Editing Joseph Butler (section)

===Ethics and moral psychology===
{{Primary sources|date=July 2019}}
A Butler scholar, Stephen Darwall, wrote: "Probably no figure had a greater impact on nineteenth-century British moral philosophy than Butler."<ref>Darwall, "Introduction<" p. 3.</ref> 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. Such a view left no place for genuine altruism, benevolence or concept of morality as traditionally conceived.<ref>Darwall, "Introduction," p. 1.</ref>

In the ''Sermons'', Butler argues that human motivation is less selfish and more complex than Hobbes claimed. He maintains that the human mind is an organized hierarchy of a number of different impulses and principles, many of which are not fundamentally selfish. The ground floor, so to speak, holds a wide variety of specific emotions, appetites and affections, such as hunger, anger, fear and sympathy. They, in properly organized minds, are controlled by two superior principles: self-love (a desire to maximize one's own long-term happiness) and benevolence (a desire to promote 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.<ref>Butler, ''Five Sermons'', p. 37.</ref> Conscience tells one to promote 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-centred people who care nothing for the public good are not usually 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.<ref>Butler, ''Five Sermons'', p. 45.</ref>