Reasons,Motivations, and Obligations

I argue against Reasons Internalism, the view that possession of a normative reason for the performance of an action entails that one can be motivated to perform that action, and Motivational Existence Internalism, the view that if one is obligated to perform an action, then one can be motivated to perform that action. My thesis is that these positions cannot accommodate the fact that reasonable moral agents are frequently motivated to act only because they believe their contemplated actions to be morally obligatory. The failure to accommodate this fact is reason to reject these two types of internalism about reasons.     

Internal Reasons and the Conditional Fallacy

Internalists about normative reasons hold that they are necessarily connected to motives. This view is most plausible when it is construed in a conditional form - that there is a reason for one to perform a certain action guarantees that, at least if one were not rationally defective, one would be motivated to perform it. However, the conditional form that renders internalism plausible also renders it vulnerable to the 'conditional fallacy'. For instance, this conditional form implies that one could have no reason to improve one's rationality, for if one were already fully rational, one would not be motivated to do so. Most internalists have reformulated internalism to solve this problem. However, I argue that these reformulations fail to maintain the theoretical virtue of the internalist doctrine, namely, the virtue it has of showing how reasons can both explain and justify actions.     

Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivation by Moral Reasons

Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops an argument along these lines. Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to, and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires. More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy and shared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moral reasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends.     

Three Conceptions of Rational Agency

Rational agency may be thought of as intentional activity that is guided by the agent's conception of what they have reason to do. The paper identifies and assesses three approaches to this phenomenon, which I call internalism, meta-internalism, and volitionalism. Internalism accounts for rational motivation by appeal to substantive desires of the agent's that are conceived as merely given; I argue that it fails to do full justice to the phenomenon of guidance by one's conception of one's reasons. Meta-internalism explains this phenomenon by postulating higher-order dispositions, consitutive of (rational) agency itself, which causally interact with the agent's normative beliefs to produce corresponding motivations to action. I show that meta-internalism comes to grief over cases of akrasia, insofar as it leaves no room for the capacity for rational guidance when agents voluntarily act at variance with their judgments about what they have reason to do. Volitionalism, I contend, improves on both internalism and meta-internalism. Its distinctive feature is the postulation of a kind of motivation that is directly subject to the agent's control, and independent of the dispositions and desires to which the agent is passively subject.     

Valuing, Desiring and Normative Priority

Judgement internalism claims that our evaluative judgements will motivate us to act appropriately, at least in so far as we are rational. I examine how this claim should be understood, with particular focus on whether valuing enjoys a kind of 'normative priority' over desiring. I consider and reject views according to which valuing something provides one with a reason to be moved; this claim of normative priority and the readings of internalism it suggests are too strong. I also reject an interpretation which eschews claims of normative priority, whilst maintaining that valuing nevertheless rationally commits or requires one to be motivated; this rejection of normative priority and the reading of internalism it supports are too weak. In the final sections I sketch the understanding of judgement internalism I favour, and defend it against objections.     

Reasons and Rational Motivational Access

Practical Internalism holds that an agent's reasons for acting are entirely determined by his rational desires. This account is thought to be preferable to externalism, on the grounds that internalism alone can guarantee that agents have 'rational motivational access' (RMA) to their reasons. Rachel Cohon has recently argued that (i) internalism fails to ensure this, and (ii) an externalist account, akin to relativism, can guarantee RMA. I suggest that both of these claims are mistaken. I argue that relativism is best understood as an internalist theory, and claim that one version of internalism can therefore guarantee RMA.     

RELATIVISM AND NORMATIVE NONREALISM: BASING MORALITY ON RATIONALITY

Normative nonrealism denies (a) that some things are good or bad or right or wrong independently of facts about the attitudes of moral agents, and (b) that attitude-independent normative facts determine what is rational. An influential nonrealist approach to rationality comes from Richard Brandt's account of rationality in terms of “full information.” Using Brandt's account as illustrative, this paper identifies a serious problem for nonrealist normative theories based on theories of rationality. The paper argues that nonrealist accounts of rationality that oppose relativism cannot successfully handle the most serious threat from relativists: namely, a threat from a ‘Why care?’ open-question argument that stems from the question why one should care about being rational in a certain respect or sense. The paper identifies the bearing of ‘Why care?’ questions on the conflict between internalism and externalism regarding practical reasons. The main lesson is that ‘Why care?’ questions wreak havoc for nonrelativist nonrealist approaches to rationality and reason-based morality.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

