## 1. Life, Works, and General Overview



Butler was born in 1692 and attended a dissenting academy where he
read current philosophy -- including up to date logic, and works
of John Locke and Samuel Clarke. While a student there Butler wrote a
letter to Clarke pointing out two problems in Clarke's arguments
for God's unicity and God's omnipresence in Demonstration
of the Being and Attributes of God. Butler's criticisms led to a
mutually admiring correspondence. Clarke arranged to have the
correspondence published in 1716, although Butler's letters
appeared anonymously. Shortly thereafter Butler joined the Church of
England, attended Oxford, and was ordained. This led to his
appointment as preacher at Rolls Chapel, the chapel associated with
the London equity courts, where he served until 1726. During this
period he also earned a law degree. In 1726 he published a selection
of his sermons as Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. It
appeared in a second edition in 1729 with corrections and with the
addition of an important synoptic "Preface." In 1736
Butler published his major work of natural theology, the *Analogy
of Religion*, the work for which he was best known in his
lifetime, with two brief but important dissertations: "Of
Personal Identity" and "Of the Nature of Virtue"
(hence "Dissertation on Virtue"). In the same year he was
appointed Queen Caroline's cleric, and after her death the
following year he rose to become Bishop of Bristol (1738) and
eventually Bishop of Durham (1750). A number of his sermons from the
latter part of his career were published individually. Some of them
were collected as Six Sermons on Public Occasions and published in
1749. This was followed by the "Durham Charge" (a work
exhorting the clergy of his diocese) published a year before
Butler's death in 1752 (For more on Butler's life see
Cunliffe 2008, from which most of the above information is derived;
see also Cunliffe 1992 and Tennant 2011).



Butler's moral philosophy is characterized by a very high degree
of analytic rigor and argumentative care. This is all the more
surprising for the fact that many of these rigorous arguments are
presented in sermons (and particularly in footnotes to sermons). The
manner in which Butler argues, and the details of the particular
arguments, are indeed what many philosophers who have engaged with him
have found most inspiring, even when they have rejected his
conclusions whole-heartedly. Butler's first three sermons
provide a general framework for his moral philosophy via a
teleological account of human nature. On the basis of this account of
human nature Butler argues that self-love and benevolence or virtue --
principles that other moral philosophers have seen as in tension
-- are not only not in tension but mutually supporting when
properly understood. The remaining sermons consider a number of key
features of moral psychology -- self-deception, benevolence,
forgiveness, compassion -- and further develop the discussions of
self-love and virtue initiated in the first three sermons. They make
manifest that Butler thought that the details of moral psychology when
carefully presented and rigorously sorted ruled out many questionable
commitments that looser philosophers took them to warrant. These
particular moral psychological inquiries are followed by a discussion
of love of God. For Butler this was a central and unifying sentiment
that showed the continuity between morals and natural religion. Butler
concluded the Sermons with a discussion of human ignorance, which in
conjunction with his discussions of self-deceit underscored one of his
central themes: the limits of human self-knowledge and knowledge of
divine design, limits that had to be continuously in mind when making
moral arguments. Butler's later sermons, the "Dissertation
on Virtue," and the sections of the *Analogy of Religion*
that concern moral philosophy, also continue to develop many of these
themes.


## 2. Moral Science



In his "Preface" to the 2nd edition of his Sermons Butler
sketched his vision of "Morals, considered as a Science,"
("Preface," SS6) -- i.e. speculative moral
philosophy in need of defense from speculative objections as opposed
to practical moral counsel or revealed religion. Morals considered as
a science proceeds either from abstract relations of things or from
matters of fact ("Preface," SS12). Clarke and William
Wollaston were influential philosophers who argued primarily from
abstract relations to moral obligations, duties, virtues, etc. in
their moral systems. Clarke in particular had argued that we have a
priori access to the eternal "fitnesses" of things through
certain, abstract, and necessary quasi-mathematical arguments (Clarke
1706) that entail necessary moral obligations and duties insofar as
actions accord with or fail to accord with eternal and immutable
realities. In his correspondence with Clarke, the young Butler noted
his discovery of a new method for establishing truths in morals
(Butler/Clarke 1716, SS1). Although the correspondence took place
a few years before Butler delivered the Sermons, it seems likely that
the method he alluded to in the correspondence was the nascent method
that he would deploy in the first three sermons (which Butler stressed
were argued strictly from matters of fact) ("Preface"
SS13).



Butler had little doubt that arguments from abstract relations and
arguments from matters of fact were complementary, but he held that
the latter had major advantages over the former as a method in ethics.
First it was in "a peculiar Manner adapted to satisfie a fair
Mind; and is more easily applicable to the several particular
Relations and Circumstances in Life" ("Preface,"
SS12). In other words, arguments from matters of fact allowed us
to discern moral standards in human actions and for the standards to
be accessible to and motivating for ordinary reflecting agents (to be
discussed in 3.). Whereas the abstract relations of things might
establish for Clarke or Wollaston that "Vice is contrary to the
Nature and Reasons of Things" ("Preface," SS12),
arguments of matter of fact established that vice is "a
violation or breaking in upon our own Nature,"
("Preface," SS12). These fitnesses or proportions were
to be discovered in our nature and although they might be consistent
with a priori metaphysical relations, the norms and values that they
determined were obliging and motivating in absence of access to said
relations. As such they were relativized to human nature,
authoritative for it, and accessible via reflection on and observation
of our actions and those of others



