Abstract
It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto. If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Elsewhere, I have argued that Wolf’s argument for these conclusions fails (Carbonell 2009).
Why must the new motivation be derived rather than direct? It’s because, according to motivational externalism, moral judgments are not intrinsically motivating. So the change in judgment does not itself entail a change in motivation. The only way for my new moral judgment to actually be followed by new behavior is if I am motivated to act on it, and I must find this motivation somewhere other than in the judgment itself. Good people seem to be able to modify their behavior in accordance with new moral judgments. As Smith sees it, the only way externalism can explain this fact is by claiming that the good person consults some standing de dicto desire to do the right thing. In this paper, I set aside questions about whether Smith has accurately characterized the externalist position. I focus simply on the claim that this type of desire or motivation would be “fetishistic,” a claim which Smith seems to take as uncontroversial and upon which his reductio of externalism seems to rest.
Indeed, it is somewhat curious that Smith chooses to appropriate the phrase “one thought too many,” since the meaning of this phrase relies on the notion that the man in Williams’ example has two thoughts—the second thought being one too many. On Smith’s construal of externalism, the good person would have to have only one motivating thought (the standing de dicto desire to do the right thing) and it would be “one too many”—which seems to entail he thinks the good person ought to have zero thoughts!
Olson (2002) has argued that cases of “motivational overdetermination” are “quite common” (p. 91).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to discuss this point.
Of course I’m here speaking of perceived (i.e., phenomenological) difficulty, not difficulty as measured in some neuroscientific way. And arguably it’s an empirical question whether the motivational aftermath (as measured behaviorally, phenomenologically, neuroscientifically, or however) of a change-of-mind is any different from the aftermath of a new judgment like that of the man in Williams’ drowning case. Indeed, some might view Michael Smith’s internalism as itself an empirical thesis about what happens (it least in ordinary cases) when humans make moral judgments. Nevertheless, to tackle these difficult issues about internalism is beyond the scope of the paper. I simply want to point out that absent some convincing argument, we don’t seem to have non-question-begging reasons to think that an agent would be vicious or defective in some way if she has to consult a standing de dicto desire in order to be motivated to do the right thing. Appealing to Williams’ notion of “one thought too many” doesn’t constitute the convincing argument that we need.
Copp (1997) has also criticized Smith’s case against externalism. Along the way he addresses the fetish claim. “I do not think it is fetishistic to have the de dicto desire,” he writes. “A good person could have this desire along with a variety of direct desires, such as the desire for the good of her loved ones” (pp. 49–50).
For more on minimal psychological realism, see Flanagan (1991).
There is only one account in the literature on de dicto desires that looks specifically at the question of how the morally best people—as opposed to, say, run-of-the-mill morally good people—will be motivated. Olson (2002) argues that the “paragon of moral goodness”—presumably, a moral saint—will not need de dicto moral motivation, because “her de re desires to perform acts with right-making characteristics would in each and every case provide her with sufficient motivation to act on those desires (that’s what would make her a paragon)” (p. 92). But as I have argued, it is unrealistic to expect a person—even a moral saint—to have no gaps in her de re moral motivations. And moreover, some types of commitments might constitutively involve recalcitrant or stubborn de re desires that cannot simply be switched off. Presumably some of these commitments are of a sort we would expect moral saints to have, and which it would be good for them to have. As such, I think a moral saint can fall back on a standing de dicto desire to do the right thing at no threat to her sainthood. Indeed, it could be the case that one way of being a moral saint is to have a particularly effective standing de dicto motivation: that is, to be especially good at aligning one’s actions with one’s abstract commitment to doing the right thing.
Indeed, that the distinction is oversimplified is made all the more evident when we consider cases in which it appears that de re and de dicto desires might even amount to one and the same thing. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that this might be true in cases involving essentially moral values like justice (Carbonell 2009).
In a more recent paper, Darwall (2010) challenges the notion that if a normative concept (such as right, wrong, or obligatory) is a “buck-passing” concept in some sense then it necessarily provides no additional reason for performing (or not performing) the action to which it applies. Thus he defends a view of wrongness that he deems “buck-passing” in one sense and non-buck-passing in another: “Anyone who accepts the fitting-attitude account of moral obligation and wrongness I will propose should therefore be a buck-passer with respect to reasons for blaming and holding morally responsible. But that would not entail being a buck-passer with respect to reasons for action, specifically, for avoiding moral wrong. The fact that an action is wrong might still itself be, and I shall argue actually is, a reason, indeed a decisive reason, not to perform the act or to intend or choose to do so” (Darwall 2010, p. 143).
In what I take to be a similar point, Darwall (2010) claims that “Wrong-making features, such as that an action would cause harm or subvert a criminal investigation, themselves entail nothing about legitimate demands… My claim, however, is that in believing that such features are indeed wrong making, we are committed to thinking that these features nonetheless ground a legitimate demand not so to act and that this fact—the fact that the act would violate a legitimate moral demand and so be wrong—gives us a further reason not to perform the act” (p. 151). So just as Scanlon is claiming that we need to know not only that an action would be the breaking of a promise, but also that breaking promises is fun and how to weigh the latter against the former, Darwall is claiming that we need to know not only that an action would cause harm, but also what we can legitimately demand of others with respect to refraining from harm.
He later explains that while, according to his account, the property of moral wrongness is not itself reason-providing, he is positing a higher-order reason-providing property, and it’s a property of “one way of having [the property of moral wrongness]”—namely, via justifiability to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject (2007, p. 17).
References
Carbonell, V. (2009). What moral saints look like. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39(3), 371–398.
Copp, D. (1997). Belief, reason, and motivation: Michael Smith’s ‘The moral problem’. Ethics, 108(1), 33–54.
Dancy, J. (2000). Should we pass the buck? In: A. O’Hear (Ed.), Philosophy: The good, the true, and the beautiful. Philosophy (Vol. 47, Supplement, pp. 159–173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwall, S. (2006). The second-person standpoint. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Darwall, S. (2010). But it would be wrong. Social Philosophy and Policy, 27, 135–157.
Dreier, J. (2000). Dispositions and fetishes: Externalist models of moral motivation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(3), 619–639.
Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of moral personality: Ethics and psychological realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lillehammer, H. (1997). Smith on moral fetishism. Analysis, 57(3), 187–195.
Olson, J. (2002). Are desires de dicto fetishistic? Inquiry, 45, 89–96.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (2003). Precis of what we owe to each other. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66(1), 159–161.
Scanlon, T. M. (2007). Wrongness and reasons: A reexamination. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 2, pp. 5–20). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, M. (1994). The moral problem. Oxford: Blackwell.
Svavarsdottir, S. (1999). Moral cognitivism and motivation. The Philosophical Review, 108(2), 161–219.
Wallace, R. J. (2006). Moral reasons and moral fetishes: Rationalists and anti-rationalists on moral motivation. In R. J. Wallace (Ed.), Normativity and the will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, B. (1981). Persons, character, and morality (Reprinted in Moral luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Wolf, S. (1982). Moral saints. Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439.
Acknowledgments
Many people have provided me with helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I would especially like to thank Stephen Darwall, Elizabeth Anderson, and Peter Railton for their generous and insightful comments. I am also grateful to Jamie Tappenden, Eric Lormand, Ivan Mayerhofer, Dustin Locke, Howard Nye, John Ku, Aaron Bronfman, David Dick, Tim Sundell, Franklin Scott, and an anonymous referee for Phil Studies. Work on this paper was supported by grants from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the University of Cincinnati’s Charles Phelps Taft Research Center.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Carbonell, V. De dicto desires and morality as fetish. Philos Stud 163, 459–477 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z