How to Understand Internalism

Internalism about practical reasons claims that there is a necessary connection between what an agent has reason to do and what he would be motivated to do if he were in privileged or optimal conditions. Internalism is traditionally supported by the claim that it alone can capture two (supposed) conditions of adequacy for any theory of practical reasons, that reasons must be capable of justifying actions, and that reasons must be capable of explaining intentional acts. Robert Johnson ( The Philosophical Quarterly , 49 (1999), pp. 53–71) has argued that versions of internalism which avoid obvious problems nevertheless fail to capture both conditions. I argue that Johnson's criticisms rest upon a misinterpretation of the 'explanatory condition', and I proceed to formulate a version of internalism which will allow practical reasons to have both justificatory and explanatory force.     

Is Moral Motivation Rationally Required?

The answer to the title question is “No.” The first section argues, using the example of Huckleberry Finn, that rational agents need not be motivated by their explicit judgments of rightness and wrongness. Section II rejects a plausible argument to the conclusion that rational agents must have some moral concerns. The third section clarifies the relevant concept of irrationality and argues that moral incoherence does not equate with this common relevant concept. Section IV questions a rational requirement for prudential concern and whether a requirement for moral concern would follow from it. Section V examines the rationality of amoralists and partial amoralists, and Sect. VI closes with speculation on why there might seem to be a rational requirement to be morally motivated.     

BLAME AND RESPONSIVENESS TO MORAL REASONS: ARE PSYCHOPATHS BLAMEWORTHY?

Abstract: Many philosophers believe that people who are not capable of grasping the significance of moral considerations are not open to moral blame when they fail to respond appropriately to these considerations. I contend, however, that some morally blind, or ‘psychopathic,’ agents are proper targets for moral blame, at least on some occasions. I argue that moral blame is a response to the normative commitments and attitudes of a wrongdoer and that the actions of morally blind agents can express the relevant blame‐grounding attitudes insofar as these agents possess the capacity to make judgments about non‐moral reasons.     

Barry Taylor

I respond to an argument made by Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder against motivational internalism. Björnsson and Olinder present a hypothesis in which all of us are selfishly motivated to act in accordance with our moral judgments. The conceivability of such a possibility, they argue, rules out motivational internalism. I argue that this is not the case, and that, according to one dominant view about moral judgments, the agents in the hypothesis do not make genuine moral judgments. One therefore cannot argue decisively against motivational internalism without arguing against this view about moral judgments.     

DEPRESSION,LISTLESSNESS, AND MORAL MOTIVATION

Motivational internalism (MI) holds that, necessarily, if an agent judges that she is morally obligated to ø, then, that agent is, to at least some minimal extent, motivated to ø. Opponents of MI sometimes invoke depression as a counterexample on the grounds that depressed individuals appear to sincerely affirm moral judgments but are ‘listless’ and unmotivated by such judgments. Such listlessness is a credible counterexample to MI, I argue, only if the actual clinical disorder of depression, rather than a merely hypothetical example of such listlessness, is the source of this listlessness. However, empirical evidence concerning depression shows that, to the extent that the depressed are motivationally listless at all, they are abnormally listless only with respect to an important class of non‐moral judgments, namely, their prudential normative judgments (i.e., those concerning their own happiness and well‐being), not their moral judgments. Hence, depressed individuals do not constitute a counterexample to MI. This conclusion has important methodological implications concerning how supporters and opponents of MI can best defend their respective theses.     

Avoiding the Conditional Fallacy

Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection with potential explanations of action. I suggest that the problem is partly a result of failure to see that action-tokens are usually tokens of a wide variety of action-types, and that the internalist conditional need only be true of one of these types in order to justify a reason claim about the token.     

