Henry Sidgwick and the Profoundest Problem in Ethics
Sidgwick argued that it is happiness that we should take as the motivation for being good. So if happiness was what was intrinsically good, we must, at times, even put our own desires aside to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But what might motivate individual people to do this? Why not do evil if this makes us happy, if we can get away with it, and happiness is all the matters to us intrinsically?
Hence, there would always be a dualism in ethical reasoning between our interest in our own satisfaction and our interest in being impartially good.
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