Butler and Hutcheson provide radically different vantage points on the role of autonomy and reason in action and the moral life. Hutcheson carries forward an empiricist tradition – one including Hobbes, Cumberland, and Locke – that holds agency to be entirely instrumental. Every motive is a desire for some naturally good effect of action, usually some pleasurable state of the agent or of someone else. Reason's task is exclusively theoretical: to inform the agent of means to these desired end states or of natural goods of which she may have been insufficiently aware, giving rise to new desires or new levels of desire. What human agents learn from this use of reason (contingently) presents itself, within the deliberative context, as a kind of directive or dictate to take necessary means or to desire new natural goods. But there is nothing more to normativity than this appearance under these conditions, or, perhaps, than the contingent fact that human agents are motivated in these ways. This might be thought to have the effect of explaining normativity away, at least as a fundamental ethical concept. For all these writers, practical ethics can proceed entirely in terms of natural good and evil: the valuable and disvaluable states action can bring about. No further normative practical notion (of a reason for acting, for example) is required by deliberating agents or by any ethics addressed to them.

This is most obvious in Cumberland and Hutcheson.