Joseph Butler: Five Sermons

by Joseph Butler, Stephen Darwall (Editor)

Five Sermons by Joseph Butler. Edited by Stephen Darwall

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

79 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1983

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Butler is one of the most underappreciated moral philosophers of the modern period whose work explicitly influenced David Hume and anticipated elements in Kantian ethics. His Five Sermons constitute a firm rejection of Hobbesian presuppositions about human nature and represent an attempt to reconcile different sources of moral motivation often perceived at odds with one another: the desire for happiness, or self-love, and concern for others’ welfare, or benevolence. In terms of method, Butler, like so many of his philosophical peers in Britain, takes an empirical approach: he claims to start his inquiry “from a matter of fact, namely: what the particular nature of man is, its various parts, and how they are assembled . . . from whence it proceeds to consider what course of life corresponds to this whole nature” (13). Thomas Hobbes, his seventeenth-century predecessor, also took an empirical approach to the study of human nature that led him to conclude that humans are and should be entirely driven by self-interest. On the one hand, Butler affirms Hobbes’ empiricism: as to whether human nature is so constituted as to tend toward benevolence or, as Hobbes maintained, self-interest and the acquisition of power, Butler observes that this is a question not immediately provable by reason. Consequently, to make a plausible assessment of human nature, one must appeal to our senses and perceptions, commonly held facts, observable human action, and first-person testimony. All of this evidence, Butler insists, points to a less reductive portrait of human nature with complex and interrelated sources of moral motivation. In fact, Butler contends that there is a natural principle of benevolence in humans akin to a natural principle of self-love, the respective objects of which are society and the individual. More importantly, he claims that we also have the capacity to make moral evaluations that transcend our self-interest and can determine our conduct in conformity with an authoritative principle, what Butler calls the principle of reflection, or conscience.

Butler understands human nature as constituted by several different parts that work as a system whose harmony depends on the subjection of the appetites, passions, and affections to the principle of reflection, or conscience. In this view, Butler echoes many of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato, who also claimed that the unity of human nature rests on an evaluative order. By the same token, Butler maintains that human action is motivated by various principles that correspond with these constituent parts of human nature, of which there are three. First, we may be motivated by various passions and affections, which reflect our uncontrollable and spontaneous desires for specific, external objects. When we are motivated by these desires, we seek their objects, whatever they may be, for their own sake, and not necessarily as means to promote our own happiness, even if the pleasure we derive from such objects may ultimately make us happy. In other words, these desires are not self-referential or reflexive but other-directed. That these appetites and affections are not mere manifestations of self-love is, for Butler, evident from the observation that such passions may motivate actions that a cool-headed self-love would condemn as contrary to our self-interest. For example, one may be driven by ardor for one’s beloved to act in a way that is, in fact, detrimental to one’s happiness, and so cannot be motivated by self-love.

At the second level of human nature there are the principles of self-love and benevolence, both of which are distinct from our various appetites and affections for external objects and yet resemble their basic structure. That is, while our desires for external objects do not fall under the principle of self-love, self-love resembles our other-directed desires insofar as its object is our happiness. Of course, self-love is reflexive in a way our other desires are not; moreover, self-love, unlike our spontaneous desires, can serve as a principle of practical reason that helps us deliberate about the most effective means to promote our happiness. Notably, Butler claims that while self-love often serves to promote happiness, happiness itself is not constituted by self-love, but by the satisfaction of our various desires. Consequently, action exclusively in accordance with the principle of self-love in order to be happy may paradoxically frustrate the achievement of that end. For example, inordinate concern for self-love may blind me to the ways in which benevolent action will make me happy, such that if I were to simply act in accordance with my natural affections, of which benevolence is one, I may more successfully serve my own interest.

As this last example implies, benevolence, too, has affinities with our other-directed desires—and even more so than self-love. That is, we have a natural affection to promote others’ welfare in the same way we have spontaneous appetites for all sorts of external objects that we desire for their own sake. That this is true is evident, for example, from the natural, other-oriented concern parents have for their children and individuals have for their friends, both of which are plainly not reducible to self-interested concern. Like self-love, benevolence can also serve as a principle of practical reason—the utilitarian maxim to act so as to maximize overall happiness is one version of this. Importantly, Butler is keen to insist that self-love and benevolence often coincide and need not contradict one another. For example, we may act benevolently toward others from self-love in the awareness that we will derive pleasure from that action, or we may act benevolently quite apart from this awareness and merely because we want to, irrespective of self-love, in the same way we act to satisfy other natural desires. Our interest may or may not be at stake in benevolent action in terms of motivation, even if benevolent action by nature produces pleasure and thus elicits happiness. Consequently, one who believes it is rational to promote one’s own interest must concede that it is also rational to act for the sake of others, that is, to be motivated by benevolence.

