Moral Motivation Edited by Joshua May (Monash University)

About this topic
Summary Questions in moral motivation are broad, but often focus on the source and content of one's motivation to do what one judges to be right. For example, is the source of moral motivation more of a cognitive matter, involving reasoning or belief? Or is it primarily a matter of sentiment, desire, or emotion? Is the content of moral motivation, say, a desire to do whatever one believes is right, rather than something more direct, such as empathy or a concern for features that make the action right? Related questions dealt with in other areas as well concern the apparently internal connection between moral judgments and moral motivation and whether benevolent action is always ultimately self-interested. 

The notion of "right" throughout may encompass more than morality, since often philosophers interested in moral motivation have a broader concern for what we might call "normative motivation." This involves, for example, motivation to do what one believes one has most reason to do, whether these reasons are moral or not. Familiar questions can then arise, such as whether it's possible for us to judge that following a strict diet is most prudent, yet lack any motivation to do it. 
Key works Many of the issues in moral motivation dealt with in contemporary literature spring from Hume 1739/2000 and Kant 1785/2002. More recently, Nagel 1970, Korsgaard 1986, and Smith 1994 address the source and structure of moral motivation and have spurred much of the subsequent literature. Herman 1981 provides a key starting point for contemporary discussion of the content of moral motivation---there in connection with the motive of duty (see also Smith 1994, ch. 3).
Introductions The entry by Rosati 2006 provides a detailed introduction; Wallace 1998 is more brief but equally useful. Some of the relevant empirical work is summarized in May forthcoming and Schroeder et al 2010.

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  1. Steven Arkonovich (2007). Goals, Wishes, and Reasons for Action. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1):161-184.
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  2. Marcia Baron (1984). The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting From Duty. Journal of Philosophy 81 (4):197-220.
    Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' (...)
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  3. Lorraine Besser-Jones (2011). The Motivational State of the Virtuous Agent. Philosophical Psychology 25 (1):93 - 108.
    Julia Annas argues that Aristotle's understanding of the phenomenological experience of the virtuous agent corresponds to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the ?flow,? which is a form of intrinsic motivation. In this paper, I explore whether or not Annas? understanding of virtuous agency is a plausible one. After a thorough analysis of psychological accounts of intrinsic and extrinsic states of motivation, I argue that despite the attractiveness of Annas? understanding of virtuous agency, it is subject to a serious problem: all (...)
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  4. Lorraine Besser-Jones (2008). Personal Integrity, Moraity, and Psychological Well-Being. Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (3):361-383.
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  5. Lorraine Besser-jones (2008). Social Psychology, Moral Character, and Moral Fallibility. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2):310–332.
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  6. Simon Blackburn (2000). Humanity's Natural Face. Philosophical Explorations 3 (3):282 – 296.
    In my article I summarize a 'Humean' view of deliberation, and in particular deliberation with an ethical aspect. I regard Hume as having paved the way for a 'naturalistic' account of these things, avoiding Kantian fantasies of agency that dominate much current work. Contrary to what is often supposed, the Humean story gives a satisfactory account of dutiful or principled motivations, and a rich account of the ways in which different aspects of character are selected as 'useful or agreeable to (...)
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  7. Hilary Bok (1996). Acting Without Choosing. Noûs 30 (2):174-196.
    I will argue that this intuitive description is in fact accurate: that we can and do perform actions we know to be wrong simply because we fail to decide what to do. I will then try to show that once we recognize this fact, we can identify a character trait which any plausible moral theory which is not strictly self-defeating must require that we develop. Finally, I will sketch some implications of this argument for the role of virtue in moral (...)
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  8. David Brax (2009). Hedonism as the Explanation of Value. Dissertation, Lund University
    This thesis defends a hedonistic theory of value consisting of two main components. Part 1 offers a theory of pleasure. Pleasures are experiences distinguished by a distinct phenomenological quality. This quality is attitudinal in nature: it is the feeling of liking. The pleasure experience is also an object of this attitude: when feeling pleasure, we like what we feel, and part of how it feels is how this liking feels: Pleasures are Internally Liked Experiences. Pleasure plays a central role in (...)
