Abstract

“The object of the moral faculty,” wrote Butler in a classic passage of theDissertation on Virtue, “is actions, comprehending under that name active or practical principles: those principles from which men would act if occasions or circumstances gave them power, and which, when fixed and habitual in any person, we call his character. It does not appear that brutes have the least reflex” “sense of actions, as distinguished from events; or that will and design, which constitute the very nature of action as such, are at all an object to their perception. But to ours they are: and they are the object, and the only one, of the approving and disapproving faculty.