But one might still worry that moral judgments that rested on probable
matters of fact were less secure than those found to be in accordance
with eternal fitnesses, even with the aforementioned advantages. Seven
years later, Butler offered a methodological argument in the
"Introduction" to the *Analogy* that might respond
to this objection if applied to morals (although Butler framed the
point more generally). Although deductive arguments like those
championed by Clarke were secure when considered abstractly, they were
open to doubt when applied to matters of fact about actions or
characters. This was because one needed a hypothesis of how to apply
the abstract demonstrative truths to observed facts
("Introduction" SS7) -- how to fit the fitnesses
to actions so to speak -- and this hypothesis itself was not
deductively secure. Butler offered the analogy of Cartesian
physiology. Cartesian physiology applies Cartesian geometry to living
bodies. But one needs a probable hypothesis to move from the abstract
truths of Cartesian geometry to actual bodies and diseases. For
example, "this spleen is roughly an oval and the way it
interacts with the liver roughly results in this sort of
mechanism." The mechanism itself as represented abstractly is a
certain geometrical relationship. But in order to apply the mechanism
to blood and guts, one needs to have a probable, i.e. not certain,
hypothesis about how the ideal mechanism fits with the facts on the
ground -- that this arrangement of blood and guts is best
captured by this mechanism not that one. A similar problem arises when
applying eternal and abstract relations to particular moral
circumstances and actions. The need for a hypothesis as to how the
relations might fit actual actions rendered the evaluation of the
action merely probable even though the rightness and wrongness to
which the action was to conform -- the eternal fitness --
was known certainly.



Since both Clarke's method and Butler's method were
probable, Clarke's probable in application to actions and
Butler's in relying on matters of fact about human nature in
establishing facts about vice and virtue, one might conclude
skeptically that both failed. But Butler argued that a probable course
of action could still be morally obligatory. He claimed that probable
reasoning could result in sufficient certainty for moral action when
an action could be shown to be more probably good than either inaction
or an opposed action. Lacking further evidence the more probably good
action is morally obligatory. This suggested a way in which probable
evidence, for example probable evidence for the existence of an
afterlife, could be obliging on us and was crucial to his arguments
for the reasonableness of basic Christian teachings in the
*Analogy*.


## 3. Human Nature



Because of the absence of a priori demonstrative premises, a moral
philosopher arguing from matters of fact had to have detailed
knowledge of the principles of action in human nature and of moral
psychology as well as arguments to show how these principles had
bearing on virtue and vice. Human beings, according to Butler, had
within their nature various instincts and principles of action:
desires for particular pleasures, benevolence, self-love, and
conscience. The practitioner of moral science aimed to discover what
these principles are and the ways in which these desires, reasons, and
motivations fit together. This is difficult in practice since the
actions that we observe in ourselves and in others almost always draw
on more than one principle. For example both self-love and the
particular passions often go into the motivation or justification for
particular actions. Consequently the moral scientist could be said to
bring a version of Locke's negative program of underbrush
clearing in the theory of knowledge to moral philosophy, by analyzing
and disambiguating principles, motivations, and passions which give
rise to actions which we judge to be virtuous and vicious. At the same
time Butler's way of thinking about morality as dictated by
nature had strong resonances with the Stoics and other ancient
moralists.



In order to show how these principles, motivations, and passions bear
on virtue and vice Butler distinguished between three senses of
"nature" (Sermon 2). Nature (N1) can refer to any
principle or element that belongs to or motivates human beings. It can
also refer (N2) to the strongest among a group of principles, i.e., it
is in our nature to get angry, not to giggle, when unjustly accused.
Finally it can refer (N3) to natural supremacy, i.e., that a principle
acts as a law, guide, or authority to other principles or passions.
Butler suggests that whatever is naturally supreme unites various
principles in a teleological system. Consequently Butler can be seen
to be arguing that when we take a survey of all that belongs to human
nature (N1) we discover that conscience has natural supremacy (N3) in
a united hierarchy (although see Section Five for Butler's claim
that self-love is also a supreme principle). N1 principles can be
identified piecemeal, particular passions that belong to the human
frame. N2 principles are relational, i.e. the strongest of a group of
principles. N3 principles are relational as well but they are also
rational and they unify other sorts of principles. By educing a
hierarchy in the principles of human nature, and by showing that the
hierarchy is independent of the strength (N2) of the principles as
motivations for action, we can demonstrate that what we ought to do
morally (N3) may differ from what we are most strongly motivated to do
(N2) without reflection.



Butler's best-known arguments for the natural hierarchy of
principles draw on a number of analogies: to a watch
("Preface"), to a civil constitution (Sermon III), to a
tree, and to a machine (Sermon 3 Note 1). Just as a clock is not an
individual gear, or a pile of gears, but is what it is due to the ways
in which the gears move together towards an end, so too human nature
is not a particular principle of action, or a bundle of principles,
but the interaction of principles, desires, and reasons, as a system
towards ends. That our nature is structured towards ends, which Butler
takes to be empirically evident, gives evidence of a hierarchy of
principles to attain the ends, a hierarchy where some principles must
be naturally subordinate to others (N3). This shows that there is
something natural to us in the sense of N3, in addition to N1 and N2
(both of which are a matter of observed fact). "A civil
constitution implies in it united strength, various subordinates under
one direction ... a superior faculty whose office it is to
adjust, manage, and preside over them" (Sermon III SS2). The
governing faculty has authority. When a civil constitution is violated
or overthrown by "meer power" this goes against the nature
of the constitution. When a machine's or a tree's parts no
longer bear proportionate relations among themselves and are no longer
guided by superior principles, it is broken or sick. By analogy, when
forceful principles and passions (N2) go against authoritative
principles (N3), or when the principles and passions no longer bear
the same relations or are in conflict this goes against our nature and
is unnatural.



