Biography
Joseph Butler was born at Wantage, Berkshire in 1692 to Thomas Butler, a successful linen draper.
Butler began his education at the dissenting school founded by Samuel Jones in Gloucester in 1711, possibly with the design of becoming a Presbyterian minister. He may have been influenced by his discourse with the future Archbishop of Canterbury (who had not yet become an Anglican himself) Thomas Secker to conform to the Church of England in 1714. His confirmation allowed him to continue his education at the Oriel College, Oxford which barred non-Anglicans.
In 1713 and 1714 Joseph Butler anonymously published a series of critiques of Samuel Clarke’s arguments in A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, to which the philosopher responded.
By 1718 he had been ordained a deacon by Bishop William Talbot, the father of a friend he met at Oriel College and in 1719 was appointed to be a preacher at Rolls Chapel with the recommendation of Talbot and Samuel Clarke, starting his ecclesiastical career. In 1725 he moved to Stanhope to work as parish priest until 1733. During this period he published Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and wrote his famous work Analogy of Religion published 1736. The year he published Analogy, he became Queen Caroline’s clerk of the closet, or the head of her ecclesiastical staff.
In 1738, Joseph Butler was consecrated as a bishop and appointed the see of Bristol, which came with a seat in the House of Lords. The year before he died he took over the bishopric of Durham.
The Nature of God and Man in the Analogy of Religion
Butler’s most famous contribution to philosophy in his time was The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, which can also be considered to be a work of natural theology (Garrett). In it Butler makes a case against deism and for theism and religion, in particular Christianity.
Part of the argument against deism is making the case for a life after death, or the continuance of life past the destruction of our physical forms. Butler then expands on the nature of that life (or continuance) after death particularly with regards to how moral action in this life can be reasonably suspected to affect the next.
In order to do so, Butler first fleshes out his standard of knowledge through his view of what reason allows us to know and what key assumption follows from his method. Ultimately, Butler gives an account of the nature of the mind and body, morality and its relation to the physical world.
Butler’s Epistemology and the Presumption of Continuance
The first chapter of the Analogy of Religion makes the case for a life after death. Integral to Butler’s argument is his idea of what claims we can rationally make. To Butler mere rationalization is not enough. Anything that does not have a kind of probable weight is speculative.
In other words, Butler’s epistemology is probabilistic. Our faculties of reason and experience do not provide us with true certainty, instead we must function based on safe assumptions and probable truths. A number of observations and arguments are needed to create a compelling and probable positive claim. Without any of these evidences, it is irrational to Butler to make an assumption which does not come with some bulk of evidence to push it past the speculative into the probable. One of these assumptions that Butler does find compelling the Presumption of Continuance: that things will continue on as they are. This is supported by the sum of all our prior experience, which is that things do, in fact, continue on as they have been for the most part. It therefore makes it unlikely for there to be a discontinuity either in experience, or the laws by which the world is governed.
Butler’s Self
The real argument of Chapter 1 of The Analogy of Religion is the justification for life after death. Butler makes a thought provoking conclusion from his presumption of continuance. He first provides precedent for the supposition of death being a transformative process. Next he tackles the problem with assuming that the mind dies with the body.
Butler evokes the multifarious stages and transformations, not just in the growth of the human body but also those in nature to demonstrate that there is plenty of precedent for radical transformation. The adult human resembles the infant very little, and the fly does not resemble the maggot. There seems to be no reason to rule out that death could be a similar process.
Butler here makes an argument for the indivisibility of the human mind as well. It either has its identity as a mind by its power, or will or it does not. It would be impossible to divide these capacities in half or in pieces so the mind or will is a unit. The body, however, is divisible and death is the division of the body resulting in its destruction. The same process cannot occur on a mind due to its indivisibility.
Due to the presumption of continuance, there is no reason to assume that the individual ends with the destruction of their physical form. This can be analogized to the destruction of the physical senses, or limbs not destroying the essential capacity they allow. Our means of physical interaction and action may be broken off, but the Will to which these capacities belong may continue, and in Butler’s argument, it would be irrational to assume otherwise.
