecy in Consequentialism\", 2010; The Point of View of the Universe, 2014) defend the Sidgwickian position as a coherent and sometimes correct implication of consequentialism honestly followed. The passage is the sharpest test of whether indirect utilitarianism can answer the objection from integrity and publicity.","era":"1838-1900","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We are supposed to see that general happiness will be enhanced (just as the excellence of a metrical composition is) by a slight admixture of irregularity along with a general observance of received rules; and hence to justify the irregular conduct of a few individuals, on the ground that the supply of regular conduct from other members of the community may reasonably be expected to be adequate.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":2,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"For, as we have before observed, it is not necessary that the end which gives the criterion of rightness should always be the end at which we consciously aim: and if experience shows that the general happiness will be more satisfactorily attained if men frequently act from other motives than pure universal philanthropy, it is obvious that these other motives are reasonably to be preferred on Utilitarian principles.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":3,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"These conclusions are all of a paradoxical character: there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality, differing from that popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy.","label":"The Methods of Ethics"},{"n":4,"work":"The Methods of Ethics","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Especially as all the objections to innovation, noticed in the previous section, apply with increased force if the innovator does not even claim to be introducing a new and better general rule.","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":"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?"},{"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?"}]}