The analogy suggests that it is unnatural when a N2 principle
overpowers a N3 principle. The subordination of N2 principles to N3
principles is natural and preserves and guides our natures. N3
principles are what we ought to act on or act in accordance with.
Deciding whether Butler holds that we ought to act on them just
because they are in accordance with our nature or we ought to act on
them because they are morally right and in accordance with our nature
has led to some of the most salient objections to Butler's moral
philosophy (see Section 4).



The supremacy of conscience in human nature can also be shown by a
comparison of the constitutions and natures of animals with human
nature. Animals are driven by principles similar to (or identical to)
those that give rise to human actions: they share many of our passions
and they too are driven by self-interest. When animals act according
to these principles they act appropriately to their natures (in senses
N1 and N2). But humans have a principle, conscience, which animals
lack. This suggests that when humans act only from those principles
that they share with animals and not according to conscience they do
not act suitably to what is distinctive to their whole nature, and in
particular suitable to that end which draws on many of the principles
of human nature .



Interpreters of Butler have disagreed about the degree to which
Butler's teleological and hierarchical account of human nature
relies on theological premises, and on what sort of teleology is at
play. Some interpreters hold that Butler's arguments that there
are N3 principles only go through if we assume that God created human
beings for a purpose and in accordance with providence (Darwall 1995;
Penelhum 1985). On this account what human beings ought to be or ought
to do follows from what they were designed for. Humans were designed
for virtue and so they ought to be virtuous. Others suggest that the
argument has support without recourse to theological arguments, and
that the teleological facts about human nature imply norms and values
that are obliging without reference to design (Wedgwood 2007; Irwin
2008).


## 4. Conscience and the principles of human nature



Like Shaftesbury, Butler held that conscience is a reflective
principle. Shaftesbury asserted that "every reasoning or
reflecting Creature is, by his Nature, forc'd to endure the
Review of his own Mind, and Actions; and to have Representations of
himself, and his inward Affairs, constantly passing before him,
obvious to him, and revolving in his Mind" (Shaftesbury 1699
II.1 [119]). For Butler conscience is more specifically a reflection
on prospective or retrospective actions of oneself and others
according to moral principles. When we judge characters we reflect on
actions in relation to the capacities of agents ("Dissertation
on Virtue" SS5). Butler presumes that all ordinary human
beings have a sense of right and wrong in presuming that the moral
principles are accessible for reflection, and that the many ways of
describing this sense of right and wrong all point to one and the same
capacity: "Conscience, moral Reason, moral sense, or divine
Reason... as a Sentiment of the Understanding, or as a Perception
of the Heart" ("Dissertation on Virtue" SS1).
There are a number of elements in the natural supremacy of conscience
that help us to understand the nature of its authority.



First, according to Butler conscience has a unique authority among the
principles belonging to human nature. As evidenced in the civil
constitution analogy, we recognize that it should direct other
principles and not vice-versa and that the authority is proper to
conscience and no other principle. Further we recognize that any
ordinary reasonable person has a conscience and ought to obey it. The
term "conscience" was commonly employed in both
theological and philosophical contexts (Shaftesbury identified it with
reflective reason) but was also a legal term of art among the equity
lawyers to whom Butler preached his sermons. In the legal context it
had the sense of acting minimally as an ordinary reasonable person
would and maximally as a fully informed, ideal reasoner would (see
Garrett 2012).



Next, conscience is closely connected to autonomy: when we act
according to conscience we act as a law unto ourselves or according to
a law of our own nature. By being a law unto oneself Butler seemed to
mean being motivated by our inner sense of moral rightness and
wrongness and not being motivated by considerations external to the
rightness or wrongness of acting or not acting (Sermon III SS6).
For Butler, like Clarke, moral law, duty, obligation, or virtue, is
right or wrong, morally good or bad independent of any punishment or
reward ("Preface" SS 29; "Dissertation on
Virtue" SS8). Butler criticized those forms of natural law
and Hobbesian accounts of motivation that held that I am morally
motivated and given an authoritative reason for acting by a law
sanctioned with rewards and punishments by a divine or civil
legislator. He argued that insofar as sanctions are superadded to the
moral rightness or wrongness of the act there is no connection between
the sanction and the rightness or wrongness of the action beyond the
arbitrary will of the legislator. This connection is insufficient for
moral motivation. When I act primarily or only due to an external
sanction I am not acting from a law unto myself (see Darwall
1992).



This law of conscience is readily accessible to us -- "the
most near and intimate, the most certain and known"
("Preface," SS 26) -- in a way that probable
consequences of prudential or interested actions are not. That an
authoritative principle dictates that we ought to intend a good action
does not depend on external factors that might prevent or mitigate the
desired prudential outcome (but see McNaughton 2012). Relatedly, ends
may vary but conscience is "fixed, steady, and
immovable."