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  9. Talbot Brewer (2002). The Character of Temptation: Towards a More Plausible Kantian Moral Psychology. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2):103–130.
    Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one’s circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate (...)
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  10. David O. Brink (1997). Moral Motivation. Ethics 108 (1):4-32.
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  11. Danielle Bromwich (2010). Clearing Conceptual Space for Cognitivist Motivational Internalism. Philosophical Studies 148 (3).
    Cognitivist motivational internalism is the thesis that, if one believes that 'It is right to ϕ', then one will be motivated to ϕ. This thesis—which captures the practical nature of morality—is in tension with a Humean constraint on belief: belief cannot motivate action without the assistance of a conceptually independent desire. When defending cognitivist motivational internalism it is tempting to either argue that the Humean constraint only applies to non-moral beliefs or that moral beliefs only motivate ceteris paribus . But (...)
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  12. Timothy Chan & Guy Kahane (2011). The Trouble with Being Sincere. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2):215-234.
    Questions about sincerity play a central role in our lives. But what makes an assertion insincere? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it has sometimes been taken to be. Until recently the dominant answer has been that a speaker makes an insincere assertion if and only if he does not believe the proposition asserted. There are, however, persuasive counterexamples to this simple account. It has been proposed instead that an insincere (...)
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  13. Michael Cholbi (2011). Depression, Listlessness, and Moral Motivation. Ratio 24 (1):28-45.
    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 (...)
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  14. Stephen R. L. Clark (1999). A New Stoicism by Lawrence C. Becker. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1998, 272pp; ISBN 0 691 01660 7 £22.50. Philosophy 74 (1):122-139.
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  15. David Copp (1995). Moral Obligation and Moral Motivation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplement 21:187–219.
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  16. David Copp & David Sobel (2002). Desires, Motives, and Reasons: Scanlon's Rationalistic Moral Psychology. Social Theory and Practice 28 (2):243-76.
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  17. Jonathan Dancy (1993). Moral Reasons. Blackwell.
    This book attempts to place a realist view of ethics (the claim that there are facts of the matter in ethics as elsewhere) within a broader context. It starts with a discussion of why we should mind about the difference between right and wrong, asks what account we should give of our ability to learn from our moral experience, and looks in some detail at the different sorts of ways in which moral reasons can combine to show us what we (...)
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  18. John J. Davenport (2007). Review of R. Jay Wallace, Normativity and the Will: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason. [REVIEW] Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (12).
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  19. John Deigh (1996). The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory. Cambridge University Press.
    The essays in this collection are concerned with the psychology of moral agency. They focus on moral feelings and moral motivation, and seek to understand the operations and origins of these phenomena as rooted in the natural desires and emotions of human beings. An important feature of the essays, and one that distinguishes the book from most philosophical work in moral psychology, is the attention to the writings of Freud. Many of the essays draw on Freud's ideas about conscience and (...)
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  20. John Deigh (1992). Ethics and Personality: Essays in Moral Psychology. University of Chicago Press.
    This anthology focuses on emotions and motives that relate to our status as moral agents, our capacity for moral judgement, and the practices that help to define our social lives. Attachment, trust, respect, conscience, guilt, revenge, depravity, and forgiveness are among the topics discussed. Collectively, the thirteen essays in this collection represent a time-honored tradition in ethics: the effort to throw light on fundamental questions concerning the complexities of the human soul.
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  21. Lara Denis (2005). Autonomy and the Highest Good. Kantian Review 10 (1):33-59.
    Kant’s ethics conceives of rational beings as autonomous–capable of legislating the moral law, and of motivating themselves to act out of respect for that law. Kant’s ethics also includes a notion of the highest good, the union of virtue with happiness proportional to, and consequent on, virtue. According to Kant, morality sets forth the highest good as an object of the totality of all things good as ends. Much about Kant’s conception of the highest good is controversial. This paper focuses (...)
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  22. John Doris (2010). Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford University Press.
