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Sense and Reason in Butler's Ethics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Peter Fuss
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside

Extract

In recent years there has been widespread agreement among Bishop Butler's commentators and critics concerning the nature of his “official” position as a moral philosopher. His moral epistemology is a form of moral sensism, its cognitive aspect best described, after Sidgwick, as perceptual intuitionism. His normative theory is strongly deontologistic in character, and as a moral psychologist he is still celebrated as a devastating critic of psychological egoism and hedonism. Understandably enough, there has been a tendency to discount those remarkable passages in Sermons XI and XII in which Butler seems to be defending an almost diametrically opposed position, compounded of a rationalistic epistemology, a hedonistic-utilitarian normative theory, and a form of psychological egoism. Thus G. D. Broad finds flatly inconsistent those passages in which Butler seems to make self-love coordinate with conscience in its moral authority. When Butler asserts that on calm reflection one is unable to justify any course of action contrary to one's own happiness, Broad maintains that in context this statement must be understood not as a presentation of Butler's own view, but as “a hypothetical concession to an imaginary opponent.” Butler, Broad thinks, is merely once again trying to convince people that reasonable self-love and the dictates of conscience do not conflict. Similarly, A. Duncan-Jones argues that the apparent inconsistency in the passage in question is removed once we understand that Butler is only refuting the egoists' contention that self-love and virtuous benevolence are necessarily opposed.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1968

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References

1 Five Types of Ethical Theory (New York: The Humanities Press, 1951), pp. 7982Google Scholar.

2 The Works of Joseph Butler, edited by Gladstone, W. E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), volume II, p. 64Google Scholar. All subsequent references to Butler's writings will be to this edition, and will list volume and page number.

3 Butler's Moral Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952), pp. 113115Google Scholar.

4 “And therefore a disposition and endeavour to do good to all with whom we have to do, in the degree and manner which the different relations we stand in to them require, is a discharge of all the obligations we are under to them.” (Ibid.)

* I am indebted to Professor E. J. Bond for calling my attention to a blurring of the distinction between the two in an earlier version of this essay.

5 For this last interpretation, see McPherson, T. H., “The Development of Bishop Butler's Ethics,” Philosophy XXIII (October, 1948)Google Scholar and XXIV (January, 1949).

6 “Conscience and Self-Love in Butler's Sermons” Philosophy XXVII (October, 1952).

7 Loc. cit., p. 337.