GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

l86 ETHICS
to see my friend run over in the street gives me more
concern than I would feel if I saw the same accident
happening to a stranger, it is not true to say that my
additional distress is felt because the fact that it is my friend
who is being run over makes me more anxious about myself,
than I should have been if it were a stranger.
Having disposed of the over-simplified egoist theory,
Butler develops his own analysts of the sentiment of pity.
The pity we fed for a fellow-being in distress is, he holds,
compounded of, or perhaps I should say is accompanied
by, three states of mind. There is, first, thankfulness at
the contrast presented by his condition and our own;
there is, secondly, anxiety about our own condition so
far Butler subscribes to Hobbes's egoistical analysis and
there is, thirdly, what Butler calls genuine sympathy.
This last element is distinguishable from the others and
is not resolvable into them. It is, in other words, a unique
aspect of human experience.
Butler proceeds to make some interesting strictures
upon the state of mind responsible for such a theory as
that of Hobbes. Hobbes is an exceedingly able man;
what is more, theories which belong to the same
type as Hobbes's theory, in that they seek to reduce the
complexity of human motives and the variety of human
states of consciousness to a single motive, namely, the
motive of concern for the well-being of the agent, have
from time to time been advanced by a number of exceed-
ingly able men. Hedonism, as we shall see, 1 is the out-
standing example of such a theory, and Hedonism has
been argued with force and subtlety by a long line of
distinguished thinkers. Yet both Egoism and Hedonism
are plainly at variance with the dictates of common sense,
so much so that, as Butler slyly remarks, nobody but a
philosopher could have dreamed of maintaining anything
quite so foolish. Butler, a man of sound common sense,
would, one imagines, have cordially subscribed to the
definition of a "silly'* theory suggested by a contemporary
1 See Chapter XI*