Mapping Moral Motivation

In this paper we defend a version of moral internalism and a cognitivist account of motivation against recent criticisms. The internalist thesis we espouse claims that, if an agent believes she has reason to A, then she is motivated to A. Discussion of counter-examples has been clouded by the absence of a clear account of the nature of motivation. While we can only begin to provide such an account in this paper, we do enough to show that our version of internalism can be defended against putative counter-examples. All theories of motivation which take what motivates to be a psychological state run foul of the following plausible constraint: the reason why you ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the same. In our view, however, while what motivates is a reason (which is a fact) the state of being motivated is a cognitive stage, viz. the belief that one has reason to act. In cases where the agent's relevant beliefs are false, then she has no reason to act, but nontheless her action can be explained in other ways.     

I am not now,nor have I ever been,a turnip.

This paper considers how to put together two popular ideas in the philosophy of time: detenserism (the view that tense can be analysed in token-reflexive terms) and perdurantism (the view that objects persist through time by having temporal parts. On the most obvious way of doing this, certain problems arise. I argue that to deal with these problems we need a tool that is unfamiliar to most detensers and perdurantists—the distinction between sortal and non-sortal predicates.     

Are children moral objectivists? Children's judgments about moral and response-dependent properties

Researchers working on children's moral understanding maintain that the child's capacity to distinguish morality from convention shows that children regard moral violations as objectively wrong (e.g. Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, one traditional way to cast the issue of objectivism is to focus not on conventionality, but on whether moral properties depend on our responses, as with properties like icky and fun. This paper argues that the moral/conventional task is inadequate for assessing whether children regard moral properties as response-dependent. Unfortunately, children's understanding of response-dependent properties has been neglected in recent research. Two experiments are reported showing that children are more likely to treat properties like fun and icky as response-dependent than moral properties like good and bad. Hence, this helps support the claim that children are moral objectivists.     

Norms with feeling: towards a psychological account of moral judgment

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that "disgust" violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations.     

Smith’s practicality requirement meets dual-process models of moral judgment

In The Moral Problem, Michael Smith argues that only motivational internalists can offer an adequate explanation of why changes in moral judgment tend to be accompanied by changes in motivation in morally virtuous people. Smith argues that the failure of motivational externalism to account for this phenomenon amounts to a reductio of the view. In this paper, I draw on dual-process models of moral judgment to develop an externalist response to Smith’s argument. The key to my proposal is that motivationally efficacious states are often the source of our moral judgments, and changes in judgment are typically the result of changes in these states. However, moral judgments can also be formed via an alternative pathway that does not necessarily affect motivation, and so motivation and judgment can come apart. This response not only defuses Smith’s objections to externalism, but challenges Smith to square his internalist proposal with the empirical details of moral judgment.     

道德概念垂直空间隐喻对空间关系判断的影响

本研究通过三个实验考察道德概念垂直空间隐喻对空间关系判断的影响。涉及的空间关系判断包括上下关系判断、远近关系判断和距离判断。研究结果显示：（1）上下判断中,在空间上方时,道德词的反应快于不道德词;在空间下方时,不道德词的反应快于道德词;（2）远近判断中,在空间上方时,个体更倾向于将道德词判断为\"远\",即道德词更偏上;在空间下方时,没有显著的偏向;（3）在距离判断中,个体对道德词的判断出现显著的向上偏移,对不道德词的判断则出现显著的向下偏移。由此得出结论：道德概念的垂直空间隐喻会影响个体对空间关系的判断,具体来说是\"道德是上\"的隐喻会导致空间关系判断产生\"向上\"的偏移效应;而\"不道德是下\"的隐喻则会导致空间关系判断产生\"向下\"的偏移效应。     

Motivating Hume's natural virtues

Many commentators propose that Hume thinks that we are not or should not be motivated to perform naturally virtuous actions from moral sentiments. I take issue with this interpretation in this paper, arguing that Hume fully incorporates the moral sentiments into his understanding of how human beings act when it comes to the natural virtues and that he does not see the moral sentiments as a problematic kind of motivation that threatens or weakens the virtuous status of the action.     

Hume’s better argument for motivational skepticism

On a standard interpretation, Hume argued that reason is not practical, because its operations are limited to “demonstration” and “probability.” But recent critics claim that by limiting reason’s operations to only these two, his argument begs the question. Despite this, a better argument for motivational skepticism can be found in Hume’s text, one that emphasizes reason’s inability to generate motive force against contrary desires or passions. Nothing can oppose an impulse but a contrary impulse, Hume believed, and reason cannot generate an impulse. This better argument is here developed and defended. Two lines of objection to it can be anticipated: (1) that reason actually can generate impulsive force, based on contents of its normative judgments and (2) that reason neither can nor needs to generate an impulse, since the actions of rational agents are not determined by forceful impulses of desire, as Hume supposed. These objections are answered by pointing out their unsatisfying consequences.     

The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed.     

The Definition of Moral Dilemmas: A Logical Problem

This paper concerns one of the undecided disputes of modern moral philosophy: the possibility of moral dilemmas. Whereas proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas often appeal to moral experience, many opponents refer to ethical theory and deontic logic. My aim in this paper is to clarify some of the tension between moral experience and ethical theory with respect to moral dilemmas. In Part One I try to show that a number of logical arguments against the possibility of moral dilemmas, though apparently very different, turn out to be basically the same, as they are all based on the following concept of ought: if A ought to be done, doing B is impermissible and doing A itself is permissible. In Part Two I present an overview of several definitions of moral dilemmas that have been given by proponents of moral dilemmas: definitions that define moral dilemmas in terms of oughts and definitions that define them in terms of reasons. I conclude that, while reason is to weak, ought is too strong a concept to define moral dilemmas with. In this way, the arguments from Part One create a logical problem for proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas to define moral dilemmas.