Copyright

Alison Stone

Published On

2026-07-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

THEMA

  • QDTQ
  • QD
  • QDTJ
  • JPA
  • JH

BISAC

  • PHI005000
  • PHI019000
  • PHI009000
  • PHI022000
  • POL028000

Keywords

  • Victorian philosophy
  • Ethics
  • Metaphysics
  • Religion
  • History
  • Feminism

5. Relation and Isolation

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter expands on Wedgwood’s disagreements with utilitarianism, which fuel her ethical thought. First, I look at her criticisms of John Stuart Mill, which are bound up with her claim that the pleasure/pain antithesis is a logical fiction. The real antithesis lies between pain, from which we recoil, and moral ideals, to which we aspire. I then look at the relational ethics she puts forward as a critical alternative to Sidgwick’s utilitarianism. Anticipating feminist care ethics, Wedgwood argues that we are always embedded in relationships which supply our aims, and that it is always right to do whatever most fortifies our whole web of relationships. I identify several problems with this relational ethics, problems that led Wedgwood herself to move away from it. More broadly, Wedgwood objects that utilitarianism foists a logical grid upon moral life, and she instead urges attention to lived experience. Lived experience is disparate and uneven and, in key cases, our real-life values are asymmetrical: we can recognise and value the good with no reference to the bad.

Contributors

Alison Stone

(author)
Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9621-8263

Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Her most recent books are on nineteenth-century women philosophers. They are Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2022), Frances Power Cobbe (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2024). With Charlotte Alderwick, she co-edited Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America (Routledge, 2024), and with Lydia Moland, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2025).