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Moral judgment purposivism: saving internalism from amoralism

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Abstract

Consider orthodox motivational judgment internalism: necessarily, A’s sincere moral judgment that he or she ought to φ motivates A to φ. Such principles fail because they cannot accommodate the amoralist, or one who renders moral judgments without any corresponding motivation. The orthodox alternative, externalism, posits only contingent relations between moral judgment and motivation. In response I first revive conceptual internalism by offering some modifications on the amoralist case to show that certain community-wide motivational failures are not conceptually possible. Second, I introduce a theory of moral motivation that supplements the intuitive responses to different amoralist cases. According to moral judgment purposivism (MJP), in rough approximation, a purpose of moral judgments is to motivate corresponding behaviors such that a mental state without this purpose is not a moral judgment. MJP is consistent with conceptual desiderata, provides an illuminating analysis of amoralist cases, and offers a step forward in the internalist-externalist debates.

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Notes

  1. Throughout I will be concerned with first person moral ought judgments. The literature on this kind of internalism is large. See Darwall (1983), Schaffer-Landau (2003), Ch. 6, and Mele (1996, 2003) for nice discussions.

  2. Some with internalists leanings could retreat to weaker and less orthodox claims, like ‘Necessarily, the virtuous are motivated by their moral judgments’ or ‘Anyone who judges that he ought to X (morally or otherwise) is either motivated accordingly or practically irrational.’ But such theses are more about virtuous or rational people than they are about moral judgments. These theses require the motivational connection to be mediated by something external to the judgments themselves. I want to argue that there is a less mediated motivational role for moral judgments that denies the robustly externalist view that moral judgments of themselves have only contingent connections to motivation.

  3. Not only does MJI rule out amoralists, it also rules out the possibility that a normally virtuous person on one occasion renders a moral judgment that fails to motivate. The natural thing to say is that these are motivationally defective moral judgments, though still moral judgments. Proponents of MJI try to avoid the natural thing to say. They might say that the amoralist only makes a moral judgment in the inverted commas sense; that the moral judgment is not sincere; or that the moral judgment does not concern a moral obligation. These moves might suffice for the amoralist, but they seem quite desperate explanations of the single-shot glitch in the otherwise virtuous person.

  4. Nichols (2004, p. 111) embraces what he calls “empirical internalism about core moral judgment”. In Nichols’s words, “core moral judgment is nomologically connected with motivation” (Id). Though he uses the label “internalism,” this appears to be the standard externalist view advocated by Brink, for any connection between moral judgment and motivation would be contingent.

  5. Both Dreier and Blackburn seem to thinking of normalcy or the background connection as a community property, though this is not entirely clear. For example, it is implicit in Dreier’s discussion of Sadists, who individually do not have the slightest motivation to perform moral actions but nonetheless render moral judgments, that normalcy is a property of a population. On the other hand, he elsewhere suggests that psychic states can defeat normalcy, (e.g., he says that “if a person has a certain state of character for all her life, then behavior flowing from that state is normal for her” (Dreier 1990, p. 14)), which indicates that normalcy can be a property of particular psychologies.

  6. One interesting question is whether the heart’s proper function is partially definitive of the kind of thing that it is. There is a good case that it is. Surgically removed hearts, defective hearts, and other things that do not pump blood might still count as hearts depending on their proper functionings, which, in turn, depend on the histories of these things’ ancestors. But water pumps do not count as hearts even if they can pump blood precisely because, it would seem, water pumps do not have pumping blood as a proper function, and having such a proper function is partly definitive of hearts. This issue will come to the fore below in a discussion of MJP as a synthetic necessity claim.

  7. For a review of game theory models of social behaviors see Maynard Smith (1982) and Axelrod and Hamilton (1981).

  8. These terms are due to Hull (1980).

  9. For a nice discussion of cultural evolution see Richarson and Boyd (2005).

  10. See also Haidt and Bjorkland (2008).

  11. For a nice discussion of some difficulties when modeling culturally driven adaptations see Dennett (1995, Ch. 12).

  12. Evolutionary dynamics seeks to explain the distal causes of things that copy over generations. Other approaches might provide workable proximate explanations of our moral behaviors so we can understand why individuals engaged in them from, say, a psychological or sociological perspective. But we need something like evolutionary dynamics to explain the persistence or proliferation of moral behaviors over generations.

  13. Our moral behaviors might fail to have these effects currently, but it is sufficient that their history bestows them with the purpose of eliciting these effects. More importantly, the mechanisms that enable our moral behaviors might have been co-opted to produce other kinds of behavior that fail to generate cooperative outcomes. I discuss this more below.

