It is sometimes said that we live in an age that rejects authority. Th — Henry Sidgwick

"For philosophy and history alike have taught...to seek not what is "safe," but what is true."

"I may begin by laying down as a principle that ‘all pain of human or rational beings is to be avoided’; and then afterwards may be led to enunciate the wider rule that ‘all pain is to be avoided’; it being made evident to me that the difference of rationality between two species of sentient beings is no ground for establishing a fundamental ethical distinction between their respective pains."

"it seems scarcely extravagant to say that, amid all the profuse waste of the means of happiness which men commit, there is no imprudence more flagrant than that of Selfishness in the ordinary sense of the term,—that excessive concentration of attention on the individual’s own happiness which renders it impossible for him to feel any strong interest in the pleasures and pains of others."

"A universal refusal to propagate the human species would be the greatest of conceivable crimes from a Utilitarian point of view"

"Is it total or average happiness that we seek to make a maximum?...we foresee as possible that an increase in [population] numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness...if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole...it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible...but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum."

"Despite his inability to build a system, Sidgwick had made Cambridge Benthamite in its social reasoning. Perhaps this development was always inevitable in a university which had aimed to turn out mathematical rather than classical curates. But it had important consequences. Only a philosophy based on a hedonistic calculus could provided exact reasoning about social policy. Alfred Marshall was a product of Sidgwicks Cambridge. On the other hand, Sidgwick left moral philosophy in a mess. Intuitionist ideas revived, with an admixture of Hegelianism, in the more dynamic form of Idealism. But its headquarters were at Oxford rather than Cambridge; its high priests the Oxford philosophers Bradley and T. H. Green. Cambridge had become too critical, too empirical, to accept its ethics in metaphysical form. The way was open for G. E. Moore to construct a Cambridge system detached from both Benthamism and metaphysics. Moore was as much a product of Sidgwicks failure as was Marshall."