Bart Schultz

The career of Oxford philosopher Roger Crisp has produced a wonderfully rich yield of elegant, lucid philosophizing that combines in a rare mix historical erudition and brilliant, creative, and highly interdisciplinary ethical argument. Crisp is steeped in Aristotle and Mill, W. D. Ross and Derek Parfit, but his deepest source of inspiration is by his own admission the Victorian era Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, author of the famous Methods of Ethics. Although Sidgwick has been regarded as a kind of master of those who know by everyone from Brand Blanshard and C. D. Broad to John Rawls and Peter Singer, his star has been on an especially dramatic ascent in recent decades, in very...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 567-568 [Access article in PDF] Georgios Varouxakis. Mill on Nationality. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix + 169. Cloth $80.00. Georgios Varouxakis is a leader in the new generation of Mill scholars, and his work is exciting and provocative. Well-versed in recent debates over nationalism, colonialism, orientalism, and racism, he aims to address rather than avoid questions about Mill's supposed imperialistic and racist leanings.Although slim and rather costly, Mill on Nationality marks an important statement of Varouxakis's extensive research on Mill. It "offers a study of Mill's attitudes and pronouncements on nationality, patriotism, national character, national self-determination, and related issues, based on a great range of writings, from his major works through his innumerable journalistic articles to his voluminous correspondence. Writings that prove particularly useful and illuminating are those related to France and his constant Franco-British or Franco-English comparisons, as well as his writings on Ireland and the Irish question, the Celtic peoples more generally, India, and, last but far from least, his pronouncements on Englishness, the "English national character," and his recipes and subtle strategies aimed at its education and "improvement" (5).The book delivers. If the prose at times suggests a lightly reworked dissertation, Varouxakis does nonetheless cheerfully maul scores of commentators on Mill whose works betray a less-than-intimate familiarity with the Mill corpus—e.g., everyone from Will Kymlicka to Bhiku Parekh. Varouxakis's criticisms reflect his methodology; he aims to trounce "misinterpretation due to lack of adequate contextualization and to insufficient conversance with Mill's overall thought" (8). But as with so many champions of this approach, he plainly adores the subject of his hermeneutical efforts, who emerges as a very bright light amid the dimness of later commentary on him. Referring to a passage from Mill's Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews, he writes that this "is impressive indeed: the thinker who is associated (wrongly) with so-called elitism, asserts that as complex an area of policy as foreign and international policy should be under the close scrutiny of the citizens and that it is a gross dereliction of duty if citizens fail to scrutinize their country's foreign policy and international comportment using as an excuse that international law is too complicated to understand. This is a very demanding conception of citizenship and a very lofty and high-minded perception of what constitutes a good citizen and a good patriot" (125-6). That it remains a relevant one is clear—indeed, "Mill's conception of the relationship between obligations to country and obligations to mankind was close to that of [Martha] Nussbaum" (118). For both, patriotism is commendable only when it conduces "to the interests of the whole of humanity" (116).As for racism, one of the most explosive issues in Mill studies, Varouxakis helpfully urges that discussions "about national and... cultural characteristics were, in Victorian Britain, inextricably associated with discussions about 'race,' and the term, 'race,' was often substituted for nation, nationhood, or national character" (39). Mill often used the term "race" in a loose way, discussing national characteristics "without reference as to whether they were biologically inherited or simply cultural traits occurring in these groups" (41). Moreover, "while accepting vaguely that racial origin is one of the factors influencing the formation of national character, Mill went further to establish that racial predisposition in itself could prove nothing and was liable to be modified out of any recognition through the agency of circumstances such as institutions, historical accidents and human effort" (43). In fact, for all his criticisms of the historical naiveté of the Enlightenment, Mill, in such mature works as The Subjection of Women, offered "not only a theoretical rejection of biological determinism, but also... an unequivocal belief in the malleability of human nature and therefore in the improvability of the character of various nations" (47).To be sure, disturbing questions remain. Although Mill "made strenuous efforts during the last three decades of his life to depreciate the importance of physical factors in the formation...

This chapter discusses the life and ethical philosophy of Henry Sidgwick. His masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics, first published in 1874, marks the culmination of the classical and nontheological utilitarian tradition, which took ‘the greatest happiness’ as the fundamental normative demand. Sidgwick was also a reformer who always advocated education as the crucial issue for historical progress, in ethics, economics, politics, and other areas. His practical ethics, often only indirectly utilitarian, involved finding common ground despite foundational ethical differences, and that common ground was the cultivation of humanity.

This essay is in effect something of a self-review of my book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe and of the volume, co-edited with Georgios Varouxakis, Utilitarianism and Empire . My chief concern here is to go beyond those earlier works in underscoring the arbitrariness of the dominant contextualist and reconstructive historical accounts of J. S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick on the subjects of race and racism. The forms of racism are many, and simple historical accuracy suggests that both Mill and Sidgwick could be described as ‘racist’ on some plausible understandings of that term

J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy was the single best philosophical commentary on Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics produced in the twentieth century. Although Schneewind was primarily concerned to read Sidgwick's ethical theory in its historical context, as reflecting the controversies generated by such figures as J. S. Mill, F. D. Maurice, and William Whewell, his reading also ended up being highly neo-Kantian, reflecting various Rawlsian priorities. As valuable as such an interpretation of Sidgwick surely is, Schneewind's approach has always been in some key respects too narrowly conceived in its construction of Sidgwick's philosophical and cultural context, failing to grapple with such troubling, philosophically relevant issues as the possible racism of Sidgwick's ethical and political views, or the sexual politics manifest in his collaboration with such figures as John Addington Symonds. Correspondence:c1 [email protected].

The pragmatist revival of recent decades has in some respects obscured the radical emancipatory potential of Deweyan pragmatism. The author suggests that neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty have too often failed to grasp the ways in which Dewey's notion of social intelligence was bound up with the case for participatory democracy, and that recent efforts to bring out the potential of pragmatism for supporting certain forms of feminist and gay critical theory make for a more compelling reconstruction of pragmatism.