Nothing is good in itself except desirable consciousness

Ultimate good is desirable consciousness

Henry Sidgwick 1838 · 1900Cambridge utilitarian who named the "paradox of hedonism": seeking pleasure too much keeps you from finding it.

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What it claims

Ultimate good is desirable consciousness, and it comes down to pleasure, that is, to happiness.

Why

A thing with no consciousness is worth nothing in itself: whatever we call good is good through the happy conscious life it brings.

The same idea through history

Épicure300 BCEpicurus makes pleasure the beginning and end of a happy life. Sidgwick adds a proof by elimination: whatever else is called good is good through what it makes us feel.Jeremy Bentham1789Bentham says pleasure and pain are the only masters of our acts. Sidgwick keeps the principle but rests it on an analysis of what can be ultimately good.John Stuart Mill1861Mill ranks pleasures as higher and lower. Sidgwick refuses to rank pleasures by their source: only the desirable quality of the feeling counts, as judged by the one who feels it.

Henry Sidgwick1874Sidgwick (1874, 7th edition 1907) makes the thesis the conclusion of a review of the other candidates for ultimate good: virtue, perfection, truth, beauty, freedom.

In short

"Nothing is good in itself except desirable consciousness" is an argument by Henry Sidgwick (The Methods of Ethics, Book III, ch. 14 (1874; 7th ed. 1907), 1874) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: pleasure). Its claim: Ultimate good is desirable consciousness, and it comes down to pleasure, that is, to happiness. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Methods of Ethics, Book III, ch. 14 (1874; 7th ed. 1907)

Valid with an implicit premise

Many things seem good: virtue, knowledge, beauty, freedom. Sidgwick asks what is left when we step back, in a calm hour, and ask why each one matters. His answer: a painting, a theorem or a movement of matter is nothing as long as no conscious being benefits from it. Among states of consciousness, only those that are desirable to the one who lives them count, and he calls that happiness or pleasure. He does not say that knowledge or virtue are useless: he says they are worth what they bring to conscious lives.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where ultimate good is a non-painful feeling that its owner finds desirable and that is still not counted as pleasure (for instance, a plain serenity). Sidgwick avoids the case by defining pleasure as any feeling judged desirable by the one who has it.

The argument is valid with the hidden premise P5. Ultimate good belongs to consciousness (P1): to a feeling, a cognition, a volition, or their links with outside things. Cognitions and volitions alone are neutral (P3), "ideal goods" taken apart from consciousness are not ultimately desirable (P4), and a painful feeling is not either (P2). What is left is the non-painful feeling, which P5 calls pleasure. Objections mostly target P1 and P4: one can deny that a beauty no one sees, or contact with reality, is worth nothing.

Analogy. A banknote is worth something only because it can be exchanged for something else. If we ask what everything we prize is for, we end up with what is lived: Sidgwick thinks that at the end of the chain, what is left is the well-being of those who live.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

George Edward Moore 1903 · attacks premise 4

Imagine two worlds that no human being will ever see: one exceedingly beautiful, the other a heap of filth. Moore finds it rational to hold that it is better for the first to exist, and that, if we could, we should make that one rather than the other. He admits the case is extreme and that in practice effects on conscious beings come first. But then a beauty no one sees would have value in itself, and P4 is false.

Sidgwick replies

Henry Sidgwick (earlier text) 1874 · Sidgwick, written before Moore

Sidgwick writes that we often judge certain objects or scenes good because of their beauty, but that no one would consider it rational to aim at producing beauty in nature when no human being could ever contemplate it. Moore quotes this passage in order to oppose it.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: it is a clash of intuitions. Sidgwick and Moore describe the same imagined case and reach opposite verdicts. Sidgwick could not answer Moore, who wrote after his death, but the passage Moore quotes already says what he thought.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an open point. There is no test accepted by all to decide between the two intuitions. Defenders of Sidgwick's thesis answer that the world "without a witness" is hard to imagine without slipping a spectator into it.

Robert Nozick 1974 · attacks premise 1

If a machine could give us any experience we desired, many would refuse to plug in. We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. So something matters in addition to experience, and the good does not boil down to pleasant consciousness.

Sidgwick replies

see the argument

Henry Sidgwick (a neighbouring case) 1874 · Sidgwick, on preferring the true

Sidgwick knows this kind of preference. A man may prefer to grasp the truth rather than rest on accepted fictions, even if that is more painful. For him, what is preferred is then not consciousness itself but a relation between the mind and something else. And if we learned afterwards that what we took for truth was not truth, we should feel that our preference had been mistaken.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Sidgwick treats a case close to the machine, not the machine itself, which comes almost a century later. For him, the preference for the real does not survive calm judgement. For Nozick it does, and it shows that we want to be and to do, not only to feel.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an open point. Both camps appeal to what seems evident on reflection, and do not agree. Recent surveys show that the answer depends on how the question is put.

Immanuel Kant 1785 · attacks premise 3

Nothing is good without qualification except a good will. It is good in itself, not through what it achieves. And the sight of a being without a trace of good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never please an impartial rational spectator. So happiness is not the ultimate good: good will is its condition.

Sidgwick replies

Henry Sidgwick (on virtue) 1874 · Sidgwick, on virtue and pain

Sidgwick finds virtue precious, but he sees it as one part of the good, through the consciousness that goes with it. He notes that the Greeks held that a virtuous life remains good even under extreme pain. A modern thinker, he says, would hardly venture to assert that the part of life a martyr spends in torture is in itself desirable.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Sidgwick answers the idea that virtue is worth something in itself, not Kant's remark about the impartial spectator. For Kant, the value of good will does not depend on what it makes one feel. For Sidgwick, a virtue with no desirable consciousness is not ultimately desirable.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: a basic disagreement between ethics of duty and ethics of consequences, open since Kant and Sidgwick and not settled.