SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE IN BUTLER'S ETHICAL SYSTEM.
IN an examination of Butler's treatment of self-love, attention must first be directed to the distinction which he makes between that principle and the particular affections. Butler never wearies of reminding his readers of the difference, since he maintains that it is confusion upon this point which has given rise to the common error that there is an antagonism between interested and disinterested action the coincidence of which is of vital importance to his general standpoint. In the eleventh sermon, his chief design, as he tells us, is to show that self-love is no more at variance with benevolence than with "any other particular affection," and that the terms 'interested' and 'disinterested' either do not apply to particular affections or apply equally to all of them.[1] Actions proceeding from these are "all particular movements toward particular external objects," and are interested in no other sense than that they are expressions of the agent's own desire or preference.[2] The well-known argument by which Butler attempts to refute the hedonistic contention, that pleasure is the only object of desire, may be briefly stated in his own words: "That all particular appetites and passions are toward external things themselves, distinct from the pleasure arising from them, is manifested from hence; that there could not be this pleasure, were it not for that prior suitableness between the object and the passion."[3] Thus impulse and desire precede the feeling of pleasure, but not vice versâ. Pleasure is the consequence of the gratification of a passion, but not the dynamic, the force that moves us a tergo. The hedonic result is conditioned by the natural instinct towards the object, but the impulse to exercise the function precedes and conditions the pleasure. Butler's analysis of the objective reference of desire is, however, so familiar, and its importance and significance so clearly shown by such
