Happiness Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is doing something sneakier than offering a pious self-help maxim: he’s conceding the power of self-interest in order to discipline it. “The sum of the whole is plainly this” is the voice of a cleric trying to sound like a plain-dealing moral psychologist, not a pulpit scold. The key move sits in the narrowing clauses - “considered in his single capacity” and “with respect only to the present world.” He temporarily brackets out God, eternity, and grace to argue on the skeptic’s home turf: even if you only care about this life, human nature is built to chase “the greatest happiness” available.

The intent is defensive and strategic. In an early Enlightenment culture increasingly confident in reason and increasingly suspicious of religious moralizing, Butler meets the fashionable claim that people are selfish and replies: fine - but your selfishness isn’t a blank check for vice. The subtext is that our desires come with built-in limits and rivalries: short-term indulgence can sabotage long-term satisfaction, and social creatures can’t secure private “happiness” without stable norms, trust, and some version of conscience. He frames morality not as a supernatural imposition but as an internal technology for living well.

Context matters: Butler’s sermons (and later The Analogy of Religion) were aimed at deists and polite doubters who wanted ethics without theological overhead. By insisting that human nature “is adapted” toward happiness, he borrows the era’s language of design and function, then uses it to smuggle in a conservative claim: virtue isn’t anti-human; it’s the most pragmatic form of self-regard.