What Makes Something Right or Wrong? Inside Your Own Nature

Imagine you’re walking home from school and you see a younger kid get knocked down by an older one, who then takes the kid’s bag and runs off. Something in you reacts instantly. You feel angry at the bully. You feel bad for the kid. And you feel like something should be done—that the bully ought to give the bag back.

That feeling—that sense of “ought”—is weird when you stop to think about it. Where does it come from? Is it just your feelings talking? Is it your brain calculating that you’d want someone to help you if you were in that position? Is it a rule your parents taught you? Or is there something deeper—something built into what it means to be human?

An 18th-century philosopher named Joseph Butler had a fascinating answer. He thought that when you feel that pull toward doing the right thing, what you’re really feeling is your own nature speaking to you. Not society’s rules. Not God’s commands (though he believed in God too). Your nature. And he thought that if you paid careful attention to how your own mind works, you’d discover that you come with a kind of internal structure—a built-in moral authority—that tells you what you ought to do.

This is a strange idea. And philosophers have been arguing about whether it works for almost 300 years.

What’s Your Mind Made Of?

Butler thought human beings have several different kinds of mental “principles” that push us to act. Some are simple urges: hunger, thirst, the desire to be liked, the flash of anger when someone insults you. Others are bigger and more organized. And he thought the most important thing you could do—if you wanted to understand morality—was to figure out how these principles relate to each other.

Here’s a rough picture of what Butler thought we’d find inside ourselves if we looked honestly:

First, there are particular passions. These are specific desires and feelings: wanting to eat pizza, feeling scared of a growling dog, getting annoyed when your little brother hums the same song for an hour. Each one has its own object—it’s aimed at something specific. The hunger is aimed at food. The annoyance is aimed at that song stopping. These passions just happen to you, like weather.

Second, there’s self-love. This isn’t selfishness. Self-love is your general desire to be happy and to have a good life overall. It’s the part of you that looks at your whole situation and asks, “Is this making me happy? Will this choice make my life better in the long run?” Self-love is rational: it thinks about the big picture.

Third, there’s benevolence. This is your desire for other people to be happy. Butler thought it was obvious that human beings genuinely care about others—not because it makes us happy (though it often does), but because we actually want good things for people we care about. You want your friend to get the part in the play, even if you don’t. That’s benevolence.

And fourth—most importantly—there’s conscience. This is the part of you that judges actions as right or wrong. Not by calculating consequences, but by a direct sense. When you see the bully take the bag, you don’t have to do math to figure out it’s wrong. You just see it. That’s conscience.

The Hierarchy Inside You

Here’s where Butler’s argument gets interesting—and controversial. He claimed that these principles don’t just sit next to each other like items on a shelf. They’re organized in a hierarchy. Some are supposed to rule over others.

Think about the difference between what you strongly want to do and what you ought to do. You might really want to shove back the kid who bumped you in the hallway. That urge might feel powerful—stronger than any other feeling you have at that moment. But something in you says, “No, that’s not what I should do.” The strong urge and the authoritative “should” are different things.

Butler said that’s because our nature has layers. Some principles just have force—they push us hard. But other principles have authority—they have the right to tell us what to do, even when they’re not the strongest feeling in the room. Conscience has authority. The flash of anger has force. And when the two conflict, Butler said, going against conscience is not just doing something wrong—it’s going against your own nature. It’s making yourself work the way you weren’t designed to work.

He used a bunch of analogies to make this point. A watch isn’t just a pile of gears; it’s gears arranged in a particular way to tell time. If you rearranged the gears randomly, you’d have a pile of metal, not a watch. Human nature is like that: it’s not just a bundle of urges. It’s a system with parts that have different jobs, and some parts are supposed to direct others.

He also compared human nature to a government. In a country, you might have a strong army that could take over—but it shouldn’t. The civil government has authority, even if the army has more raw power. In the same way, conscience has authority over our other urges, even when those urges feel more urgent.

