Bart Schultz

The Land Acknowledgment of the Chicago History Museum provides another possible model for a University of Chicago LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT: "The Chicago History Museum is situated on ancestral homelands of the Potawatomi people, who cared for the land until forced out by non-Native settlers. The Ojibwe, Odawa, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Miami, Mascouten, Sac and Fox, Kickapoo, Ho-Chunk, Menomonee, and tribes whose names have been lost as a result of genocide also lived, gathered, and traded in this region. Today, Chicago is home to the largest urban Indigenous population in the Midwest, and they continue to honor this land and its waterways, practice traditions, and celebrate their heritage. The Chicago History Museum acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous communities and commits to an ongoing collaboration to share a complex and inclusive history.

University of Chicago
Senior Lecturer, Philosophy Department, Division of the Humanities; Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Work Address:
Philosophy Dept., Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago,  Edelstone Bldg. 133 (mail to Cobb MB# 103), 6030 S. Ellis Av., Chicago, Il. 60637
Phone: 773-571-0580 or 773-834-3929 ext. 1
E-Mail: rschultz@uchicago.edu or bartschultz63@gmail.com
Website: https://www.bartschultz.com/

I It is more or less de rigueur to begin a piece such as this by considering why anyone should take a serious philosphical interest in the ethics and politics of Bertrand Russell. Russell was, of course, one of the most profoundly influential philosophers of the twentieth ...

"A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze."-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass "And even at my age, and in these times, times that sometimes seem so bad, I can keep on keepin' on, and you can too."-Timuel D. Black, Sacred Ground Table of Contents Volume I.

Project Title College Course Feedback-Winter 2022 Number Enrolled 20 Number of Responses 12 Report CommentsOpinions expressed in these evaluations are those of students enrolled in the specific course and do not represent the University. Creation Date Monday, April 4, 2022 Download PDF What are the most important things that you learned in this course? Please reflect on the knowledge and skills you gained.

Henry Sidgwick was a Cambridge philosopher, psychic researcher and educational reformer, whose works in practical philosophy, especially The Methods of Ethics (1874), brought classical utilitarianism to its peak of theoretical sophistication and drew out the deep conflicts within that tradition, perhaps within the age of British imperialism itself. Sidgwick was profoundly influenced by J.S. Mill, but his version of utilitarianism – the view that those social or individual actions are right that maximize aggregate happiness – also revived certain Benthamite doctrines, though with more cogent accounts of ultimate good as pleasure, of total versus average utility, and of the analytical or deductive method. Yet Sidgwick was a cognitivist in ethics who sought both to ground utilitarianism on fundamental intuitions and to encompass within it the principles of common-sense ethics (truthfulness, fidelity, justice, etc.); his highly eclectic practical philosophy assimilated much of the ratio...

... Henry Sidgwick, Essays on Ethics and Method Reviewed by. Bart Schultz. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. Philosophy in Review ISSN 1206-5269 EISSN 1920-8936. ...

Henry Sidgwick shared many of the feminist concerns of John Stuart Mill and was an active reformer in the cause of higher education for women, but his feminism has never received the attention it deserves and he has in recent times been criticized for promulgating a masculinist epistemology. This essay is a prolegomenon to a comprehensive account of Sidgwick's feminism, briefly setting out various elements of his views on epistemology, equality, gender, and sexuality in order to provide some initial sense of how he carried on and developed the Millian project.

Henry Sidgwick has gone down in the history of philosophy as both the great, classical utilitarian moral theorist who authoredThe Methods of Ethics, and an outstanding exemplar of intellectual honesty and integrity, one whose personal virtues were inseparable from his philosophical strengths and method. Yet this construction of Sidgwick the philosopher has been based on a too limited understanding of Sidgwick's casuistry and leading practical ethical concerns. As his friendship with John Addington Symonds reveals, Sidgwick was deeply entangled in an effort to negotiate the proper spheres of the public and private, not only in philosophical and religious matters, but also with respect to explosive questions of sexuality – particularly same sex actions and identities, as celebrated by Symonds and other champions of Oxford Hellenism and Whitmania. His willingness to mislead the public about such issues suggests that Sidgwick's utilitarian casuistry was rather more complex and e...

