Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

A clean Victorian moral universe never really existed, and Butler knows it. “The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds” is a scalpel-line aimed at the era’s public piety and private appetites: if “virtue” is allowed to sprawl unchecked, it mutates into something coercive, performative, even cruel. Vice, in Butler’s formulation, isn’t just corruption; it’s a pressure valve. The shock is that he grants it a social role, as if sin were an essential municipal service.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, it punctures sanctimony: the loudest guardians of virtue often need a shadow to define themselves against, and “vice” obligingly supplies the contrast. On the other, it warns that virtue can become vice when it’s unmoderated - when it hardens into puritan surveillance, moral panic, and the kind of righteousness that excuses damage in the name of purity.

Butler wrote in a culture obsessed with respectability, where “reasonable bounds” were policed through class, sexuality, and religion. His subtext is that moral systems aren’t just ethical; they’re regulatory. By reframing vice as functional, he’s smuggling in a critique of how societies use “virtue” to control bodies and behavior, then rely on “vice” as the convenient other: a scapegoat, a safety release, a secret indulgence.

It works because it refuses the comforting binary. Butler makes morality look less like a ladder to heaven and more like a thermostat: society turns the dial, and hypocrisy supplies the heat.