Butler argued in the Sermons that conscience was a principle superior
to and governing of the particular passions, affections, and instincts
and established a hierarchy among them (Sermon XIII SS7). As
previously discussed the hierarchy is natural. But due to ambiguities
in Butler's presentation, in particular due to differences in
the aims of individual sermons, there are a number of ways to
understand the relation between conscience and the other principles.
On one reading conscience is authoritative over the other main
principles discussed by Butler -- self-love and benevolence (if
it is a principle -- see Section 5) -- and all when properly
understood promote the same actions in accordance with our nature.
When we seek our own goods and those of others in accordance with
conscience or reflection we act virtuously and we also promote our
private happiness. But, there are also passages that suggest that
Butler held self-love to be a principle on par with conscience
(Sidgwick III.12 SS2) or even above it (Sermon IX SS15). And
there are passages where Butler suggests that benevolence contains all
the virtues, and consequently this too seems to be a principle on par
with or identical with conscience. Consequently there are multiple
plausible hierarchies. Interpreters who advocate hierarchies which
place self-love or benevolence on par with (or even above) conscience
normally either argue that they are still consistent with the
supremacy of conscience or see this as showing a serious problem in
Butler's arguments.



Here are few of the problems. If it is reasonable to obey conscience,
then "the rules that Conscience lays down" are either
reasonable in and of themselves or they are "the dictates of an
arbitrary authority" (Sidgwick, III.13 SS2). If the latter,
then it is hard to see what justifies this arbitrary authority. But if
the former, then Sidgwick argues that there is no independent moral
authority for conscience -- a conclusion which Sidgwick thought
perfectly reasonable -- and Butler is caught in the same
justificatory circle that the Stoic arguments for life according to
nature were: "it is reasonable to live according to Nature, and
it is natural to live according to Reason" (ibid.). A related
objection is that since both conscience and self-love are rational
principles and in general cannot be in conflict, conscience just
dictates whatever self-love dictates and vice-versa. Consequently
conscience cannot have a distinctive authority. Sturgeon identified a
different circularity connected with the justification of the
supremacy of conscience. Since Butler held that virtuous actions are
those in conformity to the nature of the agent and vicious ones not in
conformity, according to Sturgeon "the doctrine of natural
authority of conscience is entirely superfluous" (Sturgeon,
316). This is because if conscience points to the wrongness of an
action the wrongness must be due to the action's conformity or
non-conformity with our nature -- i.e. due to a conflict among
principles. Conscience can't be pointing to a conflict with
itself since that would be circular. So it must be a conflict with the
next highest principle: self-interest. But then conscience just
asserts what self-interest dictates, and so the testimony of
conscience is redundant and has no special authority. Put differently,
Butler assumes that his argument that virtue is natural entails an
argument for the supremacy of conscience. But there is no good reason
to assume the entailment -- in fact the two are not only
independent, but in conflict. There have been a number of responses to
Sturgeon. Penelhum, notably, denied that Butler was committed to the
"Full Naturalistic Thesis" and argued that Butler instead
held "the independent existence of the judgments of right and
wrong" from judgments of "naturalness and
unnaturalness" (Penelhum 1990, 68; see also Irwin 2008 SS707
and McNaughton 2012).


## 5. Self-Love and Benevolence



As previously noted, Butler discusses two other important constituents
of human nature in addition to conscience and the particular passions:
self-love and benevolence. Butler's extremely influential
dismissal of psychological egoism was central to his analysis of
self-love. C. D. Broad claimed that "he killed the theory so
thoroughly that he sometimes seems to the modern reader to be flogging
dead horses" (Broad 1930, 55). For Butler the kind of egoism
exemplified by Hobbes -- "the selfish theory" in
eighteenth-century parlance -- rests on a failure to distinguish
principles from passions (for context see Maurer 2019). There is a
trivial sense in which all of our passions are our own and the
pleasure we have in discharging or pursuing any passion is
"self" love. But it is also uninteresting: we can't
conclude much from the fact that every passion we take pleasure in is
our passion. We certainly can't conclude that human beings are
always motivated by selfishness. That selfish theorists thought we
could was due in part to their confusing the "ownership of an
impulse with its object" (Broad 1930, 65)--the inference
from that the passions are ours to that we are the objects of the
passions. Although the passions belong to us it does not therefore
follow that our "self," or our self-gratification, is the
object of the passion.



One of the most discussed passages from the Sermons, the so-called
"stone argument" (Sober 1992) has often been taken as an
argument against psychological hedonism. In the passage Butler
purports to establish that "all particular appetites and
passions are towards external things themselves, distinct from the
pleasure arising from them" due to the fact "that there
could not be this pleasure, were it not for that prior suitableness
between the object and the passion" (Sermon XI SS6). Butler
then concludes were this not the case then "there could be no
enjoyment or delight from one thing more than another, from eating
food more than from swallowing a stone, if there were not an affection
or appetite to one thing more than another" (Sermon XI SS6).
The upshot of the stone argument seems to be that appetites and
passions must have something more than, or other than, pleasure as
their object. That said not everyone has seen Butler's argument
as valid (Penelhum 1985; Henson 1988; Sober 1992; Tilley 2018) and
there is disagreement on what exactly it is an argument against.