Moral Order and the Government of God
In Chapter 2 of The Analogy of Religion Butler gives his account of how morality interacts with nature, and ends with the conclusions that he is led toward.
Butler posits that there is a tendency, albeit imperfect, in nature for virtue to be rewarded and vice to be punished. This is demonstrated by the effects of a virtuous life being prosperity, health and respect which contribute to the happiness of the righteous, while the momentary pleasures of vice, such as drunkenness, are often paid back in the long run with poverty, sickness and death. There is also an apparent tendency for Reason to induce people to act rightly and respect virtue, and to dissuade wrongdoing and abhor vice. This has the effect of the scales tipping onto the side of justice over injustice. The exceptions to this seem to be the result of a hindrance of reason to prevail over a brutish kind of being that creates vice, primarily through the inability of reason to unite against viciousness in every instance. To further press his point he calls the reader to imagine a kingdom that operated in its totality according to reason and virtue. It would not be hard to imagine how such a kingdom would become peaceful, prosperous and subsequently powerful over time through this way of acting. There is seemingly no similar way that total immorality could produce the same effects, either in a kingdom or at an individual level.
The demonstration of this tendency allows Butler to come to four conclusions:
- God, the “Author of nature”, is not indifferent to the morality of vice and virtue.
- We can therefore expect, if there is a continuance of this tendency, that the difference between the punishments and rewards of the next life may differ in degree but not in kind to what is experienced here and now.
- The manner in which our virtues and vices are punished in our present circumstances only gives us reason to suspect that the rewards and punishments in the next life are possibly more intense than those in this life.
- The hindrances to the punishment of vice and reward of virtue are not necessary, but incidental.
Butler vs. Spinoza: God, the Mind and Telos
Butler in The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature puts forth a prototypically Christian view of the world. This is not surprising in that he was an Anglican preacher arguing against deism. It is also not surprising that the conclusions he comes to about the nature of the world put him in conflict with one of the most notorious philosophers of the era: Baruch Spinoza.
Although Spinoza died fifteen years before Butler was born, his views on God and nature made him notorious not just in his lifetime, but long after. Many of the philosophical forays into the nature of God keep one eye on Spinoza, if only to keep from resembling his arguments too closely and inviting the scorn of good Christians, of which Butler was one, or Jews, of which Spinoza was before he was excommunicated by writ of herem (Nadler).
Spinoza’s work Ethics puts forth his ideas in a geometrical form in which he proves his case from axioms that were widely accepted at the time (Nadler). The first part of Ethics makes Spinoza’s argument on the nature of God, the second part touches on the nature of the mind.
God
The two philosophers differed quite radically on the idea of God.
Butler’s God is the Christian God, a personal God who created the world and ordered it to function according to the laws of nature. This God is apart from creation, yet able to interact with it, and the humans within, consciously. He is capable of thought and emotion.
Spinoza, on the other hand, argues in Ethics that God is not a personal God. The God of Spinoza is the substance which composes all things and gives rise to all of the various attributes that compose the physical world. He defines God as such in Ethics: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Spinoza’s God is infinite in expanse and therefore allows an infinite range of attributes to be presented. In his own words: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”
The Mind
Butler makes the case in the Analogy that the mind is not necessarily completely unified with the body. According to Butler, there is no reason to assume that the destruction of the body destroys the mind, which all reason points to being an indivisible whole. In the same argument Butler does caveat this with the supposition that the mind comes into existence through the body, but that this does not necessarily mean the mind is dependent on the body’s existence, or does not outlast the physical integrity or continuance of the function of the body.
Spinoza was sceptical of mind-body dualism. He did not believe that an independent mind could affect the body, or be affected by the senses or powers of the body in turn. His idea in Ethics was that the primary substance joined two different aspects, mind and body, which were fundamentally the same. There was no causation between these two, but a deterministically linked coincidental reaction. Spinoza sees no difference between form and idea. Thoughts arising in the human mind are analogous to the physical forms in the world arising from God.
