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Motivational internalism

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Abstract

Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set of counterexamples to motivational internalism, examples which are effective both against traditional formulations of the thesis as well as against many of these more recent restricted proposals.

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Notes

  1. See Smith 1994: chapter one.

  2. In recent years, the thesis which I call ‘motivational internalism’ has also gone by the name of ‘motivation internalism,’ ‘moral belief internalism,’ and ‘judgment internalism.’ The first and third would serve equally well as labels, but the second is problematic. A formulation of motivational internalism should not simply assume that moral judgments are beliefs, especially since that would have the awkward implication of precluding traditional non-cognitivists from being internalists.

  3. For similar formulations of weak MI, see Darwall 1983: 54, 1997: 308, Dreier 1990: 11, 14, Smith 1994: 61, 64, 1995: 277, 1996: 175, 1997: 111, Copp 1996: 189, Parfit 1997: 105, Bloomfield 2001: 158, Joyce 2001: 18, 2002: 337, Cuneo 2002: 482, and Shafer-Landau 2003: 143.

  4. Here I follow Mele 1996: 730 and Audi 1997: 226, who make a similar observation. The discussion of moral motivation in this paper will remain neutral on the truth of Humean versus anti-Humean theories of motivation.

  5. As Frankena claims in a well-known passage, “The question is whether motivation is somehow to be ‘built into’ judgments of moral obligation, not whether it is to be taken care of in some way or other” (1958: 41). See also the discussion in Falk 1948: 23, 27-9, Solomon 1987: 381, McNaughton 1988: 22, 134, Smith 1989: 94, 1994: 61, 72, 132, Brink 1989: 42, 1997: 6, Dreier 1990: 7, 9, 14, Thomson 1996: 102, 113, Mele 1996: 727, 730, 751, Copp 1997: 33, 36, Audi 1997: 219, 224–229, Bloomfield 2001: 154, and Shafer-Landau 2003: 142.

  6. In particular, the kind of moral evaluation in question (moral rightness, goodness, virtue, and the like) is left open since there is nothing approaching consensus in the literature as to which kind (or combination of kinds) should figure into MI. Similarly, the ‘available’ qualifier on actions is meant to exclude moral evaluations of actions in the agent’s distant past or remote future, actions which might have little bearing on present motivation. Such a qualifier is, however, also controversial. In the remainder of the paper I try to remain neutral on these and other disputes among internalists.

  7. It is important to emphasize that regardless of what form debates about the truth of motivational internalism might take, the resolution of such debates does not strictly imply that any of the other well-known internalist or externalist positions in philosophy is true. Thus, for example, the truth or falsity of MI is neutral with respect to reasons internalism in the theory of normative reasons, justificatory internalism in the theory of epistemic justification, and content internalism in the theory of mental content.

  8. See especially Brink 1986 and 1989: 46–50, as well as Falk 1948: 22, Railton 1986: 169, Copp 1996: 204–205, Thomson 1996: 118–120, Brink 1997: 18–21, Blackburn 1998: 61, Svavarsdóttir 1999: 176–183, Shafer-Landau 2000: 274, and van Roojen 2002: 35. For defenses of internalism from this objection, see McNaughton 1988: 139–140, Dancy 1993: 5, and Smith 1994: 68–71.

  9. See Dreier 1990: 10–11, Blackburn 1998: 61, Bloomfield 2001: 172–174, and Joyce 2001: 19–23. For defenses of internalism from this objection, see McNaughton 1988: 140–144 and Dancy 1993: 6.

  10. See Stocker 1979, Smith 1989: 94–95, 1994: 61, 120, 135–136, 1995: 280, Dreier 1990: 10, Dancy 1993: 6, Mele 1996, Audi 1997: 231, Blackburn 1998: 65, Svavarsdóttir 1999: 164–165, Shafer-Landau 2000: 273–274, 2003: 150, Bloomfield 2001: 171–172, and van Roojen 2002: 34.

  11. For more on the distinction between motivating reasons and good or normative reasons, see Smith 1994: chapter four and Dancy 2000: chapter one.

  12. The only form of weak MI which would not come under the purview of (S2) would be a version which also assumes that a moral judgment is a cognitive mental state and that the joint presence of more than one cognitive mental state is necessary for motivation. But no one to my knowledge has defended such a theory, with good reason.

  13. See Miller 2007a.

  14. Frankfurt 1988b: 182, emphasis his. See also Williams 1992: 54 and Frankfurt 1993: 112.

  15. See Miller 2007a.

  16. Frankfurt 1993: 111.

  17. See Watson 2002 and Frankfurt 2002: 163.

  18. In fact, I have intentionally avoided Frankfurt’s talk of the mother deciding at t1 to give her child up for adoption. The reason for this revision of the case is that it is not immediately clear how that detail of the story can be rendered consistent with Frankfurt’s additional claims that the mother also does not change her mind, and yet does not give up the child for adoption.