J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy was the single best philosophical commentary on Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics produced in the twentieth century. Although Schneewind was primarily concerned to read Sidgwick's ethical theory in its historical context, as reflecting the controversies generated by such figures as J. S. Mill, F. D. Maurice, and William Whewell, his reading also ended up being highly neo-Kantian, reflecting various Rawlsian priorities. As valuable as such an interpretation of Sidgwick surely is, Schneewind's approach has always been in some key respects too narrowly conceived in its construction of Sidgwick's philosophical and cultural context, failing to grapple with such troubling, philosophically relevant issues as the possible racism of Sidgwick's ethical and political views, or the sexual politics manifest in his collaboration with such figures as John Addington Symonds.

and inefficient norms” (179). She claims that “individuals systematically underestimate the similarity of their attitudes to those of their peers” (184). For instance, I might not like prejudicial treatment of immigrants, but I might engage in prejudicial behavior because others appear to approve of it. Little do I know that many others share my disapproval (187). The result is that the norm goes unchallenged. So, “individuals may disapprove of the norm but still refrain from open dissension because they interpret others’ behavior as signaling support” (195). Bicchieri closes the book with the suggestion that we can understand how a fairness norm might emerge in the absence of one by recognizing that “most individuals who behave in a ‘fair’ or ‘decent’ way do so simply because they have certain kinds of expectations” (217). In general, social norms emerge because, in unfamiliar situations where it is expected that there is a norm, actors look for behavioral regularities and, having identified them, they aim to conform to them when they expect that doing so is preferred by a sufficient part of the population. Here Bicchieri stands opposed to a tendency to leave unstated the psychological aspects of norm-following (217). For a philosophical audience, Grammar may be somewhat unsatisfying, not because it works within a certain philosophical outlook about social norms but because it avoids engagement with philosophical issues in favor of working out the empirical details of that outlook. (A glance at Bicchieri’s bibliography is some indication of her intended domain of engagement.) Yet Grammar is nonetheless interesting for its focused attempt to articulate how one conception of social norms can be made experimentally respectable. Sadly, many philosophers eschew such tasks. But if they want social norms in their analyses of any number of phenomena, they ultimately need an empirically respectable story about how social norms actually affect behavior. Bicchieri should be praised for pursuing this kind of investigation.

“If we were to follow the wisdom of repugnance in eating, the greatest wisdom would undoubtedly be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived for a year on cottage cheese and rye bread; my old friend Bart Schultz, who ate cheese pizza and salad; or nearly any two-year old” (81–82). I was delighted to thus discover myself—neatly sandwiched between philosophical genius and wonderful, stubborn innocence—close to the heart of Anne Norton’s timely, insightful, and very personal account of the thinking and politicizing of Leo Strauss and his followers, many of whom have achieved prominence in the neoconservative movement of recent decades. Over the course of thirteen chapters, bearing such titles as “Closing the American Mind” and “Getting the Natural Right,” her book both explicates the core meaning of the term “Straussian” and brings vividly to life—often in high comic relief—the strange sociology of this school of thought. Her account can be especially recommended to European political philosophers, who have often found themselves baffled by the phenomenon of Straussianism, if they have heard of it at all. The above line comes in the midst of a witty attack on the views of Leon Kass, chairman of the Presidential Council on Bioethics and an ardent Straussian who has, in Norton’s words, undertaken “to tell Americans not only how they ought to eat but how they ought to think of romance, marry, and produce children, how happiness should be earned, and how they should mourn” (79). Her judgment is stern:

I It is more or less de rigueur to begin a piece such as this by considering why anyone should take a serious philosphical interest in the ethics and politics of Bertrand Russell. Russell was, of course, one of the most profoundly influential philosophers of the twentieth ...

Course evaluations for the Zoom version of Happiness, spring quarter 2021.  The course focused mainly on Haybron's emotional condition theory of happiness and authenticity requirement for well-being, and Sumner's authentic  happiness (as life satisfaction) theory of well-being, though much critical material was introduced to underscore the ideological dimensions of happiness research and the need for greater diversity and inclusion.