These mistakes are connected to another: confusing the principle of
self-love, which has the happiness of the self as its object, with
particular passions and desires. Once we recognize that "the
pain of hunger and shame, and the delight from esteem, are no more
self-love than they are any thing in the world" (Sermon I, Note
3) -- they are particular passions and desires with particular
objects -- we see that from the fact that we take pleasure in our
passions and that they are our passions it does not follow that we are
guided by selfish principles. Passions do make us happy or unhappy.
But that we have an interest in being happy or unhappy is distinct
from the particular passions, their objects, or the happiness arising
from the passions -- although it may be a reason to prefer one
passion over another. This was connected to Butler's belief that
passions are not interested in themselves. They have particular ends
whereas self-love is our general interest in securing our
happiness.



Like Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, Butler thought it prima facie
evident that human beings had benevolent motivations, and he thought
it obvious that these benevolent motivations could make us happy and
be consistent with self-interest. The onus was on advocates of the
selfish theory to provide a compelling case against. Butler placed
more stress on the exceptions than Shaftesbury had and stressed that
they are "naturally" consistent, i.e. that they are
consistent in our nature and the natural course of things although the
unnatural and intemperate actions of others might interfere locally
(*Analogy* III SS5; SS27). He saw Hobbes'
reduction of all other-directed motivations -- such as compassion --
to selfish motivations in disguise to deny an evident matter of fact
for theoretical reasons, i.e. in order to reconcile benevolence and
compassion with Hobbes' general hypothesis about human nature.
But once a compassionate motivation is recast as a selfish motivation,
for Hobbes as a type of fear, it conflicts with the sense of the term
being explained to the point that it engenders contradiction. For
example: we feel compassion strongly towards our friends. If
compassion were a fear then we would fear our friends strongly, which
seems to conflict with the agreed use of the word
"compassion."



Which was not to deny of course that people act from selfishness,
self-partiality, and confused self-interest. Selfishness and
self-partiality often mix with benevolent motivations to give rise to
benevolent and even compassionate actions (Sermon V Note 1). Unlike
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Butler stressed that human beings often act
from mixed and opaque motives (as will be discussed in Section 6). But
the existence of mixed motivations presumes non-interested motivations
with which selfishness is mixed, not the reducibility of all
motivations to selfishness or self-partiality. This also has the
virtue of being a simpler explanation than the more complicated
selfish motivations offered by Hobbes' theory.



According to Butler, once clarified self-love is properly understood
as "regard to our own Interest, Happiness, and private
Good" (Sermon IX SS8). Butler further suggests that
self-love can be pursued better and worse, and that it is best
reflected on via reason in a cool and impartial way. By
"cool" Butler understood "impartial" in the
sense of not being swayed away from the truth by particular loves and
hates or by self-partiality. And by "reason" Butler
understood the faculty of discerning truth (Sermon XIII SS5).
Self-love worked best and our interest was best served when we
impartially seek what is truly in our interest. When understood in
this way it can clearly suggest actions that conflict with
selfishness. Conversely resolute selfishness and self-partiality are
not the best course for self-love. To satisfy a particular desire may
or may not make us happy in either the short or long-term and may not
educe to our private good. And although satisfying a desire may make
us happy, and all of our happiness may be the result of particular
passions, no particular passion has happiness in general as its
object.



Conversely we might fruitlessly seek our interest but have no
particular object in mind. Or we might obsess over our interest to
such a degree that we would continually be exercising the principle of
self-love but not actually satisfying our particular passions and
consequently not be happy. "Happiness consists in the
Gratification of certain Affections, Appetites, Passions, with Objects
which are by Nature adapted to them," (Sermon IX SS16).
Self-love is a principle governing actions leading to the satisfaction
or avoidance of the particular passions. Both self-love and the
particular passions are necessary for the proper natural functioning
of human beings.



Once self-love is distinguished from selfishness, self-partiality and
the particular passions it becomes clearer that the conflict between
self-love and benevolence is mostly an illusion when considered in the
long term. Particular passions like compassion are perfectly
consistent with self-love, indeed Butler held that to take pleasure in
benevolent and virtuous acts and view them as part of one's
happiness is "itself the Temper of Satisfaction and
Enjoyment." In the *Analogy*, Butler provided further
arguments that the natural tendency of virtue was the reward of
happiness, and the natural punishment for vice, misery. We often fail
to see this natural tendency because we focus on accidents or a
limited range of examples to the detriment of the consistent long-term
tendencies. Butler suggested a thought experiment of a monarchy run on
virtuous principles (*Analogy* III SS20) and argued that it
would tend to be happier and more powerful than other regimes if
allowed to flourish, eventually becoming a universal monarchy. The
natural tendency of happiness, power, and virtue all coincide in its
flourishing, growth, and moral governance. And happiness as coupled to
virtue in this life points to happiness as the consistent reward for
virtue in the next when accidents do not threaten to derail the
natural tendency.



Which is not to suggest that conscience, virtue, and self-love are
identical, although Butler connected them very deeply (Frey 1992 and
n.p.). Although virtue tends to coincide with interest it tends to
coincide because a virtuous life is a life with the right balance of
benevolent passions and dispositions to make one happy and a life
which responds to the unchanging and immediate moral authority of
conscience - although they are approved of and motivated by
self-love as well.



