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Biography: Joseph ButlerLIFE. Joseph Butler was born into a Presbyterian
family at Wantage. He attended a dissenting
academy, but then converted to the Church of
England intent on an ecclesiastical career.
Butler expressed distaste for Oxford's
intellectual conventions while a student at
Oriel College; he preferred the newer styles
of thought, especially those of Locke,
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, leading Hume to
characterize Butler as one of those "who have
begun to put the science of man on a new
footing, and have engaged the attention, and
excited the curiosity of the public." . Butler
benefited from the support of Samuel Clarke
and the Talbot family.
In 1719, Butler was appointed to his first job,
preacher to the Rolls Chapel in Chancery Lane,
London. Butler's anonymous letters to Clarke
had been published in 1716, but a selection of
his Rolls sermons (1726) was the first work
published under his name. These sermons
are still widely read and have held the
attention of secular philosophers more than
any other sermons in history. Butler moved
north and became rector of Stanhope in 1725.
Only at this point is his life documented in
any detail, and his tenure is remembered
mainly for the Analogy of Religion (1736).
Soon after publication of that work, Butler
became Bishop of Bristol. Queen Caroline had
died urging his preferment, but Bristol was
one of the poorest sees, and Butler expressed
some displeasure in accepting it. Once Butler
became dean of St. Paul's in 1740, he was able
to use that income to support his work in
Bristol. In 1750, not long before his death,
Butler was elevated to Durham, one of the
richest bishoprics. The tradition that Butler
declined the See of Canterbury was
conclusively discredited by Norman Sykes
(1936), but continues to be repeated
uncritically in many reference works. Butler's
famous encounter with John Wesley has only
recently be reconstructed in as full detail as
seems possible given the state of the
surviving evidence, and we are now left with
little hope of ever knowing what their actual
relationship was. They disagreed, certainly,
on Wesley's right to preach without a license,
and on this point Butler seems entirely in the
right, but Butler may have supported Wesley
more than he opposed him, and Wesley
seems entirely sincere in his praise of the
Analogy.
Butler has become an icon of a highly
intellectualized, even rarefied, theology,
"wafted in a cloud of metaphysics," as Horace
Walpole said. Ironically, Butler refused as a
matter of principle to write speculative
works or to pursue curiosity. All his writings
were directly related to the performance of
his duties at the time or to career
advancement. From the Rolls sermons on, all
his works are devoted to pastoral philosophy.
A pastoral philosopher gives philosophically
persuasive arguments for seeing life in a
particular way when such a seeing-as may
have a decisive effect on practice. Butler had
little interest in and only occasionally
practices natural theology in the scholastic
sense; his intent is rather defensive, to
answer those who claim that morals and
religion, as conventionally understood, may
be safely disregarded. Butler tried to show,
as a refutation of the practice of his day (as
he perceived it) that morals and religion are
natural extensions of the common way of life
usually taken for granted, and thus that those
who would dispense with them bear a burden
of proof they are unable to discharge. In
arguing that morals and religion are favored
by a presumption already acknowledged in
ordinary life, Butler employs many types of
appeal, at least some of which would be
fallacious if used in an attempted
demonstrative argument. Butler's philosophy
possesses a unity often neglected by those
who read him selectively.
The totality of his work addresses the
questions: why be moral? why be religious?
and which morality?, which religion?
HUMAN NATURE AS MADE FOR VIRTUE.
Butler's argument for morality, found
primarily in his sermons, is an attempt to
show that morality is a matter of following
human nature. To develop this argument, he
introduces the notions of nature and of a
system. There are, he says, various parts to
human nature, and they are arranged
hierarchically. The fact that human nature is
hierarchically ordered is not what makes us
manifestly adapted to virtue, rather it is that
what Butler calls conscience is at the top of
this hierarchy. Butler does sometimes refer
to the conscience as the voice of God, but
contrary to what is sometimes alleged, he
never relies on divine authority in asserting
the supremacy, the universality or the
reliability of conscience. Butler clearly
believes in the autonomy of the conscience as
a secular organ of knowledge.
Whether the conscience judges principles,
actions or persons is not clear, perhaps
deliberately since such distinctions are of no
practical significance. What Butler is
concerned to show is that to dismiss morality
is in effect to dismiss our own nature, and
therefore absurd. As to which morality we
are to follow, Butler seems to have in mind
the common core of civilized standards. He
stresses the degree of agreement and
reliability of conscience without denying some
differences remain. All that is required for his
argument to go through is that the opponent
accept in practice that conscience is the
supreme authority in human nature and that
we ought not to disregard our own nature.
The most significant recent challenge to
Butler's moral theory is by Nicholas Sturgeon
(1976), a reply to which appears in Stephen
Darwall (1995).
Besides the appeal to the rank of conscience,
Butler offered many other observations in his
attempt to show that we are made for, i.e.,
especially suited to, virtue. In his famous
refutation of Hobbes, one of them, he shows
that benevolence is as much a part of human
nature as self-love. Butler also shows how
various other aspects of human nature are
adapted to virtue, sometimes in surprising
ways, for example, that resentment is needed
to balance benevolence. He also deals
forthrightly with self-deception. Only three of
the fifteen sermons deal with explicitly
religious themes: the sermons on the love of
God and the sermon on ignorance.
HUMAN LIFE AS IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD.
Butler's views on our knowledge of God are
among the most frequently misstated aspects
of his philosophy. Lewis White Beck's
exposition (1937) of this neglected aspect of
Butler's philosophy has itself been generally
neglected, and both friends and foes
frequently assert that Butler "assumed" that
God exists. Butler never assumes the existence
of God, rather, at least after his exchange with
Clarke, he takes it as granted that God's
existence can be and has been proved to the
satisfaction of those who were party to the
discussion in his time. The charge, frequently
repeated since the mid-nineteenth century,
that Butler's position is reversible once an
opponent refuses to grant God's existence is
therefore groundless. Butler does not
expound any proof of God's existence, a fact
that makes his identification with Cleanthes in
Hume's Dialogues problematic, but he does
endorse many such proofs, using common
names rather than citing specific texts. The
sermons on the love of God are rarely read
today, but they provide abundant evidence
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