This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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The most important philosopher in the utilitarian tradition, who would you go for?

Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill.

Peter Singer of Princeton University puts the case for a less familiar 19th century thinker, a man few outside academia know about.

Henry Sidwick.

Peter Singer, welcome to Philosophy Bines.

It's good to be with you again.

The topic we're going to focus on is Henry Sidrick's ethics.

Now, who was Henry Sidgerick?

Henry Sidgerick was a late 19th century Victorian philosopher, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge

University. He published what many people and I'm one of them

think is certainly among the greatest works of ethics ever written, the methods of

ethics. Published first in 1873 and throughout his lifetime he kept reworking it so the final edition is the seventh

published posthumously in 1901 and what kind of a philosopher was he what was

his central theme? Sidwick was a utilitarian.

So when people talk about the classical utilitarian,

they tend to talk about Jeremy Bentham,

John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidwick.

I regard Sidwick as the greatest of them as a philosopher. Obviously

Bentham was the pioneer and Bentham did an enormous amount of work about law and

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