The Methods of Ethics (e-book) (used book) | Na Na | bookbook.eu

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The Methods of Ethics was first published in 1874. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy indicates that The Methods of Ethics "in many ways marked the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition." Noted moral and political philosopher John Rawls, writing in the Forward to the Hackett reprint of the 7th edition, says Methods of Ethics "is the clearest and most accessible formulation of ... 'the classical utilitarian doctrine'". Contemporary utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer has said that the Methods "is simply the best book on ethics ever written."

Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics was—and is—important for many reasons. Though earlier utilitarians like William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill had sketched versions of utilitarian ethics, Sidgwick was the first theorist to develop the theory in detail and to investigate how it relates both to other popular ethical theories and to conventional morality. His efforts to show that utilitarianism is substantially compatible with common moral values helped to popularize utilitarian ethics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The careful, painstaking, and detailed way Sidgwick discusses moral problems was an important influence on G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and other founders of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Contemporary ethicists Derek Parfit and Peter Singer have acknowledged Sidgwick as a major influence on their thought. As Sidgwick scholar J. B. Schneewind has noted, the Methods “is widely viewed as one of the best works of moral philosophy ever written. His account of classical utilitarianism is unsurpassed. His discussions of the general status of morality and of particular moral concepts are models of clarity and acumen. His insights about the relations between egoism and utilitarianism have stimulated much valuable research. And his way of framing moral problems, by asking about the relations between commonsense beliefs and the best available theories, has set much of the agenda for twentieth-century ethics.”