These are the course evaluations from the 2019 version of my advanced undergraduate seminar on consequentialism.  For this version of the course, key works included Eggleston and Miller, The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, and de Lazari-Radek and Singer, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.

Course evaluations from my winter 2019 course on Philosophy and Philanthropy.  The course was designedly experimental and structured to be responsive to student participation (all students participated in group presentations on topics of special interest to them).  The readings featured various philosophical perspectives on effective altruism and highlighted important contemporary critiques of mainstream philanthropy.

A book review of a superb recent volume devoted to the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Available at Utilitas, FirstView, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/tommie-shelby-and-brandon-m-terry-eds-to-shape-a-new-world-essays-on-the-political-philosophy-of-martin-luther-king-jr-cambridge-ma-the-belknap-press-of-harvard-university-press-2018-pp-464-3500/B9D68AFAC02E159F0FB226D47A9694F0

Some critical reflections on the forms of political nostalgia, the responsibilities of academic philosophers, and the continuing need for a more diverse and inclusive approach to philosophy and its history, with special reference to Timuel Black's memoir Sacred Ground.  See http://jptp.online/issues/volume-ii/

On December 8, 2018, an All-Star cast gathered at the Logan Center Performance Hall to participate in a symposium on the life and times of the remarkable Prof. Timuel D. Black, educator, civil rights activist, oral historian, and the Senior Statesman of Chicago's mid-South Side.  Prof. Black had just turned 100 years old on December 7, and the performances and panels that made up this birthday symposium formed a remarkable tribute to his life and work.  Prof. Black's new memoir, Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black, has just been released by Northwestern University Press.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0E-gGiJ6M&fbclid=IwAR1kPF_5Nf3tH6mwfnkeB0k7kvX4hWb6-lzhPjNALdqz2tD5LazrpIexwV0

A brief critical reflection on the reception of my books The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, 2017) and Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004). The clarifications and rejoinders offered are, I believe, important for understanding how these works reflect both a sympathetic, complex reconstruction of the classical utilitarian legacy and an approach to the history of philosophy prioritizing diversity and inclusion.
http://www2.units.it/etica/2018_2/SCHULTZ.pdf

William Godwin: rebel for love, happiness, and anarchy

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    Sunday 4 June 2017 5:30PM

What does happiness have to do with morality? Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are perhaps the most recognised ‘happiness philosophers’. They gave us the moral rule we more-or-less live by today: seek the greatest good for the greatest number. But one of their number—William Godwin—often drops off the list. His views on free love, anarchy, and government stretched the doctrine about as far as it could go—and so did his love life. To this day his thinking challenges us to consider what it means to live well.

Bart Schultz on The Happiness Philosophers
May 30, 2017 by PUP Author

SchultzIn The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most profoundly influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Schultz recently took the time to answer some questions about his new book.

What do you hope to achieve with this book?

Well, I suppose it represents one of the ways in which I try to “do good better,” as the saying goes.  Among other things, I would like to see it help spark a more critical approach to the so-called “happiness industry,” that vast literature (both popular and academic) on the subject of happiness that far too often lends itself to questionable political (or apolitical) agendas.  The great nineteenth-century utilitarians—Godwin and Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick—developed and deployed their notions of happiness as part of their tireless efforts to advance social reform, e.g. seeking to promote happiness by securing political and social equality for women.  They had their failings, but their energetic reformism was often admirable and their example remains relevant to our political situation today.  Were they around today, they would all be participating in the Women’s Marches, fighting global poverty, and sounding the alarm about global warming.

Many people might not think of utilitarianism in that way, or of academic philosophy as holding that potential.

