Happiness Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is smuggling a surprisingly modern bit of moral psychology into clerical prose: self-love isn’t the cartoon villain of Christian ethics, it’s a targeting system. It doesn’t latch onto money, status, or even pleasure as intrinsically worthy; it treats them as instruments, interchangeable tools for arriving at “happiness or good.” That narrowness is the point. If self-love is basically strategic, then it’s also limited, fallible, and often bad at its own job. People can miscalculate means. They can chase what looks like happiness and end up anxious, isolated, or bored. The sin isn’t wanting your own good; it’s mistaking the route.

The knife twist comes in the contrast: “particular affections” rest “in the external things themselves.” Butler is defending the idea that humans are built for attachments that aren’t reducible to self-interest: friendship, parental love, loyalty to a community, even aesthetic delight. Those affections don’t use the world; they regard it. That distinction lets him answer the cynics of his day (and ours) who insist every motive is ego in costume. If you can love a person as a person, not as a mood-regulating device, then moral life has real architecture, not just rationalized appetite.

Context matters: early 18th-century Britain was thick with Hobbesian suspicion and emerging market logic, both eager to interpret virtue as self-preservation with better PR. Butler, the Anglican bishop, pushes back by conceding self-love its rightful domain while refusing to let it annex the whole human heart.