What the conciliatory Falkland demonstrated on the battlefield in the 1640s, the relentlessly reasonable moral philosopher and Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler, preached from the pulpit of the Rolls Chapel in the 1720s: Hobbes's cynical story about the human bottom line should not be mistaken for reality. Human beings are in fact motivated fundamentally by two basic principles, not just one — not just by self-interest, but also by benevolence. Indeed, the towering Calvinist international jurist, Hugo Grotius — another veteran of violent political conflict — had written as much in the 1620s.
Even better than Butler and Grotius, the natural law tradition stemming from Thomas Aquinas puts its finger more exactly on the button. The crucial point is not merely that human motivation isn't simply self-interested. It's also that human self-interest is not simply material. Rather, it reaches way beyond mere physical self-preservation and group loyalty to a wider range of goods — such as rational integrity, knowledge of the (often useless) truth, friendship, and justice. And these goods are as powerful in appeal as they are intangible in nature.
Both personal experience and history confirm this. Monks, scholars, artists, and scientists — no doubt including even some evolutionary biologists — have been known to miss meals, lose sleep, risk their health, and forego reproduction in pursuit of non-material goods such as knowledge of the truth about the world and the manifestation of beauty; and martyrs have sacrificed themselves, jeopardised their kin, and even defied their own national group for the sake of justice — as did Jesus, to name but one.
Dogmatic materialists have no choice but to deconstruct the noble appearances and to reduce the seeming authority of non-material goods to unflattering physical drives. Others less spellbound by Hobbes have an alternative option. They can read the data of experience and history — and indeed of evolutionary biology, zoology, and anthropology — in terms of the gradual emergence of beings with an ever-wider range of interests, capable of recognising and responding to an ever-wider range of goods. And they can recognise goods not at all concerned with the physical survival of the individual and his group, or with the avoidance of physical pain, for what they really are: spiritual. In a nutshell, they can do justice to the phenomena of human beings who are capable of conceiving their self-interest in such a way as to make it perfectly sensible to ask: "For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"
