Joseph Butler

The son of a Presbyterian linen-draper, he was destined for the ministry of that church and, along with future archbishop Thomas Secker, entered Samuel Jones's dissenting academy at Gloucester (later Tewkesbury) for that purpose. While there, he entered into a secret correspondence with the distinguished Anglican theologian and philosopher Samuel Clarke. In 1714, Butler decided to enter the Church of England, and went to Oriel College, Oxford. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1718 and later proceeded Doctor of Civil Law on 8 December 1733.[1]

Butler was ordained a deacon on 26 October 1718 by William Talbot, Bishop of Salisbury, in his Bishop's Palace, Salisbury, his palace chapel[11] and a priest on 21 December 1718 by Talbot at St James's Church, Piccadilly.[1] After holding various other high positions, he became rector of the rich living of Stanhope, County Durham.

In 1736 he was made the head chaplain of George II's wife Caroline, on the advice of Lancelot Blackburne. He was nominated Bishop of Bristol on 19 October 1738 and consecrated a bishop on 3 December 1738 at Lambeth Palace chapel. Remaining Bishop of Bristol, Butler was installed Dean of St Paul's on 24 May 1740; he kept that office until his translation to Durham.[1] He is said (apocryphally) to have declined an offer to become the archbishop of Canterbury in 1747 but was appointed Clerk of the Closet to the king in 1746 (until 1752). He was translated to Durham by the confirmation of his election to that See in October 1750; he was then enthroned by proxy on 9 November 1750.[1] He is buried in Bristol Cathedral.

Butler died in 1752 at Rosewell House, Kingsmead Square in Bath, Somerset.[12] His admirers praise him as an excellent man, and a diligent and conscientious churchman. Though indifferent to general literature, he had some taste in the fine arts, especially architecture.

In the calendars of the Anglican communion his feast day is 16 June.

He has his own collection of manuscripts (e.g. Lectionary 189).

During his lifetime and for many years after his death, Butler was most famous for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736), which, according to historian Will Durant, "remained for a century the chief buttress of Christian argument against unbelief."[13] English deists such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal had argued that nature provides clear evidence of an intelligent designer and artificer, but they rejected orthodox Christianity because of the incredibility of miracles and the cruelties and contradictions contained in the Bible.

Butler's Analogy was one of many book-length replies to the deists, and it was long widely believed to be the most effective. Butler argued that nature itself was full of mysteries and cruelties, and thus shared the same alleged defects as the Bible. Arguing on empiricist grounds that all knowledge of nature and human conduct is merely probable, Butler then appealed to a series of patterns ("analogies") observable in nature and human affairs, which, in his judgment, make the chief teachings of Christianity likely true.

Butler's jiu-jitsu-like argumentative strategy was unusual and risky. Arguing that "because nature is a mess of riddles, we cannot expect revelation to be any clearer"[14] obviously invited the retort that then both deism and Christianity were irrational. Today, Butler's Analogy is "now largely of historical interest,"[15] but his claim that probability is the guide to life would be endorsed by many contemporary philosophers.

A Butler scholar, Stephen Darwall, wrote: "Probably no figure had a greater impact on nineteenth-century British moral philosophy than Butler."[16] Butler's chief target in the Sermons was Thomas Hobbes and the egoistic view of human nature he had defended in Leviathan (1651). Hobbes was a materialist who believed that science reveals a world in which all events are causally determined and in which all human choices flow unavoidably from whatever desire is most powerful in a person at a given time. Hobbes saw human beings as being violent, self-seeking, and power-hungry. On such a view, there was no place for genuine altruism or benevolence or any conception of morality as traditionally conceived.[17]

In the Sermons, Butler argues that human motivation is less selfish and more complex than Hobbes claimed. Butler maintains that the human mind is an organized hierarchy of a number of different impulses and principles, many of which are not fundamentally selfish. On the ground floor, so to speak, is a wide variety of particular emotions, appetites, and affections, such as hunger, anger, fear, and sympathy. They, in properly organized minds, are under the control of two superior principles: self-love (a desire to maximize one's own long-term happiness) and benevolence (a desire to promote the general happiness). The more general impulses are in turn subject to the highest practical authority in the human mind: moral conscience. Conscience, Butler claims, is an inborn sense of right and wrong, an inner light and monitor, received from God.[18] Conscience tells one to promote both the general happiness and personal happiness. Experience informs that the two aims largely coincide in the present life. For many reasons, Butler argues, unethical and self-centered people who care nothing for the public good are usually not very happy.

There are, however, rare cases where the wicked seem (for a time) to prosper. A perfect harmony of virtue and self-interest, Butler claimed, is guaranteed only by a just God, who, in the afterlife, rewards and punishes people as they deserve.[19]

In Appendix 1 of the Analogy, Butler offers a famous criticism of John Locke's influential theory of "personal identity", an explanation of what makes someone the "same person" from one time to the next, despite all the physical and psychological changes experienced over that period. Locke claimed that personal identity is not from having the same body or the same soul but from having the same consciousness and memory. According to Locke, memory is the "glue" that ties the various stages of our life together and constitutes sameness of person.

More precisely, Locke claims, Person A is the same person as Person B just in case A and B share at least some of the same memories. Butler pointed out that the way "real" memories can be distinguished from false ones is that it was people who had the experiences that are truly remembered. Thus, Butler claimed, memory presupposes personal identity and so cannot constitute it.[20]