Abstract
This chapter reviews the book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (2004), by Bart Schultz. If social good for all or most people is to be achieved, it will be because somehow or other the selfish decisions of many people combine to produce it. Such Utilitarian ideas, however, are but an amputated limb of the radical philosophy that once went by that name. For the three great British Utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—the proper social goal was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Sidgwick domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. Unlike Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick wanted badly to believe in conventional religion. He tried to prove the existence of a life after death scientifically, co-founding the Society for Psychical Research and devoting a great part of his later life to experiments that tested the claims of mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists. Sidgwick was also profoundly unconventional in matters of gender and sexuality.
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