The Big Puzzle: Self-Love vs. Conscience

But here’s a problem Butler noticed, and it’s a problem that philosophers still argue about today.

Let’s say you’re trying to decide whether to cheat on a test. Your friend has the answers. You could look. Part of you really wants to—you’d get a better grade, your parents would be proud, you’d avoid studying. That’s your self-love talking (though in a short-sighted, selfish way, not the wise way Butler meant). But another part of you says, “That’s wrong. Don’t do it.” That’s your conscience.

Butler claimed that these two parts—self-love and conscience—aren’t really in conflict when you look at the big picture. Living virtuously, he argued, actually makes you happier in the long run. A life where you follow your conscience, care about others, and don’t cheat or lie is a life that tends to be more peaceful, more satisfying, and more truly happy than a life where you always grab what you want.

So self-love (properly understood) and conscience point in the same direction. The selfish person who always takes shortcuts isn’t really loving themselves well. They’re missing out on the real happiness that comes from being a good person.

But wait—is that really true? Philosophers have pushed back hard on this point. What if doing the right thing would make you miserable? What if telling the truth about something would get you expelled, or would hurt someone you love? Can virtue really always make you happy? Butler admitted there could be cases where they conflict in the short term, but he thought that in the long run—especially if you believe in an afterlife where everything gets sorted out—virtue and happiness converge.

Did Butler Kill Selfishness?

One of Butler’s most famous arguments was aimed at people who believed that everything humans do is secretly selfish. You might think you’re helping a friend because you care about them, but really, according to this “selfish theory,” you’re just trying to feel good about yourself, or avoid guilt, or get them to owe you a favor later.

Butler thought this was confused. Here’s why.

Imagine you’re hungry. You eat a sandwich. You enjoy it. The selfish theorists say, “See? You ate the sandwich because you wanted the pleasure of eating it. You were just pursuing your own pleasure.” But Butler pointed out that this gets things backwards. You don’t eat the sandwich in order to get pleasure. You eat it because you’re hungry—because the sandwich looks good, because it will satisfy your appetite. The pleasure comes from getting what you wanted. And what you wanted was the sandwich itself, not the pleasure.

His point was that our desires are aimed at real things in the world—food, friendship, justice, a good grade—and the pleasure we get from satisfying those desires is a bonus, not the goal. The selfish theorists confuse the fact that our desires belong to us (they’re “ours”) with the claim that the object of our desires is ourselves.

Butler also thought it was just obvious that we care about others. You feel sad when your friend is sad. You feel happy when they succeed. That’s not a disguised form of selfishness. It’s a real, basic part of being human. And the selfish theorists, he argued, were twisting the meaning of words to try to explain away something that anyone can see if they’re honest.

The Problem of Self-Deception

Here’s where Butler gets really interesting—and maybe a little uncomfortable.

If conscience is so clear and authoritative, why do we do bad things? Why do we cheat, lie, and hurt people, all while telling ourselves we’re doing the right thing?

Butler had a powerful answer: we’re masters of self-deception. We’re really, really good at fooling ourselves.

Think about a time you did something you knew was wrong, but found a way to justify it. Maybe you said something mean about someone behind their back, but told yourself you were “just being honest” or “blowing off steam.” Maybe you took credit for something you didn’t do, but told yourself you “deserved it” or “would have done the work anyway.”

Butler used the biblical story of Balaam to illustrate this. Balaam was a prophet. God told him not to curse the Israelites. But when the Moabite king offered him money to do it, Balaam didn’t just say no. Instead, he stalled. He invited the messengers to stay the night, as if he was being hospitable. He kept the question open. He let himself pretend there was still a decision to be made.

Butler thought we do the same thing. We avoid really looking at our choices. We don’t reflect honestly. We tell ourselves partial truths. We focus on the parts of the situation that make us look good and ignore the parts that don’t. And gradually—almost without noticing—we talk ourselves into doing things our conscience would have rejected if we’d paid attention.

