Symposium on David Phillips’s Sidgwickian Ethics

Abstract

Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics has many admirers. In the foreword to the Hackett edition of the book, John Rawls claims that of the works devoted to defending classical utilitarianism The Methods of Ethics is “the most philosophically profound.” More recently, in On What Matters, Derek Parfit states that The Methods of Ethics is the best book on ethics ever written, since it contains “the largest number of true and important claims.” Despite these accolades, there exist only a small ...