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

OBJECTIVE 1NTUITIONISM ,
iBf
English philosopher, Professor C, D. Broad, as one which
could only have been put forward inside a philosophical
class-room.
Confusion between the Ownership of an Impulse and
its Object. The mistake which Hobbes makes and,
Butler would add, the mistake which all egoists and
hedonists make, is in Butler's terminology to reduce the
particular impulses and passions to different expressions
of Self-love, How does this mistaken reduction so frequently
to be made? It arises, Butler holds, from two consions.
The first is a confusion between the ownership ofan
ipulse and its object. Now all impulses are owned by
self, but they do not all have for their object some
change in the state of the self. Some do; others do not.
Hunger, for example, is an impulse which has for its
object some change in the state of the self. Butler, in point
of fact, says that the object of hunger is food; but this
is surely wrong. The object of the housewife who is going
to shop is food. The object of hunger is to fat food and,
by so doing, to produce an alteration in the sensations
experienced by the self, an alteration which will substitute
for the unpleasant sensations connected with hunger the
pleasant sensations of eating and the pleasant sensation
of repletion.
In fact, as Professor Broad has pointed out, the object
of an impulse is never a person or thing, but is always,
in so far as it has an object, to produce a change in the
state of a person or a thing. This correction does not
affect Butler's argument, which is that only some of our
impulses are self-regarding in the sense that they have
as their object some change in the self. Hunger is one
such impulse, but sympathy is not, since sympathy has
as its object the production of some change* in the state
of the person sympathized with. When we sympathize,
we want to relieve the distress of the person who is the
object of our sympathy. Now Butler's argument against
Egoism is briefly this: the fact that all my impulses are