Alan R. White; I*—The Presidential Address: Shooting, Killing and Fatally Wounding, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pa.

Mr. T. H. Mcpherson has given, in a recent article in PHILOSOPHY , various reasons for supposing that there was a development in Butler's ethics from the Sermons to the Analogy . He argues that Butler was in the Sermons a “rational egoist” or “Ethical Eudaemonist,” and in the Analogy an Intuitionist. By “Ethical Eudaemonism” he seems1 to mean that “the ground or criterion of rightness is conduciveness to the agent's interest” or that “it is the happiness-producing character of acts (...) that makes them right” . I shall use the phrase “McPherson's view” to denote the theory that this was Butler's view in the Sermons. (shrink)

The author holds that "russell confused the idea of meaning which is akin to use and the idea of meaning which is akin to reference, or perhaps denotation." (staff).