Happiness Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler opens with a disarming concession to ego: everyone wants their own happiness. In an early-18th-century moral landscape where Hobbesian self-interest still cast a long shadow, that first clause sounds like he’s handing the skeptics the keys. Then he quietly changes the subject. “And likewise” is the pivot: the human engine isn’t powered by one master motive but by “a variety” of drives aimed at “particular external objects.” The sentence is doing philosophical crowd control, pushing back against any neat reduction of human behavior to a single principle, whether it’s pure self-love or pure benevolence.

The subtext is clerical but not preachy. Butler is defending the credibility of virtue by arguing for psychological complexity. If our inner life contains many “affections, passions, and appetites,” then not every action that leads to happiness was chosen for happiness. You can love someone, pursue justice, or crave recognition as its own object, not as a disguised strategy for feeling good later. That matters because moral responsibility depends on the idea that motives are real and distinct, not just clever masks.

Even the old-fashioned “hath” and catalog-like rhythm work to his advantage. It reads like a calm inventory, not a sermon: the tone of someone insisting that ordinary experience already falsifies the cynics. Butler’s intent is to normalize mixed motives without excusing them. Humans aren’t saints; they’re not calculators either. They’re complicated enough for morality to be more than branding.