Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays

by the late Henry Sidgwick

A classic work in the field of practical and professional ethics, this collection of nine essays by English philosopher and educator Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) was first published in 1898 and forms a vital complement to Sidgwick's major treatise on moral theory, The Methods of Ethics . Reissued here as Volume One in a new series sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the book is composed chiefly of addresses to members of two ethical societies that Sidgwick helped to found in Cambridge and London in the 1880s. Clear, taut, and lively, these essays demonstrate the compassion and calm reasonableness that Sidgwick brought to all his writings.

As Sidgwick explains in his opening essay, the societies he addressed aimed to allow academics, professionals, and others to pursue joint efforts at reaching "some results of value for practical guidance and life." Sidgwick hoped that members might discuss such questions as when, if ever, public officials might be justified in lying or in breaking promises, whether scientists could legitimately inflict suffering on animals for research purposes, when nations might have just cause in going to war, and a score of other issues of ethics in public and private life still debated a century later.

This valuable reissue returns Practical Ethics to its rightful place in Sidgwick's oeuvre . Noted ethicist Sissela Bok provides a superb Introduction, ranging over the course of Sidgwick's life and career and underscoring the relevance of Practical Ethics to contemporary debate. She " Practical Ethics , the last book that Henry Sidgwick published before his death in 1900, contains the distillation of a lifetime of reflection on ethics and on what it would take for ethical debate to be 'really of use in the solution of practical questions.'" This rich, engaging work is essential reading for all concerned with the relationship between ethical theory and. practice, and with the questions that have driven the study of professional ethics in recent years.

Genres: Philosophy

168 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1977

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sidgwick provides a really strong complement to his work Methods of Ethics with this collection. It feels like a breath of hope in the intellectual failure of the philosopher. Two essays in the book are actually about the failure inherent in the study of ethics.

There’s also two essay on religion and veracity. To anyone aware of Sidgwick’s long history -of religious doubts and his own history of refusing adherence to religious dogma which resulted in the lost of his livelihood- these essays will seems very personal like the two first speech on ethical societies.

Nonetheless the book gives a good insight into an applied view of the utilitarianism of Sidgwick. It touches topics that Sidgwick has tackled his whole life. These essays shine in the collection.

Much can be said about this collection, yet it is to often put aside when it was clearly important to the author and so deeply connected with his own personal life. This is not the mythical tale of Methods of Ethics, but it the closing chapter in the intellectual life of this ethicist.

“Thus, even a man who said, “Evil, be thou my good”, and acted accordingly, might have only an obscured consciousness of the awful irrationality of his action -obscured by a fallacious imagination that his only chance of being in any admirable, at the point of which he has now reached in his downward course, must lie in candid and consistent wickedness”