Telos
What arises from these two different views of God, nature and the mind are two opposing views of Telos, or final ends. Because Butler’s God is a rational Creator with the capacity of a will, Butler must believe that the laws of nature, the objects and beings found in nature and the things that happen in the world exist to fulfill some final end prescribed by God.
Spinoza does not have to believe this. Spinoza’s God is impersonal. He does not think or have a will. Therefore Spinoza does not believe in final ends. To Spinoza all of nature is just the substance of God in various forms and attributes, fulfilling all of the possibilities of infinity.
Butler does not just assume final ends, however. Part of his argument in the Analogy of Religion is to demonstrate that morally virtuous behavior has a suspiciously outsized positive effect. This shows that human virtue is aligned with nature in a non-arbitrary way, making it improbable that any God that exists is indifferent to morality. If this is the case, then physical nature has to be designed in such a way to allow virtuous behavior, and human nature has to exist in such a way to allow people to act virtuously, without necessitating such action deterministically as in the case of an automaton.
Spinoza, however, does not believe in free will, nor does he have to. The mental and physical substances in his framework are both deterministic. Everything that exists exists out of necessity, including God. The rules which govern nature are just necessary attributes. The appearance of free will simply arises out of a kind of ignorance of the necessity which compels them.
Butler vs Spinoza
Spinoza and Butler disagree on the fundamentals of philosophy: God, the Mind and Purpose. As such there is little that unites, or could unite, their philosophies. Perhaps the most striking similarity is their starting point: God. Both of their philosophies follow from what they take to be the nature of God, and what that would mean about the world as we know it. Both were, at least in my estimation, theologians who happened to be interested in exploring the nature of things through that lens.
Glossary
Presumption of Continuance – The assumption that a particular law of nature, as examined through observation, holds and will hold over time due to the improbability of its cessation
Syllabus Change: Replace Emilie Du Chatelet!
Joseph Butler was integral to the discourse between the various philosophies of the early modern period. We see the works of Spinoza, Descartes, Hume and Locke but we do not really see the defense of a pre-existing philosophical framework. Reid together with Butler represent the reaction of pre-existing thought to the purely rational forces in philosophy and put the argument over epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy in its proper context.
If there is one philosopher that seemed redundant, it would be Emilie du Chatelet. Her metaphysics was too convoluted, and her moral philosophizing suffers from a similar problem, specifically that she struggles to remain consistent. In contrast, Butler makes a highly organized moral argument.
Where du Chatelet is valuable, she is redundant with other more consistent and compelling philosophies, such as Leibniz or Voltaire. Butler’s point of view, on the other hand, is mostly unrepresented.
Replace Emilie du Chatelet with Butler!
Bibliography
Works of Butler:
Butler, J. and Clarke, S., 1716, Several Letters from a Gentleman in Glocestershire, London, J. Knapton, 1716.
Butler, J., 1726, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, London: J. and J. Knapton.
Butler, J., 1729, Fifteen Sermons Preached at Rolls Chapel, London: J. and J. Knapton, 2nd ed.
Butler, J., 1736, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, London: J. and P. Knapton, 2nd corrected edition.
Butler, J., 1749, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel… To which are added Six Sermons, Preached on Publick Occasions, London: J. and P. Knapton, 4th ed.
Referenced works of Spinoza:
Spinoza, B., 1677, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order.
Secondary Sources:
Cunliffe, Christopher, Butler, Joseph (1692–1752), moral philosopher and theologian, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 26 Mar. 2021, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-4198.
The above was used as a biographical resource.
Garrett, Aaron, “Joseph Butler’s Moral Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/butler-moral.
The above is a synopsis and analysis of Butler’s moral philosophy and included a list of his philosophical works used for reference in the above section.
Nadler, Steven, “Baruch Spinoza”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/spinoza/>.
Used for reference to Spinoza’s life and works.
Penelhum, Terence. “Butler and Hume.” Hume Studies, vol. 14 no. 2, 1988, p. 251-276. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/hms.2011.0490.
Comparison of Hume and Butler’s moral philosophies.