Self-validation and internalism in Velleman’s constitutivism

Metaethical constitutivists explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is (putatively) constitutive of agency. In Velleman’s paradigmatic constitutivist theory, that is the aim of self-understanding. The best-known objection to constitutivism is Enoch’s shmagency objection: constitutivism cannot explain normativity because a constitutive aim of agency lacks normative significance unless one has reason to be an agent rather than a “shmagent”. In response, Velleman argues that the constitutive aim is self-validating. I argue that this claim is false. If the constitutive aim of self-understanding structures an agent’s practical deliberation as Velleman describes, then some correctly deliberating agents will regard that aim as normatively arbitrary or unjustified. Moreover, I argue that the self-invalidation of the constitutive aim undermines or significantly qualifies Velleman’s claim that his constitutivism reconciles internalism with a kind of objectivity about reasons. Internalists typically hold that motives from which an agent is alienated do not generate reasons, but in cases of self-invalidation, agents are alienated from the aim of self-understanding in just this way. Thus, the larger cost of the constitutive aim’s possible self-invalidation is that Velleman’s constitutivism does not satisfy a plausible and widely accepted constraint on an internalist account of reasons.     

Perspectivism, Criticism and Freedom of Spirit

The paper examines the view that Nietzsche's perspectivism about practical judgments, understood as a form of internalism about practical reasons, implies that any legitimate criticism of judgments emanating from a foreign perspective must be in terms that are internal to this perspective. Insofar as it is thought to be motivated by certain general theoretical strictures of perspectivism, this view is incoherent. The paper argues that, on the contrary Nietzsche's recourse to a strategy of internal criticism is motivated by his own particular commitment to preserving the freedom of spirit of his interlocutors. The paper concludes with a discussion of how freedom of spirit is preserved by internal criticism, and how the nature of freedom of spirit affects the particular form such criticism will assume.     

Weakness of will and motivational internalism

The unconditional version of motivational internalism says that if an agent sincerely judges that to φ in circumstances C is the best option available to her, then, as a matter of conceptual necessity, she will be motivated to φ in C. This position faces a powerful counterargument according to which it is possible for various cases of practical irrationality to completely defeat an agent’s moral motivation while, at the same time, leaving her appreciation of her moral reasons intact. In this paper, I will argue that weakness of will, as the paradigmatic case of practical irrationality, and all other cases of practical irrationality that feature in standard formulations of this argument do not represent genuine counterexamples to this version of motivational internalism. In this sense, the main aim of this paper is to show that proponents of this internalist position are well justified in their denial of the claim that there are people who are completely unmotivated by their judgments about what is the best option available to them.     

A Functional Role Analysis of Reasons

One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences, this paper argues that it is extremely useful to explain the nature of practical reasons in terms of the systematic contributions that such reasons make to the wholesale rational statuses of actions. This strategy gives us a clear view of two logically distinct normative roles for practical reasons – justifying and requiring – that are often conflated, and it allows us to give clear definitions of what ‘the strength of a reason’ means within each of these roles. The final section of the paper explores some implications of the resulting view for the internalism/externalism debate about practical reasons, and for the practical significance of moral theory.     

Aesthetic judgements and motivation

Are aesthetic judgements cognitive, belief-like states or non-cognitive, desire-like states? There have been a number of attempts in recent years to evaluate the plausibility of a non-cognitivist theory of aesthetic judgements. These attempts borrow heavily from non-cognitivism in metaethics. One argument that is used to support metaethical non-cognitivism is the argument from Motivational Judgement Internalism. It is claimed that accepting this view, together with a plausible theory of motivation, pushes us towards accepting non-cognitivism. A tempting option, then, for those wishing to defend aesthetic non-cognitivism, would be to appeal to a similar argument. However, both Caj Strandberg and Walter Sinnott-Armstong have argued that Internalism is a less plausible claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements by raising objections against aesthetic internalism. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections can be raised against internalism about moral judgements as well. As a result, internalism is no less plausible a claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements. I will then show how a theory of internalism about normative judgements in general is capable of avoiding both of these objections.     

Sound Advice and Internal Reasons

Reasons internalism holds that reasons for action contain an essential connection with motivation. I defend an account of reasons internalism based on the advisor model. The advisor model provides an account of reasons for action in terms of the advice of a more rational version of the agent. Contrary to Pettit and Smith's proposal and responding to Sobel's and Johnson's objections, I argue that the advisor model can provide an account of internal reasons and that it is too caught up in the psychology of the actual agent to be able to account for anything other than internal reasons.