Hastings Rashdall

Who was Hastings Rashdall?

Hastings Rashdall, DL was an English philosopher, theologian, and historian. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and is a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.

Son of an Anglican priest, he was educated at Harrow and received a scholarship for New College, Oxford. After short tenures at St David's University College and University College, Durham, Rashdall was made a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and dedicates his main work, The Theory of Good and Evil, to the memory of his teachers Thomas Hill Green and Henry Sidgwick.

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. Rashdall was also a Berkeleyan, believing in metaphysical idealism.