Yes, but those are views that I am out to challenge.  I hope that my book will inspire people in many different walks of life, academic or not, both to revisit the classical utilitarians and to engage with the wonderful utilitarian philosophizing at work in the world today, as evidenced by the journal Utilitas.  Curiously, although there is a laudable and widespread interest in the work of Peter Singer, particularly the animal liberation and effective altruism movements that he did so much to advance, that interest often fails to extend to the philosophical roots of his utilitarian perspective in the work of Henry Sidgwick, the greatest of the nineteenth century utilitarians.  But if the philosophizing and activism of Singer can so engage people, the work of Sidgwick and the other great utilitarians should be able to inspire them as well.  True, the old, malicious caricatures of the classical utilitarians are still far too common.  In my own experience teaching at the University of Chicago for thirty years, even many of the brightest young students of philosophy harbor views of classical utilitarianism that owe more to the hostile depictions of it by critics than to the classical utilitarian writings themselves.  They have read Michel Foucault on Bentham, but not Bentham; John Rawls on Sidgwick, but not Sidgwick, and so on.

How will your book change that?

By providing fuller portraits of the lives and works of the classical utilitarians taken together.  The philosophizing and the activist life of, say, William Godwin (but the others as well) were genuinely inseparable, and one gets a much better sense of what his philosophy actually meant by looking at how it was realized in his life—for example, in his relationships with the amazing Mary Wollstonecraft and the daughter they had, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.  When students meet classical utilitarianism only through one or another stylized argument (often not one that was actually made by the great utilitarians), as in the popular “Trolley cases,” they do not gain a good sense of the resources of the utilitarian perspective, of its potential as a change agent.  Thus, much of what people today champion as a many-sided liberal education—the kind of education that Martha Nussbaum has done so much to articulate and defend—was in fact defended by such figures as Mill and Sidgwick, on utilitarian grounds.  They loved and promoted the humanities, and often criticized the universities for failing to support philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as for failing to open up educational opportunities for all.  On these topics and others, we still have much to learn from them.

What is your biggest worry or regret about your book?

Naturally, I wish that I could have spent another ten years on it—there is still so much research to do, especially on Bentham.  Also, it breaks my heart that Derek Parfit, who died on January 1st, will not around to read the final published version.  He read various drafts, especially of the chapter on Sidgwick, and was very, very supportive and helpful, as he always has been.  My first major publication was an article contributed to the 1986 Ethics symposium on Reasons and Persons, an article to which he wrote a Reply, and I think that from that time to this I have never published anything without wondering what he would think of it—and fortunately, very often finding out, since he was so generous in his comments.  Some of my more recent work was devoted to On What Matters.  And I was profoundly honored to include him in the book symposium that I edited on Kasia de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s recent book, The Point of View of the Universe.  Readers familiar with Derek’s work will see how parts of my Sidgwick chapter, relating to personal identity and other issues, are addressed to some of the points that he made about Sidgwick.  I once remarked to him that I thought his work was ultimately more about reasons, and mine more about persons, in the full biographical sense.  But really, he was the one who, with J. B. Schneewind, gave me the confidence and courage to pursue my Sidgwick studies, which in turn led to this book.  I am glad to have this opportunity to explain just how much I owe to both of them.

Bart Schultz is senior lecturer in the humanities and director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians.
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Filed Under: Author Interviews, Philosophy Tagged With: Happiness, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Philosophy, utilitarianism

Sidgwick. By exploring the fascinating historical contexts and human sides of these remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, it yields a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives. By resisting overly reductive or narrow accounts of the meaning of utilitarianism, this historical reconstruction can also help explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems. See