The cure, Butler thought, was hard, honest self-examination. He suggested a rule: imagine someone else in your situation, and judge them the way you’d judge a stranger. Or imagine you’re the person on the receiving end of your action. If you can do that honestly—if you can really step outside yourself—you’ll see what’s right.

But he was honest about the difficulty. Even the rule for avoiding self-deception can be applied dishonestly. There’s no guaranteed method. You just have to keep trying.

So What’s Right and Wrong?

Butler’s picture of morality is built on the idea that your own nature contains a kind of moral compass. The right thing to do is the thing that’s in line with your nature as a whole—not just your strongest urge, but your whole system of desires, reason, and conscience working together the way they’re supposed to.

This is different from other theories you might have heard about. It’s not about following rules because someone told you to. It’s not about calculating which choice produces the most happiness for the most people (though Butler thought virtue usually does produce happiness). It’s about listening to something inside you—something that has authority because it’s part of what you are.

But philosophers have raised serious questions about this. How do we know that conscience is really authoritative, and not just another feeling? If we say “act according to your nature,” how do we know which parts of our nature count? Some people have violent urges—are those “natural” in the same way compassion is? And what about people whose conscience tells them to do terrible things? Is their conscience wrong, or is conscience not reliable after all?

Butler didn’t have easy answers to all of these questions. But he thought the structure of human nature gave us real guidance, even if it wasn’t perfect guidance. And he thought that paying careful attention to how our minds actually work—not how we wish they worked, or how some theory says they work—was the best starting point for figuring out how to live.

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Conscience	The part of you that directly judges actions as right or wrong, and that Butler thought has natural authority over your other desires
Self-love	Your rational desire for your own happiness and well-being, which Butler distinguished from selfishness
Benevolence	Your genuine desire for other people to be happy, which Butler thought was an obvious fact about human nature
Self-deception	The process by which you trick yourself into doing wrong while believing you’re doing right
Authority	The kind of power conscience has—not just force, but the right to tell you what to do
Particular passions	Specific desires and feelings (hunger, anger, compassion) that are aimed at particular objects

Key People

Joseph Butler (1692–1752): An English bishop and philosopher who preached these ideas as sermons in a London chapel and later published them. He argued that careful observation of human nature reveals a built-in moral structure.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): A philosopher who argued that all human actions are ultimately selfish. Butler spent a lot of energy arguing that Hobbes was wrong about this.

Things to Think About

Have you ever had a strong desire to do something that you knew was wrong? Where did the “knowing it was wrong” feeling come from? Was it just another feeling, or did it feel different from the desire?
Butler thought virtue and happiness go together in the long run. Can you think of a case where doing the right thing seems to make someone less happy, not more? What would Butler say about that case?
Self-deception is a weird idea. Can you really trick yourself? Wouldn’t you have to know you were tricking yourself for the trick to work? Or is there a way to fool yourself without knowing you’re doing it?
If conscience is supposed to be a reliable guide, how do you explain people who genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing when they’re doing something terrible? Is their conscience broken, or is conscience not the right guide after all?

Where This Shows Up

Arguments about whether people are “naturally good” or “naturally selfish” still happen today in psychology, politics, and everyday conversations. Butler’s arguments—especially his critique of the selfish theory—are still used by philosophers who think we genuinely care about others.
The idea that you should “be true to yourself” is everywhere in movies, books, and advice columns. Butler gives a much more specific and complicated version of this idea: being true to yourself means listening to the parts of you that have authority, not just the parts that are loud.
Self-deception shows up in discussions of everything from addiction (how do people keep using drugs they know are destroying their lives?) to politics (how do people believe comforting lies instead of uncomfortable truths?). Butler’s analysis of how we avoid honest reflection is still relevant.
Disagreements about conscience are central to debates about civil disobedience, religious freedom, and moral disagreement. If two people’s consciences tell them opposite things, which one should we follow? Butler’s framework gives some tools for thinking about this, but doesn’t fully solve it.