Fifteen Sermons

Joseph Butler

5 ideas

1. David condemns himself through Nathan's parable

   After arranging Uriah's death to take his wife Bathsheba, King David hears the prophet Nathan's parable of a rich man who steals a poor man's only lamb, and furiously sentences the rich man to death, until Nathan says "Thou art the man." Butler uses the episode to show that a person can keep a fully working moral judgment, sharp and severe toward others, while it stays switched off toward his own identical conduct. The lapse lies in where he points his judgment, not in his moral knowledge.

2. Self-deceit works by not looking

   People rarely lie to themselves outright. Instead they avoid ever turning attention toward the part of their conduct that would indict them, and they keep their self-assessment vague and general. They also comfort themselves by being scrupulous in minor duties, and they describe their own acts in softened words, so that a wrong never appears under its true name. The cure is to force the specific question: what exactly did I do, and what would I call it if someone else had done it?

3. Particular passions are not self-love

   Hunger, curiosity, ambition and affection aim at external objects (food, knowledge, esteem, another person's good), not at one's own pleasure. Pleasure arises only when those objects are attained. So even the pleasure one gains from benevolence does not make benevolence selfish. Self-love that becomes too preoccupied with its own happiness shrinks the outward interests from which happiness actually comes, and so defeats itself.

4. Conscience has authority, not just strength

   Human nature is a constitution, a hierarchy in which reflective conscience has the rightful claim to govern and passions and self-interest are subordinate. A motive's strength at a given moment says nothing about its authority. Acting on whatever impulse is strongest is therefore 'unnatural' in the relevant sense, even though it is common and the impulse is real.

5. Resentment is legitimate; revenge is not

   Butler separates sudden anger, a reflex against harm, from settled resentment, which responds specifically to deliberate injury and exists to deter wrongdoing and protect justice. Resentment is therefore a proper passion. Forgiveness does not mean ceasing to feel wronged. It means refusing the excess of the passion: renouncing revenge and the wish that the offender suffer beyond what justice requires, while keeping goodwill toward him.

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