La thèse porte sur la conception de la politique moderne d'Henry Sidgwick fondée sur une étude philosophique et historique de la politique par philosophe lui-même et des travaux que celui-ci a réalisé sur la politique et l'organisation d'un gouvernement moderne. / The thesis is about Henry Sidgwick's concept of modern politics based on a philosophical and historical study of politics by the philosopher himself, and the written work he made about politics and the organisation of a modern government.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1918. / Typewritten. "Abstract": 9 leaves at end. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Inaug.-Diss.--Heidelberg. / Lebenslauf. Published in full, Heidelberg, C. Winter, 1907. iv, 107 p.

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I consider Derek Parfit's claim that our partial and impartial reasons are only roughly commensurable. Parfit's philosophy draws heavily on Henry Sidgwick's dualism of practical reason, and I examine how well Parfit's arguments in Reasons and Persons and On What Matters handle the difficulties that come with Sidgwick's dualism. I also defend Parfit's conclusions against Allen Wood's accusation that he relies on intuitions about cases that lack morally relevant information. This charge overlooks the more fundamental differences in their two moral theories. I conclude that if we accept Parfit's conception of what reasons we have, we ought to accept his further claim that our fundamental reasons cannot be weighed against one another. If this is the case, we will always have sufficient reason to be both moral and self-interested in most situations.

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The use of reason appears to lead to divergent conclusions for what is right and what is good in human action. While reason is a central feature in ethical theory, there is a problem when that central feature does not lead to consistent conclusions about how to act in a given situation. Several philosophers have attempted to combine previous moral theories in order to provide a better template for human action. I contend that the use of reason is of vital import when determining the foundation for moral action and that moral theories, to be consistent with reason, should incorporate aspects of both non-consequentialist and consequentialist ethical theories. I argue that there is a unifying foundation presupposed by the moral theories of both Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Through the use of reason the theories of Kant and Mill can be reconciled to show that these theories can be combined when understanding the basic foundation that they share.

Much modern moral philosophy has conceived of its interpretative and critical aims in relation to an entity it sometimes terms 'common-sense morality'. The term was influentially used in something like its canonical sense by Henry Sidgwick in his classic work The Methods of Ethics (1874). Sidgwick conceived of common-sense morality as a more-or-less determinate body of current moral opinion, and traced his ('doxastic') conception through Kant back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the practice of Plato's Socrates before him. The Introduction to this thesis traces the influence of Sidgwick's conception both on subsequent (mis)understandings of Socratic practice as well as on the practice of moral philosophy in the twentieth century. The first essay offers a challenge to Sidgwick's understanding of Socratic practice. I argue that Socrates' questioning of his interlocutors, far from revealing some determinate body of pre-existing beliefs, is in fact a demonstration of the dynamic and partially indeterminate quality of common-sense morality. The value for the interlocutor of engaging in such conversation with Socrates consisted primarily in its forcing him to adopt what I term a deliberative stance with respect to his own practice and dispositions, asking himself not 'what is it that I believe?' but rather, 'what am I to believe?' This understanding of Socratic practice gives us a way of reconciling the often puzzling combination of conservative and radical elements in Plato's dialogues. The second essay is a discussion of the reception of Sidgwick's conception of ethics in twentieth-century Oxford, a hegemonic centre of Anglophone philosophy. This recent tradition consists both of figures who accepted Sidgwick's picture of moral philosophy's aims and those who rejected it. Of the critics, I am centrally concerned with Bernard Williams, whose life's work, I argue, can be fruitfully understood as the elaboration of a heterodox understanding of Socratic practice, opposed to Sidgwick's. Ethics, on this conception, is a project directed at the emancipation of our moral experience from the many distortions to which it is vulnerable. Williams's writings in moral philosophy, disparate and not entirely systematic, are unified by these emancipatory aims, aims they share with strains of psychoanalysis except in that they do not scorn philosophical argument as a tool of emancipation: in this respect among others, I claim, they are fundamentally Socratic.