Love Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is pulling off a sly theological reversal: the pious-sounding “love your neighbor” isn’t the opposite of self-love at all. It’s built on the same psychological architecture. In one line, he drains the moral drama from the common story that altruism is heroic because it fights the self. For Butler, the real contest isn’t self-interest versus benevolence; it’s which desires get to run the show, and whether conscience can adjudicate them.

The syntax does the work. By stacking “love” and “hatred” alongside “anything else,” Butler refuses to let neighbor-love wear a halo. It’s treated as an ordinary human affection, no more “distant” from self-love than any other passion. That phrasing is quietly polemical. He’s writing against the Hobbesian mood that reduced human motivation to self-interest, plus the cynical reading that Christian charity is either impossible or fake. Butler’s move is to concede the obvious - we are self-concerned - then argue it doesn’t follow that we can’t be genuinely other-concerned. Both can be “natural,” both can be real, and neither automatically earns moral credit.

The subtext is pastoral but also political: if you insist virtue must be self-denial, you turn ethics into a masochistic performance and make everyday decency look suspect. Butler wants morality to be psychologically plausible, not saint-only. Neighbor-love, in his framing, isn’t an escape from the self; it’s one of the self’s proper directions, disciplined by conscience rather than dramatized as a miracle.