  14. Other evolutionary theorists draw a distinction, sometimes implicitly, between other-directed moral judgments, which can play some role in enforcing social norms, and self-directed moral judgments, which can play some role in ensuring that the judger complies with social norms. See, e.g., Gibbard (1990, Ch. 4); Joyce (2006, Ch. 4); Kitcher (2006). The present view speaks to self-directed moral judgments, and their psychological and social roles. I mean to acknowledge and leave open the enforcement role of other-directed judgments.

  15. When pressing me to clarify these options, an anonymous reviewer gives the following analogy. Just as a steering wheel orients a car in a certain direction, and the accelerator provides the spring of action, we can think of my moral judgment that I ought to φ as orienting me toward φing, with a separate conative attitude toward φing providing the spring of action.

  16. I defend the besire view in Bedke (ms).

  17. The separate motivational attitude view posits a de dicto desire to do the right thing (whatever that turns out to be), which looks like a moral fetish. As Michael Smith (1994, pp. 71–76) has noted, this depicts agents as caring about valuable things derivatively via a desire to do what one ought. From our own experience and what we know about moral others, this looks implausible. Even if I am wrong about this and we do aim at doing what is right and good, whatever that turns out to be, a plausible psychological picture must supplement these de dicto desires with de re desires, for we seem to be motivated by moral judgments about particulars. In addition, intuitions on the Amoralsville case show that certain community-wide motivational failures indicate a lack of moral judgments. We do not withdraw ascriptions of just any conative attitude, but moral judgments. Absent some explanation for why a failing external to moral judgments proper would induce us to withhold ascriptions of moral judgments, this is some evidence, albeit non-conclusive, that moral judgments include a motivational component.

  18. I thank an anonymous reviewer for comments that reminded me of the importance of distinguishing the action of φing, considered as the intensional content of A’s judgment, from the action considered more objectively as falling under certain act types, one of which satisfies conditions a and b. I take it that this resolves some potential difficulties when A is thinking of φing in such a way that it does not satisfy conditions a and b even though the judgment seems to have a motivational purpose. To discuss an example from the reviewer, suppose I judge that I ought to call Fred (to warn him of approaching danger). For the principle to apply, it is too much to require a social practice with the purpose of influencing individuals to call Fred. And we do not want to complicate my judgment to include its grounds, viz., that I ought to help others. Instead it is better to say that MJP applies when there is an act type, where the judgment is part of a social practice whose purpose is, in part, to influence individuals to engage in that type of action (here, a kind of helping behavior), that type enters into our adaptationist, purposive, explanations, and that type is prototypically moral.

  19. This theory of conceptual change might help other etiologically minded philosophers in dealing with swamp intuitions. Alternatively, one could say that actual moral judgments and swamp moral judgments are different species of moral judgment, and the synthetic necessity claim applies to the species of actual judgments. For a defense of historical, biological kinds as natural kinds see Millikan (1996).

  20. See also Joyce (2006, p. 109). There might be particular cases where moral judgments are defective because they do not “win out” amongst competing motivations. The claim here is that insufficient moral motivation is not necessarily a defect. Also, an anonymous reviewer has noted that the purposive perspective might be extended to reveal that certain failings in other psychological states or activities, like willing, count as defects. The success of these extensions would have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

  21. Haidt and Craig (2004) say something similar.

    Of course, it is possible to teach children to be cruel to certain classes of people, but how would adults accomplish such training? Most likely by exploiting other moral modules. Racism, for example, can be taught by invoking the purity module and triggering flashes of disgust at the ‘dirtiness’ of certain groups, or by invoking the reciprocity module and triggering flashes of anger at the cheating ways of a particular group (Hitler used both strategies against the Jews). In this way, cultures can create variable actual domains that are much broader than the universal proper domains for each module (p. 63).

  22. Compare those norms and attitudes that are appropriate within the realm of family and friends with the norms and attitudes that are appropriate within the realm of politics. In politics we do not believe it is appropriate to favor ourselves and those close to us, but in our private lives we do believe it is not only permissible, but also imperative to concern ourselves primarily with the well-being of those close to us. The purposive perspective can explain the variation by appealing to the different purposes that moral practices evolved in these two domains.

  23. This term is due to Altham (1986). The most forceful arguments against besire theory depend upon the separability of cognitive and non-cognitive functional roles (cf. Smith 1994, Ch. 4), but these arguments fail to refute the claim that these separable roles are actually realized by one and the same mental state token in our moral judgments. For a detailed analysis of this claim, see Bedke (ms).

  24. Though this choice would not be forced upon us. After discovering the distinction between jadeite and nephrite, we continue to call them both ‘jade.’

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Acknowledgments

I thank David Schmidtz and Mark Timmons for comments on an early draft of the paper. I also thank an anonymous reviewer for extensive and helpful comments on the submitted manuscript.

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Correspondence to M. S. Bedke.

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Bedke, M.S. Moral judgment purposivism: saving internalism from amoralism. Philos Stud 144, 189–209 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9205-5

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