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When your happiness, your duty and everyone else's welfare pull apart, how do you decide what is right?
In The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick asks what reasons can guide our choices—and how we know those reasons are good. He examines three paths: pursuing your own happiness, following moral rules, and seeking the greatest happiness of everyone. Each offers a different answer to the question of what we ought to do.
Sidgwick does not begin by asking you to accept his theory. He tests each method with patience, taking self-interest as seriously as duty and shared happiness. Promises, truthfulness and the rules of common sense come under close examination. The stakes are practical: can reason give us a sound basis for choosing how to act?
What you’ll discover
- Three paths through ethics Find a clear map of egoism, intuitionism and utilitarianism, and the questions that separate them.
- The challenge of happiness Explore why pursuing your own happiness raises difficult questions about what you can measure.
- Duty under close examination Look closely at promises and truthfulness, where familiar rules prove less precise than they seem.
- Everyone's happiness counts Examine the case for weighing each person's happiness equally when deciding what is right.
- A fairer way to argue Learn from a thinker who tests competing views without giving his own side an easy victory.
Who will love it
This book suits readers who enjoy clear, fair-minded argument, and anyone curious about how utilitarians, Kantians and common-sense moralists really differ.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Ethics asks what ought to be done
- Politics and ideal societies cannot settle private duty
- Ought is a unique idea that reason grasps
- Free will matters less to ethics than it seems
- The pursuit of pleasure undermines itself
- Egoism cannot be made exact or certain
- Common sense morality is vague at its edges
- Only a few abstract moral axioms survive testing
- Universal happiness is the final standard of right
- Reason may be divided against itself
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I metodi dell'etica
by Henry Sidgwick · 1874
Sidgwick tests three rival ways of deciding what you ought to do and finds a conflict he cannot fully settle.
Challenging10–20 hours to readItaliano
Learn a language with challenging classicsSpagnoloFranceseTedescoItalianoGiapponesePortogheseIngleseHow we measure levels
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In short
What should you do when your own happiness points one way and your duty points another? Henry Sidgwick spent his career on that question, and The Methods of Ethics, first published in 1874, is the most careful attempt in English to answer it.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Ethics asks what ought to be done
Sidgwick begins by fixing his subject. A method of ethics is any rational procedure for deciding what an individual ought to do through voluntary action. Politics asks how a state should be governed. The sciences describe what is, and ethics asks what is right.
He then asks which ends common sense accepts as rational. Only two have a strong claim, happiness and the excellence of human nature. Happiness divides again, since it may be your own or everyone's. That gives three methods, which he calls Egoism, Intuitionism, and Utilitarianism.
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- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 13 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- First published
- 1874
- Language
- Italiano
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-methods-of-ethics.
Sidgwick, H. (2026). The methods of ethics. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-methods-of-ethics (Original work published 1874)
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-methods-of-ethics.
@book{sidgwick2026methods,
author = {Sidgwick, Henry},
title = {The Methods of Ethics},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-methods-of-ethics},
note = {First published 1874}
}
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What is The Methods of Ethics about?
It examines the ways people reason about what they ought to do. Sidgwick separates three methods, Egoism, Intuitionism, and Utilitarianism, and tests how far each can be made clear, consistent, and reliable.
What are the three methods of ethics in Sidgwick's book?
Egoism aims at your own greatest happiness. Intuitionism follows duties that seem binding in themselves. Utilitarianism aims at the greatest happiness of all. Sidgwick treats them as natural ways of thinking that he tries to make rational.
What does Sidgwick mean by the dualism of the practical reason?
He means that reason seems to support both seeking your own happiness and promoting everyone's happiness. He finds each claim reasonable on its own, and he does not find a logical way to join them without a moral order.
The author
Henry Sidgwick
1838–1900 · English philosopher
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) was an English philosopher. He was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge and became professor of moral philosophy in 1883. He wrote The Methods of Ethics, first published in 1874. He died in Cambridge in 1900.
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