Two Approaches to Self-love: Hutcheson and Butler

This paper contrasts Frankfurt’s characterisation of self-love as disinterested with the predominant 18th-century view on self-love as interested. two senses of the term ‘interest’ are distinguished to discuss two fundamentally different readings of the claim that self-love promotes the agent’s interest. This allows characterising two approaches to self-love, which are found in Hutcheson’s and in butler’s writings. Hutcheson sees self-love as a source of hedonistic motives, which can be calm or passionate. butler sees it as a general affection of rational beings in the sense of a kind of love of one’s real nature.