    The Moral Psychology Handbook offers a survey of contemporary moral psychology, integrating evidence and argument from philosophy and the human sciences.
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  23. Pablo Gilabert (2005). A Substantivist Construal of Discourse Ethics. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (3):405 – 437.
    This paper presents a substantivist construal of discourse ethics, which claims that we should see our engagement in public deliberation as expressing and elaborating a substantive commitment to basic moral ideas of solidarity, equality, and freedom. This view is different from Habermas's standard formalist defence of discourse ethics, which attempts to derive the principle of discursive moral justification from primarily non-moral presuppositions of rational argumentation as such. After explicating the difference between the substantivist and the formalist construal, I (...)
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  24. Irwin Goldstein (2002). The Good's Magnetism and Ethical Realism. Philosophical Studies 108 (1-2):1-14.
    People support ethical antirealism with various arguments. Gilbert Harman thinks if a property of goodness existed, it would have detectable effects on objects that have it. However, Harman reasons, the good has no such detectable effects. Internalists think if good objects had some goodness property, that property would bond to desire and action in a way inconsistent with ethical realism. I defend ethical realism from the two arguments. I explain how good can both name a property and how objects with (...)
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  25. John Hardwig (1983). Action From Duty but Not in Accord with Duty. Ethics 93 (2):283-290.
    In thc Foundations, Kant draws a distinction bctwccn action which is in accord with duty and action which is done from the motive of duty. This is 21 famous distinction, of course, and thcrc arc many interesting issues concerning it and its implications for ethical thcory. In this paper, I wish t0 focus on just 0nc noteworthy feature of K2mt’s usc of this distinction. Likc any distinction bctwccn logical compatiblcs, this 0nc yields four logically possible classes of action: (1) actions (...)
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  26. Ross Harrison (2000). Government is Good for You. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2):159–173.
    There is an argument that government cannot be good for individuals because it causes them to act through fear of punishment, hence for nonmoral reasons. The obvious responses of accepting the conclusion (anarchism) and denying the premiss about moral motivation (utilitarianism) are first considered. Then the strategy of accepting the premiss but denying the conclusion is pursued at greater length. Some arguments of T. H. Green and B. Bosanquet which attempt to do this are considered before an independent resolution is (...)
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  27. Joseph Heath (1997). Foundationalism and Practical Reason. Mind 106 (423):451-474.
    In this paper, I argue that Humean theories of moral motivation appear preferable to Kantian approaches only if one assumes a broadly foundationalist conception of rational justification. Like foundationalist approaches to justification generally, Humean psychology aims to counter the regress-of-justification argument by positing a set of ultimate regress-stoppers-in this case, unmotivated desires. If the need for regress-stoppers of this type in the realm of practical deliberation is accepted, desires do indeed appear to be the most likely candidate. But if this (...)
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  28. Richard G. Henson (1979). What Kant Might Have Said: Moral Worth and the Overdetermination of Dutiful Action. Philosophical Review 88 (1):39-54.
    My purpose is to account for some oddities in what Kant did and did not say about "moral worth," and for another in what commentators tell us about his intent. The stone with which I hope to dispatch these several birds is-as one would expect a philosopher's stone to be-a distinction. I distinguish between two things Kant might have had in mind under the heading of moral worth. They come readily to mind when one both takes account of what he (...)
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  29. Barbara Herman (1981). On the Value of Acting From the Motive of Duty. Philosophical Review 90 (3):359-382.
    Richard Henson attempts to take the sting out of this view of Kant on moral worth by arguing (i) that attending to the phenomenon of the overdetermination of actions leads one to see that Kant might have had two distinct views of moral worth, only one of which requires the absence of cooperating inclinations, and (ii) that when Kant insists that there is moral worth only when an action is done from the motive of duty alone, he need not also (...)
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  30. Richard Holton (2003). How is Strength of Will Possible? In Christine Tappolet & Sarah Stroud (eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality. Oxford.
    Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.
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  31. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence & Warren Quinn (1995). Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory: Essays in Honour of Philippa Foot. Oxford University Press.
