Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays.

by Henry Sidgwick

The Making of the Modern Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 includes over 20,000 analytical, theoretical and practical works on American and British Law. It includes the writings of major legal theorists, including Sir Edward Coke, Sir William Blackstone, James Fitzjames Stephen, Frederic William Maitland, John Marshall, Joseph Story, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound, among others. Legal Treatises includes casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches and other works of the most influential writers of their time. It is of great value to researchers of domestic and international law, government and politics, legal history, business and economics, criminology and much more.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition ++++Harvard Law School Swan Sonnenschein; New Macmillan, 1909. vi, 260 p.; 20 cm

Genres: Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1977

About the author

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death, and is best known in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a member of the Metaphysical Society and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence.

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”