Henry Sidgwick was educated at Rugby (where his cousin, subsequently his brother-in-law, Edward White Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was a master), and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the same year, deciding that he could no longer in good conscience declare himself a member of the Church of England, he resigned his fellowship.

[3] Besides his lecturing and literary labours, Sidgwick took an active part in the business of the university and in many forms of social and philanthropic work.

According to the biographer, Sidgwick struggled internally throughout his life with issues of hypocrisy and openness in connection with his own forbidden desires.

It was at his suggestion and with his help that Anne Clough opened a house of residence for students, which developed into Newnham College, Cambridge.

Ethical intuitions, such as those argued for by philosophers such as William Whewell, could, according to Sidgwick, provide the missing force for such normative claims.

[13] Sidgwick tries to achieve this by formulating methods of ethics, which he defines as rational procedures "for determining right conduct in any particular case".

[14][15] He identifies three methods: intuitionism, which involves various independently valid moral principles to determine what ought to be done, and two forms of hedonism, in which rightness only depends on the pleasure and pain following from the action.

But a full success of this project is impossible since egoism, which he considers as equally rational, cannot be reconciled with utilitarianism unless religious assumptions are introduced.

[14] Such assumptions, for example, the existence of a personal God who rewards and punishes the agent in the afterlife, could reconcile egoism and utilitarianism.

This non-naturalist realism is combined with an ethical intuitionist epistemology to account for the possibility of knowing moral truths.

[20] Despite his importance to contemporary ethicists, Sidgwick's reputation as a philosopher fell precipitously in the decades following his death, and he would be regarded as a minor figure in philosophy for a large part of the first half of the 20th century.

[21] John Deigh, however, disputes Schultz's explanation, and instead attributes this fall in interest in Sidgwick to changing philosophical understandings of axioms in mathematics, which would throw into question whether axiomatization provided an appropriate model for a foundationalist epistemology of the sort Sidgwick tried to build for ethics.

Sidgwick responded to these changes by preferring to emphasize the similarities between the old economics and the new, choosing to base his work on J.S.

One instance of this is the idea that there is more to life than the accumulation of wealth, so it is not always in the best interest of society to simply aim for wealth-maximizing results.

[24] Alfred Marshall, founder of the Cambridge School of Economics, would describe Sidgwick as his "spiritual mother and father".

He believed the dualism of practical reason might be solved outside of philosophical ethics if it were shown, empirically, that the recommendations of rational egoism and utilitarianism coincided due to the reward of moral behaviour after death.

[28][29] Brought up in the Church of England, Sidgwick drifted away from orthodox Christianity, and as early as 1862 he described himself as a theist, independent from established religion.

[30] For the rest of his life, although he regarded Christianity as "indispensable and irreplaceable... from a sociological point of view", he found himself unable to return to it as a religion.