Butler uses benevolence mainly to refer to a particular passion or a
cluster of passions (McNaughton 1992), although sometimes he also
refers to it and cognate terms ("love of thy neighbor") as
principles that might have particular passions as their objects. There
is still a fair amount of scholarly disagreement as to which sense is
more central in Butler's arguments (nicely summarized in Irwin
2008). Benevolence as a particular passion, like ambition or revenge,
is never interested or disinterested in and of itself. It is only
interested or disinterested in so far as it is guided by or in
accordance with our self-love. Acting in a benevolent manner might
make us happy. Indeed it seems to be the case that benevolent actions
and affections often do make people happy. And we might initially
decide to gratify the passions of benevolence from self-love. But the
passions themselves have no more or less connection to interest than
any other passion does.



Not being made happy by benevolent actions would point to a defect of
temper or a lack of balance in one's nature if the result was
diminished happiness and going against the dictates of conscience. As
noted, for both Butler and Shaftesbury, self-love and virtue converge
when properly understood. But importantly according to Butler,
Shaftesbury erred in not recognizing that they could conflict in
particular cases, and if they did conflict the distinctive authority
of conscience would trump our apparent prudential motivations. This
did not mean that our general interest conflicted with conscience, but
rather that local prudential information could give reasons for
particular reasons for action that conflicted with conscience.



There is also some (more contested) evidence that Butler thought of
benevolence as a ruling principle (Rorty 1978). Butler referred to the
general principle of charity or "love of our neighbor as
thyself" as a virtuous principle or as the reason-guided
endeavor to promote the happiness of proximate others to the same
degree that one attempts to promote one's own good (although he
also identified "love of neighbor" with the particular
passion of compassion). This was a regulating principle of action,
perhaps distinct from benevolent passions. Butler suggested in Sermon
IX that we have a fundamental obligation to the happiness of sensible
creatures other than ourselves insofar as they are capable of pleasure
and pain, an obligation that can only be ignored in order to bring
about greater happiness (to be further discussed in Section 6).
Although this appears to be a fundamental moral obligation to maximize
welfare a few years later Butler strongly criticized theories on which
the overall happiness is what makes an action good or evil and argued
that our conscience holds actions to be morally good or bad
independent of the expected or actual consequences for happiness
("Dissertation," SS5). Most of the secondary
literature takes Butler to generally be an anti-utilitarian (but see
Louden 1995 and in a different way see Frey 1992, for a historical
overview of interpretations see Garrett 2019), but there is
disagreement as to whether Butler held a consistent position or
changed his mind (see McPherson 1948-9). Some even argue that he
might be able to embrace a form of consequentialism (see McNaughton
2017).



Finally, Butler claimed that benevolence is the whole of virtue in
Sermon XII, although he qualified the claim later in Sermon XII and
qualified it even more strongly in the "Dissertation on
Virtue." Butler did not mean that to act benevolently in each
and every action was the entirety of virtue, for example as we shall
see in the next section moral resentment was an appropriate attitude
for a virtuous agent. Rather he meant that to act according to and to
be motivated by the principle of loving one's neighbor generally
leads to virtuous and morally approved actions. Although
self-partiality tends in the opposite direction, benevolence offsets
this tendency and brings benevolent and self-partial affections in
proper proportion. Conversely self-partiality brings benevolence in
line with self-love such that it balances properly in our nature.



According to Butler when we approve of virtue in an agent this gives
rise to benevolence towards the agent. The ultimate object of this
love of benevolent moral agents is our love of God, the most
benevolent agent. In stressing the continuity between love of neighbor
and love of God, Butler also stressed the continuity between our
approval of moral agents and natural theology. Finally, to have a
character such that benevolent actions make one happy is normally to
have a character that encompasses all of the virtues.


## 6. Compassion, Resentment, and Forgiveness



Compassion was besides the love of God the most important of the
particular passions involving benevolence for Butler. He defined
compassion as "real sorrow and concern for the misery of our
fellow creatures" giving rise to the desire to relieve their
distress (Sermon V Note 1). The passion of compassion arose from the
imaginative ability to substitute another for oneself and thereby to
be affected by the distresses of that other with whom one
compassionates as towards oneself (Sermon V Note 1). Butler readily
admitted that the psychological process that gives rise to compassion
included both pleasure in the fact that we were not suffering the
distress as well and awareness of our own susceptibility to the ills
prompting distress in the object of our compassion. But although the
process of giving rise to compassion also gives rise to and even
includes self-partial thoughts, "compassion" refers
strictly to a "real sorrow and concern for the misery of our
fellow creatures" (Sermon V Note 1). To identify it with a
self-partial pleasure in the fact that we were not in distress or with
the desire to alleviate distress in order to no longer be annoyed by
it was to be confused about the meaning of word. Although according to
Butler compassion, like any affection, must be governed by reason, the
motivation to virtuous actions that compassion gives rise to would not
be given rise to by reason alone. Consequently the passion of
compassion has a central role in our moral actions. Moreover, the
principle of private self-love is not sufficient to serve our welfare
without compassion, i.e., compassion is an important ingredient in our
well being in addition to being an important moral passion. Its
importance for our well being can be seen, according to Butler, in the
fact that those who lack compassion, who have "hardness of
heart," tend to have diminished happiness due to "hardness
of heart" (Sermon X, SS7) blocking the scope and degree of
their happiness.



