Parfit here is making a reference to Sidgwick’s “Government House utilitarianism,” which seemed to suggest only people in power should believe utilitarianism but not spread it.
This may be clear to you, and isn’t important for the main point of your comment, but I think that ‘Government House utilitarianism’ is a term coined by Bernard Williams in order to refer to this aspect of Sidgwick’s thought while also alluding to what Williams viewed as an objectionable feature of it.
Sigdwick himself, in The Methods of Ethics,referred to the issue as esoteric morality (pp. 489–490, emphasis mine):
the Utilitarian should consider carefully the extent to which his advice or example are likely to influence persons to whom they would be dangerous: and it is evident that the result of this consideration may depend largely on the degree of publicity which he gives to either advice or example. Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice or example. These conclusions are all of a paradoxical character:[372] there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality, differing from that popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy. We may observe, however, that there are strong utilitarian reasons for maintaining generally this latter common opinion [...]. Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few. And thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands.
In his Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture on 18 February 1982 (or rather the version of it included in Williams’s posthumously published essay collection The Sense of the Past), after quoting roughly the above passage from Sidgwick, Williams says:
On this kind of account, Utilitarianism emerges as the morality of an élite, and the distinction between theory and practice determines a class of theorists distinct from other persons, theorists in whose hands the truth of the Utilitarian justification of non-Utilitarian dispositions will be responsibly deployed. This outlook accords well enough with the important colonial origins of Utilitarianism. This version may be called ‘Government House Utilitarianism’. It only partly deals with the problem, since it is not generally true, and it was not indeed true of Sidgwick, that Utilitarians of this type, even though they are theorists, are prepared themselves to do without the useful dispositions altogether. So they still have some problem of reconciling the two consciousnesses in their own persons—even though the vulgar are relieved of that problem, since they are not burdened with the full consciousness of the Utilitarian justification. Moreover, Government House Utilitarianism is unlikely, at least in any very overt form, to commend itself today.
This may be clear to you, and isn’t important for the main point of your comment, but I think that ‘Government House utilitarianism’ is a term coined by Bernard Williams in order to refer to this aspect of Sidgwick’s thought while also alluding to what Williams viewed as an objectionable feature of it.
Sigdwick himself, in The Methods of Ethics, referred to the issue as esoteric morality (pp. 489–490, emphasis mine):
In his Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture on 18 February 1982 (or rather the version of it included in Williams’s posthumously published essay collection The Sense of the Past), after quoting roughly the above passage from Sidgwick, Williams says:
There has since been the occasional paper mentioning or commenting on the issue, including a defense of esoteric morality by Katarzyna De Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer (2010).
Thanks for the background on esoteric morality!
Yes, I perhaps should have been more clear that “Government House” was not Sidgwick’s term, but a somewhat derogatory term levied against him.