    Philippa Foot is one of the most original and widely respected philosophers of our time; her work has exerted a lasting influence on the development of moral philosophy. In tribute to her, twelve leading philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic have contributed essays exploring the various topics in moral philosophy to which she has made a distinctive contribution--virtue ethics, naturalism, non-cognitivism, relativism, categorical requirements, and the role of rationality in morality.
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  32. Diane Jeske (1998). A Defense of Acting From Duty. Journal of Value Inquiry 32 (1):61–74.
    Philosophers who, in the light of these attacks, have attempted to vindicate the motive of duty have done so in a half-hearted way, by stressing the motive of duty’s function as a secondary or limiting motivation, or by denying “that acting from duty primarily concerns isolated actions.” I will defend duty as a primary motive with respect to isolated actions. Critics of acting from duty and philosophers who have attempted to respond to them have done little work spelling out exactly (...)
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  33. Robert Johnson (2009). Good Will and the Moral Worth of Acting From Duty. In Thomas E. Hill (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Kant's Ethics. Wiley-Blackwell.
    The first section of the Groundwork begins “It is impossible to imagine anything at all in the world, or even beyond it, that can be called good without qualification— except a good will.”1 Kant’s explanation and defense of this claim is followed by an explanation and defense of another related claim, that only actions performed out of duty have moral worth. He explains that actions performed out of duty are those done from respect for the moral law, and then culminates (...)
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  34. Robert N. Johnson (1996). Expressing a Good Will: Kant on the Motive of Duty. Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):147-168.
    If any action is to be morally good it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law-it must also be done for the sake of the moral law: where this is not so, the conformity is only too contingent and precarious, since the nonmoral ground at work will now and then produce actions which accord with the law, but very often actions which transgress it.
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  35. Jason Kawall (2004). Moral Response-Dependence, Ideal Observers, and the Motive of Duty: Responding to Zangwill. Erkenntnis 60 (3):357-369.
    Moral response-dependent metaethical theories characterize moral properties in terms of the reactions of certain classes of individuals. Nick Zangwill has argued that such theories are flawed: they are unable to accommodate the motive of duty. That is, they are unable to provide a suitable reason for anyone to perform morally right actions simply because they are morally right. I argue that Zangwill ignores significant differences between various approvals, and various individuals, and that moral response-dependent theories can accommodate the motive of (...)
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  36. Jeanette Kennett (1993). Mixed Motives. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (3):256 – 269.
    My aim in this paper is, by process of elimination, to elucidate and defend an account of how ordinary people act on their values. I will be making both a descriptive claim about our psychology and a further claim about its effectiveness and rational status. I want to suggest that the way in which most of us in fact put our values into practice is, over time, preferable to the ways which initially seem required or at least desirable.
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  37. Christine M. Korsgaard, Natural Motives and the Motive of Duty: Hume and Kant on Our Duties to Others.
    In this paper I argue that the ground of this disagreement is different than philosophers have traditionally supposed. On the surface, the disagreement appears to be a matter of substantive moral judgment: Hume admires the sort of person who rushes to the aid of another from motives of sympathy or humanity, while Kant thinks that a person who helps with the thought that it is his duty is the better character. While a moral disagreement of this kind certainly follows from (...)
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  38. Noa Latham (1994). Causally Irrelevant Reasons and Action Solely From the Motive of Duty. Journal of Philosophy 91 (11):599-618.
    My concern in part I of this paper is with how to make sense of the position that one can have reasons both of duty and inclination for an action one performs but be motivated solely by duty, and more generally that one can have several reasons for an action one performs but be motivated only by some of them. I examine a number of ways of attempting to do this, most of them independent of the Kantian context, and argue (...)
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  39. Noah M. Lemos (1991). Moral Goodness, Esteem, and Acting From Duty. Journal of Value Inquiry 25 (2):103-117.
    There is a long tradition in moral philosophy which maintains that a necessary condition for moral goodness is that one act from a sense of duty. Kant is perhaps the best known and most discussed representative of this view, but one finds others prior to Kant, such as Butler and Price, and Kant's contemporaries, such as Reid, expressing similar ideas. Price, for example writes, ". . . what I have chiefly insisted on, is, that we characterize as virtuous no actions (...)