Still, Butler admits that our natural propensity for benevolence is less powerful than our natural self-love, a fact which necessitates and implicates the third level of human nature, at which Butler locates the principle of reflection, or conscience. As mentioned, Butler claims that conscience has a natural supremacy over the other parts of human nature rooted in its moral authority, evidenced by our moral appraisal of our own actions and social practices of praise and blame. Conscience, then, allows us to adjudicate between the natural principles of self-love and benevolence to ensure that self-love does not prevail and hinder not only moral action, but also, because of the relationship between benevolence and self-interest, the attainment of happiness. Butler explains that action in conformity with conscience therefore helps us cultivate what he calls a cool-headed self-love that balances our natural and entirely appropriate desire to be happy and the moral need to promote others’ welfare. For Butler, the Christian life demands not that one renounces self-love, but that one closely attends to the moral dictates of conscience in the pursuit of one’s happiness.

Whence derives the authority of conscience? Butler offers two different answers. First, he claims that the authority of conscience is based on the kind of creature the human is, who can and should be a law unto itself—what Kant would later call autonomy. Simply on account of human nature, then, conscience “carries its own authority with it” (43). Thus, when we act in accordance with the dictates of conscience, we act in conformity with our nature, and when we fail to abide by our conscience, we do a kind of violence to our humanity. Second, Butler insists that our conscience is implanted by God and indexed to the divine will, from which it also derives its authority. Admittedly, for Butler, the relation between conscience and the will of God seems secondary, a supplement to the emphasis he puts on the need to be a law unto oneself. Nevertheless, God plays an important role for Butler so that action in accordance with conscience ultimately produces human happiness. That is, Butler seems aware that the coincidence between moral virtue and happiness is not universal and assured; whatever exceptions to this rule exist, he claims, will be corrected by God, either at the eschaton or in paradise. Thus, “duty and interest are perfectly coincident, for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future and the whole, this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things [by God]” (45, my emphasis). In this view, he once more anticipates Kant, whose observation that moral virtue has no causal or correlative relation with happiness leads him to postulate the existence of God, who perfectly distributes happiness in accordance with virtue.

[Xander Duffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really difficult read, however, that aside, there is a reason that this powerful sermon has its place in the history of philosophy. A brilliant mind

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agreeable ideas, over-intricate prose, and not terribly engaging.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

Through five sermons Butler offers a surprisingly persuasive series of arguments defending (1) the de facto existence of benevolence and so-called principle of reflection or conscience alongside self-love and various instincts, passions and drives that altogether constitute human nature as a system (2) that advancing the good of others (i.e. benevolence) does not necessarily entail sacrificing self-interest, let alone self-love and (3) the [de jure] "superiority" of the principle of reflection over and above the rest of the elements in the system as revealed through a kind of moral-phenomenological analysis or what one might call "ordinary moral philosophy". Admittedly, the main conceptual moves Butler makes in the third part of the overall project are shakier in comparison to the ones he makes in the first and second parts, owing to the fact that human beings, we might think, are creatures torn between the realm of the 'is' and the realm of the 'ought' and alienated from both. That an average moral agent can quite readily engage in a process of reflection after the fact and come to affirm, reject or suspend the moral content of the action(s) that were undertaken, is taken by Butler as phenomenological evidence in support of the claim that in human nature the rational element rules over the passions.

[Andrew Jampol-Petzinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Butler’s Sermons were evidently quite influential in their day, and are extensively cited in Sidgwick’s “Methods of Ethics.” This volume is a selection of what the editors assure are the essential portions of his sermonizing. Although Butler is sometimes cited for his valorizing of a self-interested impulse as a bearing a valid moral claim, the most interesting elements here (to my mind) are (1) the easy refutation of psychological egoism which he presents, and (2) the general common sensical defense of moral obligation that is always a virtue in moral philosophy.

[Nur Duwek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warm and fuzzy but probably wrong