Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is doing something sneakily radical for an 18th-century clergyman: defending self-love without surrendering the moral high ground. The line comes out of his project in the Sermons, where he takes aim at the fashionable cynicism of his day (Hobbes in the background, Mandeville in the wings) that treats every motive as selfishness in costume. Butler’s move is to split the human engine into two kinds of springs: self-love, and the “particular principles” (hunger, affection, resentment, pity, ambition, and so on). Each, he insists, is “itself” an object and an end. In plainer terms: not everything is secretly about you, but you are also allowed to care about you.

The phrasing matters. “Objects and ends” is philosophical language smuggled into pastoral rhetoric; he’s staking a claim about what counts as a real reason for action. If compassion is only a strategy for personal pleasure, then it isn’t compassion; it’s accounting. Butler wants to protect the integrity of ordinary moral experience: people often act directly from love, anger, loyalty, conscience - not as roundabout routes to self-benefit. At the same time, he refuses the saintly fantasy that self-interest is a stain to be scrubbed out. Self-love is natural, legitimate, and morally useful when disciplined.

Subtext: Butler is trying to rescue ethics from two dead ends at once - the bleak reductionism that collapses virtue into vanity, and the pious self-denial that turns morality into self-hatred. He builds a psychology sturdy enough for responsibility: multiple motives, competing ends, and a conscience meant to govern the whole messy parliament.