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  40. Errol Lord (2008). Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason. Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy:1-7.
    It is a truism that agents can do the right action for the right reason. To put the point in terms more familiar to ethicists, it is a truism that one’s motivating reason can be one’s normative reason. In this short note, I will argue that Jonathan Dancy’s preferred view about how this is possible faces a dilemma. Dancy has the choice between accounting for two plausible constraints while at the same time holding an outlandish philosophy of mind by his (...)
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  41. Joshua May, Because I Believe It’s the Right Thing to Do.
    Our beliefs about which actions we ought to perform clearly have an effect on what we do. But so-called “Humean” theories—holding that all motivation has its source in desire—insist on connecting such beliefs with an antecedent motive. Rationalists, on the other hand, allow normative beliefs a more independent role. I argue in favor of the rationalist view in two stages. First, I show that the Humean theory rules out some of the ways we ordinarily explain actions. This shifts the burden (...)
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  42. Adrian M. S. Piper (2008). Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception. APRA Foundation Berlin.
    The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, (...)
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  43. Markku Roinila (2011). Uneasiness and Passions in Leibniz's Nouveaux Essais II, Xx. In Breger Herbert, Herbst Jürgen & Erdner Sven (eds.), Natur und Subjekt. IX. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress Vorträge 3. Teil. Leibniz Geschellschaft.
    Chapter 20 of book II of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, titled ‘Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain’ is the most extensive discussion of emotions available in Locke’s corpus. Likewise, Nouveaux essais sur l’entedement humain, II, xx, together with the following chapter xxi remains the chief source of Leibniz’s views of emotions. They offer a very interesting and captivating discussion of moral philosophy and good life. The chapter provides also a great platform to study Leibniz’s argumentative techniques and (...)
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  44. Connie S. Rosati, Moral Motivation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon they seek (...)
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  45. Walter E. Schaller (1992). The Relation of Moral Worth to the Good Will in Kant's Ethics. Journal of Philosophical Research 17:351-382.
    I consider three questions concerning the relation of the good will to the moral worth of actions. (1) Does a good will consist simply in acting from the motive of duty? (2) Does acting from the motive of duty presuppose that one has a good will? (3) Does the fact that one has a good wilI entail that all of one’s duty-fulfilling actions have moral worth, even if they are not (directly) motivated by duty? I argue that while only persons (...)
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  46. Timothy Schroeder, Adina L. Roskies & Shaun Nichols (2010). Moral Motivation. In John Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford University Press.
    In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosophical conclusion, it does present formidable obstacles to a number of popular philosophical (...)
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  47. Chandra Sekhar Sripada (2010). Philosophical Questions About the Nature of Willpower. Philosophy Compass 5 (9):793-805.
    In this article, I survey four key questions about willpower: How is willpower possible? Why does willpower fail? How does willpower relate to other self-regulatory processes? and What are the connections between willpower and weakness of will? Empirical research into willpower is growing rapidly and yielding some fascinating new findings. This survey emphasizes areas in which empirical progress in understanding willpower helps to advance traditional philosophical debates.
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  48. Russ Shafer-Landau (2006). Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 3. Oxford University Press.
    The essays included in the series provide an excellent basis for understanding recent developments in the field; those who would like to acquaint themselves ...
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  49. David Shoemaker (2000). Reductionist Contractualism: Moral Motivation and the Expanding Self. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):343-370.
    According to a popular contemporary contractualist account of moral motivation, the most plausible explanation for why those who are concerned with morality take moral reasons seriously — why these reasons strike those who are moved by them with a particular inescapability — is that they stem from, and are grounded by, a desire to be able to justify one’s actions to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject.1 My.
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  50. Neil Sinclair (2007). Expressivism and the Practicality of Moral Convictions. Journal of Value Inquiry 41:201-220.
