Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is quietly dismantling a fashionable cynicism: the idea that every human motive is secretly self-interest in a cheap, reductionist sense. The sentence is built like a trap for the Hobbesian skeptic. He grants the buzzword - self-love - then shrinks it down to something far less imperial. Self-love, he argues, doesn’t get to write the menu of what counts as our “good.” It’s not the author of value; it’s the logistics department.

The crucial move is the split between constituting an end and pursuing it. Nature (and for Butler, nature is morally legible) “constitutes” certain interests first: hunger, safety, affection, conscience, the pull of social bonds. Only after those ends exist does self-love kick in as the mechanism that prods us to “obtain and secure” them. In other words: wanting your child to be safe isn’t a clever disguise for egoism; self-love merely supplies the energy to act on that prior concern. The subtext is pastoral but combative: a clergyman defending moral psychology against the era’s emerging story that altruism is either impossible or fraudulent.

Rhetorically, Butler’s capitalized “THIS or THAT” is doing work. It mocks the petty accountant’s view of motivation, as if we’re forever choosing from interchangeable goods. Butler insists the goods aren’t arbitrary picks; they’re structured into us. That lets him rescue genuine benevolence without denying prudence: you can care about others for their sake and still have self-love as the stabilizing force that keeps your actions consistent, not just impulsive.