Joseph Butler

Joseph Butler was an English Anglican bishop and moral philosopher, preacher at the Rolls Chapel in London and later Bishop of Bristol and then of Durham. His Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726) give an influential account of human nature as an ordered system of particular passions, self-love, benevolence and conscience. Against Hobbes, he argued that people are not purely selfish, and that self-love and concern for others usually support each other. His Analogy of Religion (1736) defended Christianity against the deists, and its appendix criticises Locke's memory-based account of personal identity.

Key ideas

• Human nature is a system in which particular passions are governed by self-love and benevolence, all under the authority of conscience.
• Psychological egoism is false: particular desires aim at their objects, not at our own pleasure, which comes from satisfying them.
• Conscience has natural authority: it is not one more impulse but the judge among them.
• Self-love and benevolence seldom conflict, since caring for others is part of a happy life.
• Memory presupposes personal identity and so cannot constitute it, contrary to Locke.

Major works

• Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726)
• The Analogy of Religion (1736)
• Of Personal Identity (1736)
• Of the Nature of Virtue (1736)

In the Book corner

• Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel 1726; second edition with Preface 1729 · Intermediate
  A collection of sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel in London, where Butler was preacher, and printed in 1726; the second edition…

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