Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed., London: Macmillan, 1907.
First published in 1874 by the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy indicates that The Methods of Ethics “in many ways marked the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition.” John Rawls, writing in the Forward to the Hackett reprint of the 7th edition, says Methods of Ethics “is the clearest and most accessible formulation of … ‘the classical utilitarian doctrine'”.
Excerpt:
In offering to the public a new book upon a subject so trite as Ethics, it seems desirable to indicate clearly at the outset its plan and purpose. Its distinctive characteristics may be first given negatively. It is not, in the main, metaphysical or psychological: at the same time it is not dogmatic or directly practical: it does not deal, except by way of illustration, with the history of ethical thought: in a sense it might be said to be not even critical, since it is only quite incidentally that it offers any criticism of the systems of individual moralists. It claims to be an examination, at once expository and critical, of the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are to be found—either explicit or implicit—in the moral consciousness of mankind generally and which, from time to time, have been developed, either singly or in combination, by individual thinkers, and worked up into the systems now historical.
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