Hastings Rashdall
Encyclopedia
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
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Son of an Anglican priest, he was educated at Harrow and received a scholarship for New College
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...
, Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
. After short tenures at St David's University College and University College, Durham
University College, Durham
University College, commonly known as Castle, is a college of the University of Durham in England. Centred around Durham Castle on Palace Green, it was founded in 1832 and is the oldest of Durham's colleges. As with all of Durham's colleges, it is, independently of the University, a listed body...
, Rashdall was made a Fellow of New College, Oxford
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...
, and dedicates his main work, The Theory of Good and Evil, to the memory of his teachers Thomas Hill Green
Thomas Hill Green
Thomas Hill Green was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G.W.F. Hegel...
and Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women...
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The dedication is appropriate, for the particular version of utilitarianism put forward by Rashdall owes elements to both Green and Sidgwick. Whereas he holds that the concepts of good and value are logically prior to that of right, he gives right a more than instrumental significance. His idea of good owes more to Green than to the hedonistic utilitarians. "The ideal of human life is not the mere juxtaposition of distinct goods, but a whole in which each good is made different by the presence of others." Rashdall has been eclipsed as a moral philosopher by G. E. Moore, who advocated similar views in his earlier work Principia Ethica
Principia Ethica
Principia Ethica is a monograph by philosopher G. E. Moore, first published in 1903. It is one of the standard texts of modern ethics, and introduced the term naturalistic fallacy.-External links:* of Principia Ethica....
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He was president of the Aristotelian Society
Aristotelian Society
The Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Square which resolved "to constitute a society of about twenty and to include ladies; the society to meet fortnightly, on Mondays at 8 o'clock, at the rooms of the Spelling...
from 1904 to 1907, a member of the Christian Social Union
Christian Social Union (Church of England)
The Christian Social Union was an organisation within the Church of England devoted to the study of social conditions and the remedying of social injustice, which flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth. Its origins lay in the writings of F.D....
from its inception in 1890, and was an influential Anglican modernist theologian of the time, being appointed to a canonry in 1909.
Rashdall was also a Berkeleyan, believing in metaphysical idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
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He was Dean of Carlisle from 1917 to 1924.
Selected works
- The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895. ISBN 0-19-821431-6
- The Theory of Good and Evil (1907)
- Rashdall, Hastings. The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology. (London: Macmillan, 1919)