Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Morality and personal relations
- 2 On the right to be punished: Some doubts
- 3 Love, guilt, and the sense of justice
- 4 Remarks on some difficulties in Freud's theory of moral development
- 5 Freud's later theory of civilization: Changes and implications
- 6 Freud, naturalism, and modern moral philosophy
- 7 Reason and motivation
- 8 Empathy and universalizability
- 9 Sidgwick on ethical judgment
- 10 Reason and ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan
- 11 Shame and self-esteem: A critique
- Index
9 - Sidgwick on ethical judgment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Morality and personal relations
- 2 On the right to be punished: Some doubts
- 3 Love, guilt, and the sense of justice
- 4 Remarks on some difficulties in Freud's theory of moral development
- 5 Freud's later theory of civilization: Changes and implications
- 6 Freud, naturalism, and modern moral philosophy
- 7 Reason and motivation
- 8 Empathy and universalizability
- 9 Sidgwick on ethical judgment
- 10 Reason and ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan
- 11 Shame and self-esteem: A critique
- Index
Summary
British moral philosophy has had two great traditions. Its empiricist tradition, which began with Hobbes and resurged with Hume and the classical utilitarians on whom Hume exercised so much influence, takes ethical judgments to be founded on or to originate in desire or feeling. Its intuitionist tradition, which formed in reaction to Hobbes and continued by way of debate with Hume and the classical utilitarians, takes ethical judgments to be deliverances of reason which subserve neither desire nor feeling and in which one recognizes and affirms morality's fundamental precepts. Within the empiricist tradition several works have supreme importance as alternative statements of its philosophy. Within the intuitionist tradition, by contrast, The Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick's masterwork, towers above the others.
The pedigree of Sidgwick's Methods is established early in the work when, in the third chapter of its first book, Sidgwick queried the nature of ethical judgment and gave in response a distinctively intuitionist account. He fashioned this account to settle the dispute between intuitionism and empiricism over the proper conception of ethical judgment, and the argument he advanced for his side appears to leave empiricism without a rejoinder. This argument is the subject of the present study. In the first two sections I will set it out as I read it and argue for this reading as against an alternative.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sources of Moral AgencyEssays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory, pp. 181 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996