Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue
A short philosophical essay, appended by Joseph Butler to *The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature* in 1736. Butler noted in the Advertisement to that book that the two dissertations printed with it — this one and "Of Personal Identity" — had originally belonged to the body of the argument and were moved to the end because they would have interrupted it. The *Analogy* was written against the deists, who granted a Creator but denied that revelation added anything to what reason could discover. Butler's method throughout was to show that the difficulties objectors raised against revealed religion appear equally in the natural world they already accepted. That argument depended at several points on the claim that human beings possess a moral faculty. This dissertation is where he states, in a few compact pages, what that faculty is and what it responds to.
Butler argues that human nature includes a principle of reflection by which we approve and disapprove of actions — not as a sentiment attaching to pleasant outcomes, but as a judgment upon conduct. Its object, he insists, is narrowly defined: we approve and condemn voluntary actions taken with their intentions and motives, never involuntary events, however much good or harm they produce. This distinction does most of the work. It allows Butler to separate moral good from mere benefit and to press his central objection to the view that virtue consists wholly in benevolence, or in the pursuit of the greatest happiness. Veracity and justice, he observes, are approved as such; we do not withhold our condemnation of falsehood until we have calculated its consequences. He adds a theological reason for the same conclusion: the happiness of the world belongs to its Proprietor, and creatures of limited foresight do not know what they are doing when they attempt to promote the general good by means other than those appointed. Prudence, too, he treats as a genuine object of moral approbation, though of a different order than justice.
The essay is Butler's tightest statement of a position he had developed in the *Fifteen Sermons* of 1726, and it became a fixed reference point in later English moral philosophy — Sidgwick engaged it seriously, and the nineteenth-century Anglican recovery of conscience as a theological category, running through Newman and Gladstone, is unintelligible without it. Anyone thinking about conscience as a formative reality rather than a private feeling will find here its most disciplined defense.
Who should read this: those working on conscience, moral theology, or the relation between virtue and consequences, and readers of the *Analogy* who want its ethical foundation stated plainly. Not for readers seeking devotional warmth or practical counsel — the prose is spare eighteenth-century argument, and it offers no consolation, only clarity.