Dr. Amanda J. Favia (Nassau Community College): What’s Self-love Got to Do with it? E.E. Constance Jones on the Deduction of Prudence from Benevolence

E. E. (Emily Elizabeth) Constance Jones (1848-1922) was a prominent figure in British philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known primarily for her work in philosophical logic. Jones, however, also made important contributions to ethics and moral psychology. This talk will focus on one of those contributions—Jones’s response to Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason”, a problem that Sidgwick never resolved to his own satisfaction. Sidgwick held that practical reason has an allegiance to two distinct ‘methods’: self-love (prudence) and benevolence (duty to others). While both methods are independently rational, they may potentially come into conflict. This, for Jones, presented “the most important difficulty of the system of [Sidgwick’s] Universalistic Hedonism”. As such, she returned to this problem a number of times in the course of her career producing several original and promising responses. In two of her most promising responses—what I will call the Argument from Temporal Irrelevance and the Argument from Mutual Dependency—Jones attempts to demonstrate a necessary connection between self-love and benevolence that subverts the problematic dualism. Ultimately, there is no actual conflict of methods, only an appearance of one. After a close analysis of these two arguments, I will consider some challenges to her view and argue that even if her arguments are not entirely successful in resolving the “dualism of practical reason”, they succeed in changing the course of the debate.