  In one of his less read sermons (Sermon IV) Butler suggests that careful government of the tongue is important to one’s moral well being. The role of others — both our oppositions to and agreements with others — and its relation to self-governance is particularly crucial for Butler in explaining this sort of self-deceit. Our tendency to paint the characters of others in black and white allows us to justify our immoral actions by virtue of the fact that we self-deceptively (and self-righteously) cast ourselves and our motivations as wholly good in opposition to our opponent who is wholly evil, and so we can treat them however we see fit. We also draw on the idle comments of others that conform with our self-partial desires to serve as external justification of our immoral actions.