difficulties. Thus morality is not made to consist in an inevitable death-struggle between action from duty and action from desire, but rather in the harmonious cooperation of reason and sense. Notwithstanding this difference, the essential truth of the Kantian position is still maintained. For both systems, reason alone can give actions moral worth. The expression 'due proportion' and similar ones which are to be found so frequently in Butler might, like Aristotle's doctrine of the "mean," apparently indicate that reasonableness and morality consist merely in a quantitative difference; but this is not the true position of either. Action in accordance with the mean is reasonable, not simply because it is neither too much nor too little, but because it can be translated into action in accordance with right reason, with a qualitative standard of right implied. In this way, it is seen, reason is not a mere regulator to determine how much a particular desire can be permitted gratification without a breach of morality, as is sometimes alleged, but that in a deeper sense it constitutes the moral value of all action, and makes moral worth what it is. It is not necessary for ethics to determine why there is any relation, or exactly what the relation is, between virtue and the mean, or vice and the extreme, any more than it is necessary for æsthetics to solve the same problem in regard to beauty and ugliness. The determination of the relation of the category of quality to that of quantity is the business of epistemology, and ethics, as well as æsthetics, must take the fact as it is, and need not formulate an epistemological solution.
In making the deduction from the constitution of the self that our nature is adapted to virtue, Butler is employing the same argument from design that Kant uses. From the fact of the existence of reason and will in man's nature, Kant argues to the proper end or purpose of such a being. He finds that reason is designed to be a moral faculty, and that its true purpose, and therefore the highest end of man, is to produce the Good Will.[1] For Kant, then, morality consists in acting in accordance with the highest principle of man's nature. Now Butler's argument is
- ↑ Fundamental Principles of the Met. of Morals (Abbot's trans.), pp. 10-12. Cf. also Crit. of Pract. Reason(Abbot's trans.), ch. 2, p. 135.