Resentment or anger was somewhat more difficult for Butler to deal
with insofar as it was ubiquitous to human beings but conflicted with
the Christian command to love our enemies. Butler made two
distinctions, between settled (or deliberate) and hasty (or sudden)
resentment and between resentment raised by non-moral harm or
resentment raised by moral injury. He further distinguished between
resentment and the negative passion of malice (although he denies the
existence of disinterested, cool, direct ill-will or malice). Hasty
resentment is an immediate response to "mere harm without
appearance of wrong or injustice" (Sermon VIII, SS6). It can
be excessive and misguided, and one can be morally culpable for
excessive and misguided expressions of it, but hasty resentment serves
an important end of self-preservation and care of one's near and
dear. Settled resentment is an affection that has moral evil or
injustice as its object. Although moral evil gives rise to pain which
can strengthen this settled resentment, the object of the resentment
is not the pain or harm done but instead the design or intention to
morally injure, harm, do wrong and injustice. And the goal of
resentment is to cause appropriate injury in a wrongdoer, not malign
injury or revenge that are distinguished from resentment. For Butler,
settled resentment has an important moral end in drawing men together
to pursue justice, in making them fear engendering resentment in
mankind due to their actions, and to extirpate moral wickedness: it is
"one of the common bonds by which society is held together; a
fellow-feeling, which each Individual has in behalf of the whole
species, as well as of himself" (Sermon VIII, SS8). Indeed
Butler goes so far as to suggest that communal moral resentment and
the justice it gives rise to is what separates us from the state of
nature where each man is arbiter of his own punishment which quickly
devolves into revenge (a point developed further in Six Sermons).



This raises a central problem for resentment as a moral sentiment or
passion: unless kept strictly within bounds it devolves into revenge
and conflicts with benevolence and virtue. Part of the answer is that
however extreme an injury done, and however settled the resentment
rising in response, the execution of justice does not supersede the
prior obligation of good will we have to all humans insofar as they
are capable of happiness and misery. Rather we harm wrong doers to
preserve "the quiet and happiness of the world" and this
"general and more enlarged obligation destroys a more particular
and confined one of the same kind, inconsistent with it. Guilt and
injury then does not dispense with or supersede the duty of
goodwill," (Sermon IX SS15). Another part of the answer is
that since the proper object is the injustice, to resent
someone's whole character as opposed to the particular aspect of
character that gave rise to the harm, i.e. to portray them as wholly
monstrous, is to move beyond the appropriate bounds. This pitfall is
easier to avoid when we recognize our own mixed characters and flaws.
Relatedly, and perhaps most importantly one must recognize that
self-partiality is often fueling a desire for revenge against those we
resent insofar as they have injured us. We ought to attempt to view
injuries to us from as distant and unprejudiced a human viewpoint as
possible -- with full awareness of our own future non-existence
and final judgment - and when we do we will be able to recognize
that our enemies are as often as not mistaken or acting
inadvertently.



The awareness of our own flaws, and our acceptance of the
non-existence of cool, disinterested and malign wills as well as our
recognition of the ubiquity of mixed characters also gives rise to
compassion and the desire to forgive. But notably for Butler
forgiveness does not entail giving up resentment for moral wrongs
(Griswold 2008; Garcia 2011). Rather it entails checking inappropriate
resentment, anger, and revenge, being aware when what appears to be a
moral harm is in fact an inadvertent injury whose putative moral
injustice is inflated by our own partiality, and treating others who
harm us with the same compassion that we hold all humans due good-will
should be treated (Radzik 2014).


## 7. Self-Deceit and Ignorance



Butler devoted three of his Sermons to issues connected with
self-deceit (IV, VI, X). The focus on the pervasiveness of self-deceit
as a serious moral problem is an important difference between Butler
and his more optimistic confreres Hutcheson and Shaftesbury. For
Butler we are often self-deceived even when we think we are doing what
is morally right (in fact if we think we are wholly in the right we
are almost always deceived (Sermon X SS13)) and we often only
recognize our self-deception -- if at all -- upon later
reflection. That we are so prone to self-deception is mainly due to a
lack of reflection when acting prompted by self-partiality.



According to Butler, most of us can access what the right thing is to
do in most circumstances, and most of us often wish to do the right
thing when it doesn't conflict with our self-partiality. But we
are also susceptible to engage in self-deceit in order to justify
acting on self-partial motives even when it conflicts with what is
morally right. Butler illustrated this sort of self-deceit by
reference to the example of Balaam, a prophet who had been asked to
curse the Israelites by the Moabites. Even though God expressly
forbade Balaam, he still considered cursing the Israelites when
greater rewards were offered by Moabite ambassadors. The puzzle was
how could Balaam know what was right but still be motivated to do what
was wrong? Butler's answer was not so much to try to solve the
problem of *akrasia* as to describe the moral psychology of
self-deceit.



