and happiness is found by Butler in the "the discernment of good and ill desert," which by "an unquestionable natural association" accompanies our judgment of good and evil. Innocence and ill-desert are contradictory ideas, and to associate wickedness with good desert would make life a tragedy unspeakable in its hideousness. Here, again, it is the nature and capacity of the agent which measures the responsibility and desert of his actions. Vicious acts, for example, are adjudged differently when "done by an idiot, madman, or child, and by one of mature and common understanding; though the action of both, including the intention, which is part of the action, be the same."[1]
After having discussed Butler's treatment of conscience, we are in a position to ascertain what answer he would give to the question what constitutes morality, or what is the class mark of virtuous acts. It is the question of criterion, and upon its answer depends the decision whether Butler has given us only a psychology of the moral life, or whether by his psychological inquiry into the facts of human nature he has explained the 'what' and the 'why' of morality as far as they are capable of explanation. It has been seen that the criterion is neither our own nor the general happiness as such. It has also been noted that morality is not a system of self-evident, axiomatic truths, intuitively and infallibly perceived—in which case there would be no need of any criterion. From his whole point of view, and from all that he says upon the subject of the standard by which con- science judges, the implication can be easily deduced that the criterion is simply rationality. This, however, is not to be mistaken. If Butler's ethics result in rationalism, it is not the rationalism of Kant. It is an altogether different conception of rationality. Reason, in Butler's view, does not determine virtue and vice merely according to its own formal, logical laws, by means of a 'contentless syllogism.' The standard by which conscience or 'practical reason' judges is the nature of the agent as an organic whole—not what would be the nature of an imaginary agent whose nature was nothing else than pure reason, a purely rational being. It is on account of this difference that we find Butler always
- ↑ Diss. on Virtue, Sect. 7, pp. 403-404.