The brilliant young African American political philosopher Danielle Allen founded the University of Chicago Civic Knowledge Project (CKP) in 2003 in an attempt to improve the educational richness and diversity of the University of Chicago. As she explained in a brief account of her reasons for founding the CKP: A healthy university cultivates the capacities of its students and faculty members to acquire and process information. The relevant capacities include not only the ability to read books and conduct experiments, but also to absorb and process sense data from the physical world or one's immediate environment. Every feature of life at a university should enhance, not reduce, its residents' capacities for information assimilation, including their ability to process sense data. For the last five decades, the University of Chicago has simultaneously supported its affiliates' development of some of their capacities for knowing the world while also allowing others to atrophy. Specifically, the University has not encouraged affiliates to take in information from their immediate environments and to connect that information to knowledge acquired through academic research. Traditionally, students and faculty at the University of Chicago have been encouraged to read exciting books and to have stimulating conversations, but often also to " not see " the community immediately around them. (see http://civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/files/Origins.pdf) Allen was of course referring to the many ways in which University of Chicago students were subtly or not so subtly socialized into avoiding serious interaction with the predominantly African-American communities on Chicago's mid-South Side, even the historic Bronzeville neighborhood, which at one time rivalled Harlem as the African American cultural capital of the U.S. Thus, the CKP was designed to use " the humanities to develop and strengthen the University of Chicago's community connections, helping to foster civic friendship and overcome the social, economic, and racial divisions among the various knowledge communities on the South Side of Chicago " (see http:// civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/index.shtml). Working in close collaboration with many community partners and such organizations as the Illinois Humanities Council, the CKP has worked to support genuinely reciprocal educational activities engaging the University of Chicago community with mid-South Side neighborhoods on a basis of civic friendship and " seeing, " rather than " not seeing. " And thus, the CKP has supported, for example, the Odyssey Project/Clemente Course in the Humanities at South Side locations, affording adults below 150% of the Federal Poverty Level the opportunity to take a yearlong course in the humanities taught by University faculty members and graduate students. As the Executive Director of the CKP for the last decade, I have been impressed time and again with the importance of elite colleges and universities taking great care to avoid the insidious training in " not seeing " against which Allen warned. However, as a Senior Lecturer in the University's Philosophy Dept., I have come to see how such insidious socializing happens even in more conventional educational activities in the classroom. This is not merely a matter of a general wariness in academic philosophy when it comes to experiential and service learning opportunities, though as a discipline philosophy is remarkably behind the times on those issues and of course matters of diversity and inclusion. It is rather the remarkable inertia and narrowness of the ways in which the canonical history of philosophy is constructed and taught. That is, while it is obviously vitally important to develop more diverse and inclusive curricula, bringing in neglected philosophers and philosophical traditions, it is just as important to develop widely accepted pedagogical practices for confronting and addressing the racism and sexism of such canonical figures as Aristotle, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hume, Schopenhauer, and so many others.

See https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Philosophers-Lives-Works-Utilitarians/dp/0691154775/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479228810&sr=1-1&keywords=bart+schultz
In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism--one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries.

Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic.

By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives--one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.

Par l'importance de ses travaux passés 1 , Bart Schultz est aujourd'hui reconnu comme l'un des grands spécialistes d'Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900). Avec ce nouveau livre, celui-ci nous offre un passionnant examen de l'utilitarisme classique qui renouvèle la compréhension de cette tradition philosophique en éclairant les oeuvres avec la vie de ses auteurs. Le livre de Bart Schultz vise fondamentalement à présenter et défendre le sens philosophique de l'utilitarisme. Son intention repose sur le constat que les philosophes utilitaristes de la modernité (de W. Godwin à H. Sidgwick) ont très largement vu leur message terni et obscurci par les préjugés et caricatures qui, de Charles Dickens 2 à aujourd'hui, ont fait des philosophies utilitaristes des idéologues servant les gestionnaires capitalistes. À partir d'une approche de l'histoire de la philosophie 3 refusant sa réduction aux seules doctrines, Bart Schultz propose de relire et de comprendre à nouveau frais l'utilitarisme classique en renouant avec l'idée que la philosophie et ses enseignements sont à la fois dans les oeuvres et dans la vie des philosophes. Comme il le présente lui-même : Ce livre reflète la croyance que chacun a besoin des oeuvres et des vies, des mots et des actions, pour récolter complètement les contributions des grands philosophes qui ne peuvent être seulement réduits à leurs oeuvres. » 4 La méthode de Schultz repose sur une conception ouverte de la philosophie. Comprendre une philosophie, c'est, dans un même geste, saisir l'oeuvre philosophique et la vie de l'homme qui l'a créée. Suivant, cette idée, le parcours proposé par Bart Schultz construit un pont entre la biographie intellectuelle, le portrait des philosophes utilitaristes et leurs parcours intellectuels et avancements dans leur oeuvre philosophique. Dans l'interstice de ce dialogue se joue des