Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

The "history of ideas" slant to the book [Anthony Quinton, Utilitarian Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973)] could make it a
dangerous one to use in undergraduate philosophy courses. (If it
were so used, of course, students would have to read also some
of the main primary sources in Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, and
others.) Students need to be on their guard so as to distinguish
passages which tell us what reasons a philosopher gave for his
conclusions from passages which tell us about the historical
causes of his having certain ideas. Sometimes Quinton slips
rather quickly from one of these sorts of consideration to the
other. Quinton partly explains Hume's conservatism in politics
(as opposed to his radicalism in philosophy and religion) by
saying that as a patriotic Scotsman Hume would be "hostile to
the Whig oppressors of his country". (By the way, did the Whigs
really oppress Scotland?) But Quinton then goes on to give
another consideration (based on the place which "custom" plays
in Hume's theory of human nature) which might be thought of
not as just a historical explanation of Hume's conservatism but
rather as (from Hume's point of view) a justification of it. Again
on pp. 96-97 Quinton makes some remarks about F. H. Bradley's
moral character which may be pertinent from a historical or
biographical point of view but which are quite irrelevant to discussing
the soundness or otherwise of Bradley's criticisms of
Mill. Both teachers and students will need to be on the watch
out for this sort of thing, because it is hard to get students to
see the difference between a pertinent philosophical argument
and an ignoratio elenchi.

(J. J. C. Smart, review of Utilitarian Ethics, by Anthony Quinton, Metaphilosophy 6 [April 1975]: 204-9, at 208 [italics in original])

Note from KBJ: The distinction being drawn by Smart is crucial, which makes it all the more shocking that certain professional philosophers fail to observe it. The distinction is between the reason, ground, or justification of a belief and the cause, motivation, or explanation of it. The former is the province of philosophy. The latter is the province of science (including, but not limited to, history, sociology, and psychology). Anyone who doesn't know the difference between philosophy and science has no business teaching either.