Henry Sidgwick

Henry Sidgwick ; 31 May 1838 – 28 August 1900 was an English utilitarian philosopher as alive as economist. He was a Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death, as alive as is best requested in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a item of the Metaphysical Society and promoted the higher education of women. His throw in economics has also had a lasting influence. In 1875, with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, he co-founded Newnham College, a women-only section college of the University of Cambridge. It was theCambridge college to admit women, after Girton College. In 1856, Sidgwick joined the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society.

Economics

Sidgwick worked in economics at a time when the British economics mainstream was undergoing the transition from the classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill to the neo-classical economics of William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. Sidgwick responded to these reorient by preferring to emphasize the similarities between the old economics and the new, choosing to base his form on J.S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, incorporating the insights of Jevons.

Sidgwick believed self interest to be a centerpiece of human motivation. He believed that this self interest had immense improvement in the economic world, and that people should non be blamed for wanting to sell a value for the highest possible price, or buy a good for the lowest possible price. He distinguished though a difference between the ability for an individual to properly judge their own interests and the ability of a group of people to properly come to a point of maximum group happiness. He found two divergences in the outcomes of the decisions of the individual and of the group. One object lesson of this is the opinion that there is more to life than the accumulation of wealth, so it is not always in the best interest of society to simply purpose for wealth maximizing results. This issue may be due limitations of the individual, from attributes such as ignorance, immaturity, and disability. This can be a moral judgement, such(a) as the decision to limit the sale of alcohol to an individual out of a concern of their alive being. The second interpreter is the fact that wealth maximizing outcomes for society are simply non always a opportunity when individuals within that society are any attempting to maximize their individual wealth. Contradictions are likely to emerge that cause one individual a lower maximum wealth due to another individual's actions, therefore disallowing the opportunity of a society-wide wealth maximization. Problems also are possible to arise due to monopoly.

Sidgwick would have a major influence on the coding of welfare economics, due to his own work on the spoke inspiring Arthur Cecil Pigou's work The Economics of Welfare.

Alfred Marshall, founder of the Cambridge School of economics, would describe Sidgwick as his "spiritual mother and father."