"Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature"
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Butler’s line is a quiet rebuke to the fashionable fatalism of his day: the idea that if you follow whatever desire is strongest in the moment, you’re simply being “natural.” As an Anglican cleric writing in an Enlightenment culture enamored with psychological mechanism, he concedes the basic observation that people act on the strongest present impulse. Then he yanks the rug out. Strength, he implies, is not legitimacy. The loudest appetite in your head is often the least authoritative.
The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Principle or inclination” pairs conscience with craving, putting them grammatically on the same level, only to show how easily they’re confused in practice. “For the present” is the blade: it marks impulse as temporary, opportunistic, and suspiciously convenient. Butler’s key move is his distinction between what we do and what we are. You can act “disproportionate to” your “real proper nature” because human nature isn’t a single urge but an ordered economy of faculties. In his moral psychology, conscience isn’t just another desire; it’s the faculty meant to preside.
The subtext reads like pastoral triage: don’t confuse intensity with truth, or immediacy with moral permission. Butler is also pushing back against emerging egoistic accounts of motivation (Hobbes’ shadow is nearby). People can rationalize almost anything as “how I’m wired,” but Butler insists that wiring includes a built-in standard for its own governance. Freedom, in this view, isn’t doing what wins the internal arm-wrestle today; it’s refusing to let the strongest impulse impersonate the self.
The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Principle or inclination” pairs conscience with craving, putting them grammatically on the same level, only to show how easily they’re confused in practice. “For the present” is the blade: it marks impulse as temporary, opportunistic, and suspiciously convenient. Butler’s key move is his distinction between what we do and what we are. You can act “disproportionate to” your “real proper nature” because human nature isn’t a single urge but an ordered economy of faculties. In his moral psychology, conscience isn’t just another desire; it’s the faculty meant to preside.
The subtext reads like pastoral triage: don’t confuse intensity with truth, or immediacy with moral permission. Butler is also pushing back against emerging egoistic accounts of motivation (Hobbes’ shadow is nearby). People can rationalize almost anything as “how I’m wired,” but Butler insists that wiring includes a built-in standard for its own governance. Freedom, in this view, isn’t doing what wins the internal arm-wrestle today; it’s refusing to let the strongest impulse impersonate the self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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