Abstract

The very title of Sidgwick’s great work is fascinating: the methods of ethics. We hear much—and persons a hundred years ago heard much—of the methods of science. But we hear very little of the methods of ethics. Is ethics a science? No, and Sidgwick never thought that it was. But he did think that the methods, or something of the spirit, of scientific investigation could be imported into ethical studies, with results which, though they would not necessarily be dramatic and would certainly not be edifying, would nevertheless be worthwhile. Sidgwick himself characterized his work as “essentially an attempt to introduce precision of thought into a subject usually treated in a too loose and popular way”. “I have thought that the predominance in the minds of moralists of a desire to edify has impeded the real progress of ethical science; and that this would be benefited by an application to it of the same disinterested curiosity to which we chiefly owe the great discoveries of physics”.