Butler Joseph (1692–1752), English theologian and Anglican bishop who made important contributions to moral philosophy, to the understanding of moral agency, and to the development of deontological ethics. Better known in his own time for The Analogy of Religion (1736), a defense, along broadly empiricist lines, of orthodox, ‘revealed’ Christian doctrine against deist criticism, Butler’s main philosophical legacy was a series of highly influential arguments and theses contained in a collection of Sermons (1725) and in two ‘Dissertations’ appended to The Analogy – one on virtue and the other on personal identity. The analytical method of these essays (‘everything is what it is and not another thing’) provided a model for much of English-speaking moral philosophy to follow. For example, Butler is often credited with refuting psychological hedonism, the view that all motives can be reduced to the desire for pleasure or happiness. The sources of human motivation are complex and structurally various, he argued. Appetites and passions seek their own peculiar objects, and pleasure must itself be understood as involving an intrinsic positive regard for a particular object. Other philosophers had maintained, like Butler, that we can desire, e.g., the happiness of others intrinsically, and not just as a means to our own happiness. And others had argued that the person who aims singlemindedly at his own happiness is unlikely to attain it. Butler’s distinctive contribution was to demonstrate that happiness and pleasure themselves require completion by specific objects for which we have an intrinsic positive regard. Self-love, the desire for our own happiness, is a reflective desire for, roughly, the satisfaction of our other desires. But self-love is not our only reflective desire; we also have ‘a settled reasonable principle of benevolence.’ We can consider the goods of others and come on reflection to desire their welfare more or less independently of particular emotional involvement such as compassion.
In morals, Butler equally opposed attempts to reduce virtue to benevolence, even of the most universal and impartial sort. Benevolence seeks the good or happiness of others, whereas the regulative principle of virtue is conscience, the faculty of moral approval or disapproval of conduct and character. Moral agency requires, he argued, the capacities to reflect disinterestedly on action, motive, and character, to judge these in distinctively moral terms (and not just in terms of their relation to the non-moral good of happiness), and to guide conduct by such judgments. Butler’s views about the centrality of conscience in the moral life were important in the development of deontological ethics as well as in the working out of an associated account of moral agency. Along the first lines, he argued in the ‘Dissertation’ that what it is right for a person to do depends, not just on the (non-morally) good or bad consequences of an action, but on such other morally relevant features as the relationships the agent bears to affected others (e.g., friend or beneficiary), or whether fraud, injustice, treachery, or violence is involved. Butler thus distinguished analytically between distinctively moral evaluation of action and assessing an act’s relation to such non-moral values as happiness. And he provided succeeding deontological theorists with a litany of examples where the right thing to do is apparently not what would have the best consequences.
Butler believed God instills a ‘principle of reflection’ or conscience in us through which we intrinsically disapprove of such actions as fraud and injustice. But he also believed that God, being omniscient and benevolent, fitted us with these moral attitudes because ‘He foresaw this constitution of our nature would produce more happiness, than forming us with a temper of mere general benevolence.’ This points, however, toward a kind of anti-deontological or consequentialist view, sometimes called indirect consequentialism, which readily acknowledges that what it is right to do does not depend on which act will have the best consequences. It is entirely appropriate, according to indirect consequentialism, that conscience approve or disapprove of acts on grounds other than a calculation of consequences precisely because its doing so has the best consequences. Here we have a version of the sort of view later to be found, for example, in Mill’s defense of utilitarianism against the objection that it conflicts with justice and rights. Morality is a system of social control that demands allegiance to considerations other than utility, e.g., justice and honesty. But it is justifiable only to the extent that the system itself has utility. This sets up something of a tension. From the conscientious perspective an agent must distinguish between the question of which action would have the best consequences and the question of what he should do. And from that perspective, Butler thinks, one will necessarily regard one’s answer to the second question as authoritative for conduct. Conscience necessarily implicitly asserts its own authority, Butler famously claimed. Thus, insofar as agents come to regard their conscience as simply a method of social control with good consequences, they will come to be alienated from the inherent authority their conscience implicitly claims. A similar issue arises concerning the relation between conscience and self-love. Butler says that both self-love and conscience are ‘superior principles in the nature of man’ in that an action will be unsuitable to a person’s nature if it is contrary to either. This makes conscience’s authority conditional on its not conflicting with self-love (and vice versa). Some scholars, moreover, read other passages as implying that no agent could reasonably follow conscience unless doing so was in the agent’s interest. But again, it would seem that an agent who internalized such a view would be alienated from the authority that, if Butler is right, conscience implicitly claims. For Butler, conscience or the principle of reflection is uniquely the faculty of practical judgment. Unlike either self-love or benevolence, even when these are added to the powers of inference and empirical cognition, only conscience makes moral agency possible. Only a creature with conscience can accord with or violate his own judgment of what he ought to do, and thereby be a ‘law to himself.’ This suggests a view that, like Kant’s, seeks to link deontology to a conception of autonomous moral agency. See also EGOISM, ETHICS, HEDONISM , UTIL- ITARIANIS. S.L.D.