Hobbist, although Butler fairly treats it as having a philosophical
basis in Hobbes’s psychology. It was, so to say,
Hobbism turned inside out,—rendered licentious and Butler.
anarchical instead of constructive. Hobbes had said
“the natural state of man is non-moral, unregulated; moral rules
are means to the end of peace, which is a means to the end of
self-preservation.” On this view morality, though dependent
for its actuality on the social compact which establishes government,
is actually binding on man as a reasonable being. But the
quasi-theistic assumption that what is natural must be reasonable
remained in the minds of Hobbes’s most docile readers, and in
combination with his thesis that egoism is natural, tended to
produce results which were dangerous to social well-being. To
meet this view Butler does not content himself, as is sometimes
carelessly supposed, with insisting on the natural claim to
authority of the conscience which his opponent repudiated as
artificial; he adds a subtle and effective argument ad hominem.
He first follows Shaftesbury in exhibiting the social affections
as no less natural than the appetites and desires which tend
directly to self-preservation; then reviving the Stoic view
of the prima naturae, the first objects of natural appetites,
he argues that pleasure is not the primary aim even of the
impulses which Shaftesbury allowed to be “self-affections”;
but rather a result which follows upon their attaining their
natural ends. We have, in fact, to distinguish self-love, the
“general desire that every man hath of his own happiness” or
pleasure, from the particular affections, passions, and appetites
directed towards objects other than pleasure, in the satisfaction
of which pleasure consists. The latter are “necessarily presupposed”
as distinct impulses in “the very idea of an interested
pursuit”; since, if there were no such pre-existing desires,
there would be no pleasure for self-love to aim at. Thus the
object of hunger is not the pleasure of eating but food; hunger
is therefore, strictly speaking, no more “interested” than
benevolence; granting that the pleasures of the table are an
important element in the happiness at which self-love aims,
the same at least may be said for the pleasures of love and
sympathy. Further, so far from bodily appetites (or other
particular desires) being forms of self-love, there is no one of
them which under certain circumstances may not come into
conflict with it. Indeed, it is common for men to sacrifice to
passion what they know to be their true interests; at the same
time we do not consider such conduct “natural” in man as a
rational being; we rather regard it as natural for him to govern
his transient impulses. Thus the notion of natural unregulated
egoism turns out to be a psychological chimera. Indeed, we may
say that an egoist must be doubly self-regulative, since rational
self-love ought to restrain not only other impulses, but itself also;
for as happiness is made up of feelings that result from the
satisfaction of impulses other than self-love, any over-development
of the latter, enfeebling these other impulses, must proportionally
diminish the happiness at which self-love aims. If,
then, it be admitted that human impulses are naturally under
government, the natural claim of conscience or the moral faculty
to be the supreme governor will hardly be denied.
But has not self-love also, by Butler’s own account, a similar authority, which may come into conflict with that of conscience? Butler fully admits this, and, in fact, grounds on it an important criticism of Shaftesbury. We have seen that in the latter’s system the “moral sense” is not absolutely required, or at least is necessary only as a substitute for enlightened self-regard; since if the harmony between prudence and virtue, self-regarding and social impulses, is complete, mere self-interest will prompt a duly enlightened mind to maintain precisely that “balance” of affections in which goodness consists. But to Butler’s more cautious mind the completeness of this harmony did not seem sufficiently demonstrable to be taken as a basis of moral teaching; he has at least to contemplate the possibility of a man being convinced of the opposite; and he argues that unless we regard conscience as essentially authoritative—which is not implied in the term “moral sense”—such a man is really bound to be vicious; “since interest, one’s own happiness, is a manifest obligation.” Still on this view, even if the authority of conscience be asserted, we seem reduced to an ultimate dualism of our rational nature. Butler’s ordered polity of impulses turns out to be a polity with two independent governments. Butler does not deny this, so far as mere claim to authority is concerned;[1] but he maintains that, the dictates of conscience being clear and certain, while the calculations of self-interest lead to merely probable conclusions, it can never be practically reasonable to disobey the former, even apart from any proof which religion may furnish of the absolute coincidence of the two in a future life.
This dualism of governing principles, conscience and self-love, in Butler’s system, and perhaps, too, his revival of the Platonic conception of human nature as an ordered and governed community of impulses, is perhaps most nearly anticipated in Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1722). Here, Wollaston. for the first time, we find “moral good” and “natural good” or “happiness” treated separately as two essentially distinct objects of rational pursuit and investigation; the harmony between them being regarded as matter of religious faith, not moral knowledge. Wollaston’s theory of moral evil as consisting in the practical contradiction of a true proposition, closely resembles the most paradoxical part of Clarke’s doctrine, and was not likely to approve itself to the strong common sense of Butler; but his statement of happiness or pleasure as a “justly desirable” end at which every rational being “ought” to aim corresponds exactly to Butler’s conception of self-love as a naturally governing impulse; while the “moral arithmetic” with which he compares pleasures and pains, and endeavours to make the notion of happiness quantitatively precise, is an anticipation of Benthamism.
There is another side of Shaftesbury’s harmony which Butler was ultimately led to oppose in a more decided manner,—the opposition, namely, between conscience or the moral sense and the social affections. In the Sermons, indeed (1729), Butler seems to treat conscience and calm benevolence as permanently allied though distinct principles, but in the Dissertation on Virtue, appended to the Analogy (1739), he maintains that the conduct dictated by conscience will often differ widely from that to which mere regard for the production of happiness would prompt. We may take this latter treatise as representing the first in the development of English ethics, at which what were afterwards called “utilitarian” and “intuitional” morality were first formally opposed; in earlier systems the antithesis is quite latent, as we have incidentally noticed in the case of Cumberland and Clarke. The argument in Butler’s dissertation was probably directed chiefly against Hutcheson, who in his Inquiry Hutcheson. into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue had definitely identified virtue with benevolence. The identification is slightly qualified in Hutcheson’s posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy (1755), in which the general view of Shaftesbury is more fully developed, with several new psychological distinctions, including Butler’s separation of “calm” benevolence—as well as, after Butler, “calm self-love”—from the “turbulent” passions, selfish or social. Hutcheson follows Butler again in laying stress on the regulating and controlling function of the moral sense; but he still regards “kind affections” as the principal objects of moral approbation—the “calm” and “extensive” affections being preferred to the turbulent and narrow—together with the desire and love of moral excellence which is ranked with universal benevolence, the two being equally worthy and necessarily harmonious. Only in a secondary sense is approval due to certain “abilities and dispositions immediately connected with virtuous affections,” as candour, veracity, fortitude, sense of honour; while in a lower grade still are placed sciences and arts, along with even bodily skills and gifts; indeed, the approbation we give to these is not strictly moral, but is referred to the “sense of decency or dignity,” which (as well as the sense of honour) is to be distinguished from
- ↑ In a remarkable passage near the close of his eleventh sermon Butler seems even to allow that conscience would have to give way to self-love, if it were possible (which it is not) that the two should come into ultimate and irreconcilable conflict.