    Many expressivists have employed a claim about the practicality of morality in support of their view that moral convictions are not purely descriptive mental states. In this paper I argue that all extant arguments of this form fail. I distinguish several versions of such arguments and argue that in each case either the sense of practicality the argument employs is too weak, in which case there is no reason to think that descriptive states cannot be practical or the sense of (...)
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  51. Michael Smith (1988). On Humeans, Anti-Humeans, and Motivation: A Reply to Pettit. Mind 97 (388):589-595.
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  52. Tamler Sommers (2009). A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. McSweeney's Press.
    A collection of long, detailed interviews with philosophers and scientists who work on issues in ethics and moral psychology. The researchers interviewed include Galen Strawson, Philiip Zimbardo, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Haidt, Frans De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Joe Henrich, and William Ian Miller.
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  53. Michael Stocker (1976). The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. Journal of Philosophy 73 (14):453-466.
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  54. Philip Stratton-Lake (2000). Kant, Duty, and Moral Worth. Routledge.
    Kant, Duty and Moral Worth tackles the debate over whether or not Kant said moral actions have worth only if they are carried out from duty or whether actions carried out from mixed motives can be good. Stratton-Lake offers a unique account of acting from duty which utilizes the distinction between primary and secondary motives. He maintains that moral law should not be understood as normative moral reason but as playing a transcendental role. Thus, a Kantian account of moral worth (...)
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  55. Sigrun Svavarsdottir (1999). Moral Cognitivism and Motivation. Philosophical Review 108 (2):161-219.
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  56. Julie Tannenbaum (2002). Acting with Feeling From Duty. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (3):321-337.
    A central claim in Kantian ethics is that an agent is properly morally motivated just in case she acts from duty alone. Bernard Williams, Michael Stocker, and Justin Oakley claim that certain emotionally infused actions, such as lending a compassionate helping hand, can only be done from compassion and not from duty. I argue that these critics have overlooked a distinction between an action's manner, how an action is done, and its motive, the agent's reason for acting. Through a range (...)
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  57. Christine Tappolet (2003/2007). Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    Sarah Stroud and Christine Tappolet present eleven original essays on weakness of will, a topic straddling the divide between moral philosophy and philosophy of mind, and the subject of much current attention. An international team of established scholars and younger talent provide perspectives on all the key issues in this fascinating debate; the book will be essential reading for anyone working in the area.
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  58. Craig Taylor (2001). Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry Finn. Ratio 14 (1):56–67.
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  59. Craig Taylor (1995). Moral Incapacity. Philosophy 70 (272):273 - 285.
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  60. Sergio Tenenbaum (forthcoming). Externalism, Motivation, and Moral Knowledge. In Susana Nuccetelli & Gary Seay (eds.), Ethical Naturalism.
    For non-analytic ethical naturalists, externalism about moral motivation is an attractive option: it allows naturalists to embrace a Humean theory of motivation while holding that moral properties are real, natural properties. However, Michael Smith has mounted an important objection to this view. Smith observes that virtuous agents must have non-derivative motivation to pursue specific ends that they believe to be morally right; he then argues that this externalist view ascribes to the virtuous agent only a direct de dicto desire to (...)
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  61. Sergio Tenenbaum (2007). Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason. Cambridge University Press.
    'We desire all and only those things we conceive to be good; we avoid what we conceive to be bad.' This slogan was once the standard view of the relationship between desire or motivation and rational evaluation. Many critics have rejected this scholastic formula as either trivial or wrong. It appears to be trivial if we just define the good as 'what we want', and wrong if we consider apparent conflicts between what we seem to want and what we seem (...)
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  62. Sergio Tenenbaum (2006). Direction of Fit and Motivational Cognitivism. In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Oxford University Press.
    The idea of direction of fit has been found appealing by many philosophers. Anscombe’s famous examples have persuaded many of us that there must be some deep difference between belief and desire that is captured by the metaphor of direction of fit. Most of the aim of the paper is to try to get clear on which intuitions Anscombe’s example taps into. My view is that there is more than one intuition in play here, and I will try to show (...)
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  63. John J. Tilley (2009). Dismissive Replies to "Why Should I Be Moral?". Social Theory and Practice 35 (3):341–68.
