J.S. Mill, H. Sidgwick and the Transformation of Utilitarianism

This longer-term project examines how and why the character of the utilitarian project has changed from Bentham and the Philosophic Radicals to John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick.

It reconstructs how the spirit of the utilitarian project has fundamentally changed in the continuous development of central ideas of the utilitarian tradition – efforts to secularize, scientify and professionalize (moral) philosophy – under the constellation of problems of science, religion and politics characteristic of the Victorian age: An originally radical social reform movement became a professional moral-theoretical research project.

Against this background, the project examines, among other things, Mill’s overall philosophical engagement with Whewell’s intuitionism, Mill’s innovation of so-called “qualitative hedonism” and Sidgwick’s (also Whewell-inspired) understanding of the task of moral philosophical theorizing.