Henry Sidgwick, moral order, and utilitarianism

Abstract

Henry Sidgwick is today remembered as a later nineteenth-century moral philosopher who struggled with his Christian faith, having difficulty reconciling this with an emergent modern and secular philosophy. In this paper, it is suggested that the only accurate part of this statement relates to the century in which Henry Sidgwick lived. It is argued that modern readers lack sensitivity to questions of faith and religiosity that were commonplace in the later nineteenth century, and that to have doubts in an Anglican faith did not necessarily imply any weakening of Christian faith. Furthermore, a misreading of Sidgwick as a moral philosopher in the modern sense neglects Sidgwick's central role in a Moral Sciences Tripos that included logic and political economy. Only after Marshall extracted political economy and political science from the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1903 did that Tripos become the foundation for a new Philosophy Tripos, and it is an error to read that later configuration back into the Tripos that Sidgwick led from 1883 to 1900.