    The question "Why should I be moral?," taken as a request for reasons to be moral, strikes many philosophers as silly, confused, or otherwise out of line. Hence we find many attempts to dismiss it as spurious. This paper addresses four such attempts and shows that they fail. It does so partly by discussing various errors about reasons for action, errors that lie at the root of the view that "Why should I be moral?" is ill-conceived. Such errors include the (...)
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  64. John J. Tilley (2008). Reasons, Rational Requirements, and the Putative Pseudo-Question “Why Be Moral?”. Synthese 161 (2):309 - 323.
    In this paper, I challenge a well-known argument for the view that “Why be moral?” is a pseudo-question. I do so by refuting a component of that argument, a component that is not only crucial to the argument but important in its own right. That component concerns the status of moral reasons in replies to “Why be moral?”; consequently, this paper concerns reasons and rationality no less than it concerns morality. The work I devote to those topics shows not only (...)
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  65. John J. Tilley (2006). Is "Why Be Moral?" A Pseudo-Question?: Hospers and Thornton on the Amoralist's Challenge. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4):549-66.
    Many arguments have been advanced for the view that "Why be moral?" is a pseudo-question. In this paper I address one of the most widely known and influential of them, one that comes from John Hospers and J. C. <span class='Hi'>Thornton</span>. I do so partly because, strangely, an important phase of that argument has escaped close attention. It warrants such attention because, firstly, not only is it important to the argument in which it appears, it is important in wider respects. (...)
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  66. John J. Tilley (2004). Desires, Reasons, and Reasons to Be Moral. American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (4):287–98.
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  67. John J. Tilley (1997). Motivation and Practical Reasons. Erkenntnis 47 (1):105-127.
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  68. R. Jay Wallace, Moral Motivation. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should play within the larger subject of ethical theory. These disagreements surface in the dispute about whether moral thought is necessarily motivating – ‘internalists’ affirming that it is,‘externalists’ denying this. [...] There are also important questions about the content of moral motivations. A moral theory should help us to make sense of the fact (...)
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  69. Owen Ware (2010). Kant, Skepticism, and Moral Sensibility. Dissertation, University of Toronto
    In his early writings, Kant says that the solution to the puzzle of how morality can serve as a motivating force in human life is nothing less than the “philosophers’ stone.” In this dissertation I show that for years Kant searched for the philosophers’ stone in the concept of “respect” (Achtung), which he understood as the complex effect practical reason has on feeling. I sketch the history of that search in Chapters 1-2. In Chapter 3 I show that Kant’s analysis (...)
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  70. Michael Weber (2007). More on the Motive of Duty. Journal of Ethics 11 (1):65 - 86.
    A number of neo-Kantians have suggested that an act may be morally worthy even if sympathy and similar emotions are present, so long as they are not what in fact motivates right action–so long as duty, and duty alone, in fact motivates. Thus, the ideal Kantian moral agent need not be a cold and unfeeling person, as some critics have suggested. Two objections to this view need to be answered. First, some maintain that motives cannot be present without in fact (...)
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  71. Michael Weber (2003). The Motive of Duty and the Nature of Emotions: Kantian Reflections on Moral Worth. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (2):183 - 202.
    As a result there is a considerable literature on the topic. I think, however, that the treatment in the literature is incomplete because there is a failure to examine the relevant emotions in significant detail, and in particular to consider their complexity and the conditions of their warrant. As a result, both defenses and critiques of the motive of duty in terms of reliability are inadequate as they stand.
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  72. David Wiggins (1995). Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty. In Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence & Warren Quinn (eds.), Virtues and Reasons. Clarendon Press.
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  73. David Wiggins (1991). Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty. The Monist 74 (1):83-106.
    If the theory advanced below is correct, then what is the difference (I know she [Philippa Foot]] will ask) between the moral must/must not and the must/must not of etiquette or the clubhouse? Looking forward to the conclusion I shall reach, let me reply, roughly and readily, that the difference will reside not in anything formal but in the depth, spread, and felt authority of the attachments to which the moral must/must not appeals-and categorically appeals.
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