Balaam's moral failure was effected by his avoiding reflecting
on his actions, by a pervasive asymmetry in how we view ourselves and
how we view others due to native self-partiality that can only be
corrected by reflection, and by a difficulty in discerning the exact
degree to which we are obliged to act morally. The three are
interconnected. We are normally happy to unreflectively cut more slack
for ourselves than we are willing to cut for others due to
self-partiality or an "overfondness for ourselves" (Sermon
X SS6). When a morally right action is a matter of degree, it is
easy and common to avoid reflection and to err on the side of
self-partiality in the degree in which the moral action is undertaken.
This allows one to engage in more and more immoral acts while
convincing oneself that each undermining of the rule is justified and
reasonable. In the story of Balaam, Balaam invites the ambassadors to
stay the night under the aegis of hospitality. By analogy for Butler
we undermine rules under the aegis of ordinary sociability and
civility -- for example we engage in self-serving malicious
gossip under the aegis of being sociable -- and gradually
undermine our capacity to act from the dictate of conscience when
called upon to do so.



Since conscience is authoritative and proximate for Butler, and since
the dictates of conscience coincide with our self-love, self-deceit
only gets off the ground if we avoid reflection or if we reflect
poorly. In addition to the oversimplifying and bad faith just
described, we give self-deceit a foothold by refusing to look at or
avoiding the facts of the matter when we feel these facts will go
against our self-partial desires -- Butler gives the example of
profligate spenders not looking at the state of their finances (Sermon
X SS11) -- and by relying piecemeal on the counsel of others
when these counsels serve our interest.



In one of his less read sermons (Sermon IV) Butler suggests that
careful government of the tongue is important to one's moral
well being. The role of others -- both our oppositions to and
agreements with others -- and its relation to self-governance is
particularly crucial for Butler in explaining this sort of
self-deceit. Our tendency to paint the characters of others in black
and white allows us to justify our immoral actions by virtue of the
fact that we self-deceptively (and self-righteously) cast ourselves
and our motivations as wholly good in opposition to our opponent who
is wholly evil, and so we can treat them however we see fit. We also
draw on the idle comments of others that conform with our self-partial
desires to serve as external justification of our immoral actions.



The problem then is given human beings' great capacity for
self-deceit, how can it be prevented? Is not the attempt to prevent
self-deceit as prone to self-deceit as anything else? Butler's
answer is that habitual and systematic self-reflection and
self-governance by rigid rules are the best response. In a manner
reminiscent of Epictetus' famous maxim one must watch oneself as
an enemy lying in ambush, and view one's actions as an enemy
would judging them harshly, Butler suggests a two part rule to this
end "One is, to substitute another for yourself, when you take a
survey of any part of your behavior, or consider what is proper and
fit and reasonable for you to do on any occasion: the other part is,
that you... consider yourself as the person affected by such a
behavior," (Sermon X SS15). The rule "itself may be
dishonestly applied" but even the misguided attempt to apply it
may reveal more truth than not applying it at all. In the
*Analogy* Butler argued that one of the central moral purposes
of this life is as a probationary period in the acquisition of habits
of self-governance (*Analogy* V). That these habits are not
fool-proof is a consequence of the fact that our ability to apply them
seriously to ourselves is one of the bases for our ultimate punishment
and reward.



The problem of self-deceit is connected to another of Butler's
abiding themes, human ignorance of the larger design of God. In Sermon
XV "Upon Human Ignorance" (notably the final sermon of the
collection), the *Analogy* and the "Dissertation on
Virtue," Butler stressed that our knowledge of design is
probable at best. Sermon XV concludes with an exhortation reminiscent
of Locke. Since we have such limited knowledge of providence and of
God's design, we should turn our attention to that which we can
have knowledge of: our nature insofar as it bears on our moral
governance and conduct.



The argument of the *Analogy* and the "Dissertation on
Virtue" were both premised on this. In the *Analogy*,
Butler argued that we have probable evidence that our morally right
and wrong actions will be judged and rewarded and punished by God and
that this life is a probationary period where we act in ways that will
ultimately be judged.


## 8. Influence



Butler's Sermons were read in the eighteenth century, in
particular after the publication of the *Analogy*, and went
through multiple editions. The *Analogy* was reprinted many
times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as were
Butler's works. His initial influence seems to have been
greatest on Scottish philosophers, including (perhaps) his
contemporary Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Fordyce, David
Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and their fellow travellers --
notably Edmund Burke. Hume sought to meet Butler and emended the
manuscript copy of *A Treatise on Human Nature* he gave to him
for fear it would cause offense. Hume's and Smith's
accounts of sympathy, compassion, resentment, justice, and their
empirical attitude towards moral psychology (and to the centrality of
moral psychology for ethics) and the limits of metaphysical
explanations in morals bear Butler's influence. Hume's
discussion of induction in his *Treatise* has also been seen as
a criticism of Butler's procedure in the *Analogy*
(Russell 2008). Butler was also widely read in Germany. Solomon
Maimon, for example, quotes Butler's "Dissertation on
Virtue" in the Preface to his *Autobiography*. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century Butler's
*Sermons* became more influential than the *Analogy*,
due to their influence at Oxford and Cambridge and particularly on
William Whewell (see Tennant 195-199) and Sidgwick. Throughout
the later nineteenth century and the twentieth century they were
discussed by and had great impact on many of the central moral
philosophers of the Anglo-American tradition -- G. E. Moore, H.
A. Pritchard, and particularly W. D. Ross, among many. Butler's
influence and importance has persisted (see, for example, the section
on Butlerian Accounts in the entry on
 forgiveness).