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Being realistic about motivation

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Abstract

T.M. Scanlon’s ‘reasons fundamentalism’ is thought to face difficulties answering the normative question—that is, explaining why it’s irrational to not do what you judge yourself to have most reason to do. I argue that this difficulty results from Scanlon’s failure to provide a theory of mind that can give substance to his account of normative judgment and its tie to motivation. A central aim of this paper is to address that deficiency. To do this, I draw on broadly cognitivist theories of emotion (those of, e.g., Martha Nussbaum and Robert Roberts). These theories are interesting because they view emotions as cognitive states from which motivation emerges. Thus, they provide a model Scanlon can use to develop a richer account of both the judgment-motivation connection and the irrationality of not doing what you judge yourself to have most reason to do. However, the success on this front is only partial—even this more developed proposal fails to give a satisfactory answer to the normative question.

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Notes

  1. While both “robust” non-natural realists (e.g., Enoch 2011; Shafer-Landau 2003) and quietist maintain that normative concepts are (largely) unanalyzable, quietism is distinct in maintaining that (non-natural) normative facts are minimally metaphysically committing. As such, quietists take themselves to be better equipped to address Mackie-style queerness worries and other metaphysical complaints about non-natural properties (c.f., McPherson 2010; Wodak 2017). Whether robust realists also face a challenge in answering the normative question is an issue for another time.

  2. Though I won’t press the point, it’s worth noting that Scanlon’s argument against a causal role for desires appears to rest on an uncharitable rendering of how desire theorists understand both desires and their relation to motivation. In particular, Scanlon’s argument seems to rest on a slide from thinking of desires in functional terms (i.e., as conative states) to thinking of them phenomenologically (i.e., as a particular type of felt urge). So while Scanlon may be correct that a mere feeling doesn’t cause action, this is not the claim desire theorists are making.

  3. Whether one should be criticized in such a case turns on, inter alia, whether it would be (morally, prudentially) wrong to bring the world in line with one’s state (desire).

  4. Speculating, I believe Scanlon’s doubly-qualified rejection of the DFM and the thinness of his alternative proposal is the source of recent dissatisfaction with his response to the normative question (e.g., Dreier 2014a, b).

  5. As we will see (§4), there are important differences in how Roberts and Nussbaum understand the connection between emotion and motivation. For now, it suffices to note that both take emotion—and so motivation—to be something that emerges from a suitably rich construal or perception of one’s situation.

  6. One might think that Andrea Scarantino’s motivational theory of emotion (2015) offers a better model for Scanlon. After all, on Scarantino’s account, emotions are states that “represent how things are (mind-to-world) and how things are to be (world-to-mind) at the same time” (177); as such, his motivational theory offers an account of emotion that appears better suited to Scanlon’s purposes. But there are two problems with this suggestion. First, emotions for Scarantino are, in the first place, motivational states—specifically, action tendencies—that happen to also have representational content (156). So, initial appearances to the contrary, his model is a poor fit for Scanlon. After all, and as we’ve seen, Scanlon needs an account on which normative judgments are, in the first place, belief-like states that have a rational tie to motivation (e.g., 66–67). Thus, following Scarantino does not appear to help Scanlon secure conditions (1) and (2) from §2. Second, Scarantino’s own discussion of emotions as states with dual directions of fit is schematic, providing little by way of an answer to (e.g.) concerns about the plausibility of such states. Thus, it’s unclear that the Scarantino proposal would provide Scanlon with the additional explanatory resources he needs.

  7. Something like this is suggested by Scanlon’s comments on p. 61. It also seems of a piece with his quietist account of reasons as both resisting analysis and metaphysically light-weight.

  8. One might think that Scanlon could respond by augmenting his account of PRAs so that the decision making of PRAs is subject to demands for coherence and consistency of the sort noted in the text. But such a suggestion fits poorly with Scanlon’s concerns about wedding his reasons fundamentalism to a substantive account of rationality of this sort (e.g., 7–10).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anne Margaret Baxley, Eric Brown, Billy Dunaway, and Eric Wiland for input on an earlier version of this paper.

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Kurth, C. Being realistic about motivation. Philos Stud 176, 2751–2765 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1149-9

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