  19. See Frankfurt 2002: 163.

  20. For Frankfurt on caring, see his 2004.

  21. See Frankfurt 1988b.

  22. For very helpful discussion, see Velleman 1989, 1992.

  23. Here I largely agree with Jaegwon Kim:

    • . . . self-understanding arises out of the context of deliberation, choice, and decision. The context of deliberation is necessarily a first-person context. For when you deliberate, you must call on what you want and believe about the world––your preferences and information––from your internal perspective, and that’s the only thing you can call on. The basis of your deliberation must be internally accessible, for the simple reason that you can’t use what you haven’t got. Reasons for action, therefore, are necessarily internal reasons, reasons that are cognitively accessible to the agent. That is one crucial respect in which reasons for actions differ from causes of actions: reasons must, but causes need not, be accessible to the agent (Kim 1998: 78, emphasis his).

    See also Dancy 2000: 5–6, 129. We shall return to these issues again in responding to the next objection.

  24. See among others Falk 1948: 22–23, Railton 1986: 168, Boyd 1988: 214, McNaughton 1988: 22–23, 134, Smith 1989: 89, Wiggins 1991: 81, Dreier 1990: 6, 9, and Audi 1997: 223.

  25. For similar remarks, see Pettit and Smith 1990: 278–279. I develop this point at much greater length in Miller 2007b.

  26. For a representative sampling of formulations of motivational internalism which explicitly appeal to judgments made by agents, see Solomon 1987: 381, Dreier 1990: 10, Smith 1994: 61, Mele 1996: 727, Svavarsdóttir 1999: 165, Joyce 2001: 18, and Cuneo 2002: 480.

  27. Frankfurt 1971: 17.

  28. Thus agency is a phase sortal that certain beings can instantiate at various times during their lives. Just as some human beings can come to be students, wives, parents, lawyers, Americans, and the like, so too can they also come to be (or cease to be) agents.

  29. See Miller 2004, 2007c. For others who adopt the identification approach to agency, see Frankfurt 1988a, 1999, Velleman 1992, and Bratman 1996.

  30. As David Brink writes, the amoralist “accepts the existence of moral facts and concedes that we have moral knowledge, and asks why we should care about these facts” (1989: 46).

  31. Dreier 1990: 10–11.

  32. Ibid., 14. For a similar view, see Blackburn 1998: 61–68 and Jackson 1998: 160.

  33. Dreier 1990: 11–13.

  34. Ibid., 13.

  35. As a general matter, it hard to know what to make of these quoted remarks. Consider a world closely resembling ours in which all the human beings are Sadists. They genuinely accept that certain things are required of them by what they take to be the moral law, but they are angry or bitter towards morality, and are motivated to do the opposite of what they judge to be moral. For example, perhaps a malevolent deity has laid down a harsh moral code on them, and furthermore the being has arranged things such that this is the only system of moral norms with which they are familiar.

    In such a world, Sadists are what constitute the norm of moral behavior. But I feel no pressure to translate their judgments that such-and-such is morally ‘bood’ as meaning bad; rather, they judge that something is morally ‘bood’ (good) and are motivated to do what is morally ‘gad’ (bad). Similarly, imagine a world similar to ours in which everyone is severely depressed. Again, I see no reason to construe their moral judgments that ‘kindness is good’ or ‘suicide is forbidden’ as somehow incorrect or insincere. It just so happens that in this world their depression gets in the way of their acting or refraining to act on their moral judgments. (For a similar objection, see Smith 1995: 284.).

    Finally, there is something rather odd about appealing to facts about an agent’s context in order to save motivational internalism. Since Dreier accepts the rebellion and depression counterexamples to unrestricted MI, he presumably thinks that the agents in question are making sincere moral judgments. But then on his proposal whether such judgments motivate is to be held hostage not only to other facts about the agents, such as their psychological well-being, but also to the relations these agents bear to the prevailing norms of society. Not only is this proposal incompatible with the intuitions underlying strong versions of MI, but by rendering motivation dependent on wholly contingent external factors, it seems to be decidedly out of step with the entire spirit of internalism.

  36. For a similar example, see Copp 1996: 190–191, 204.

  37. See Svavarsdóttir 1999: 165. Svavarsdóttir herself rejects even this restricted form of MI because of what she takes to be the force of her own amoralist counterexamples (Ibid., 176–183).

  38. See Svavarsdóttir 1999: 163–164. There is an important concern about this exception clause, namely whether what it is to be ‘motivationally disordered’ can be given an ethically neutral characterization, or whether “we are packing an ethically loaded conception of normality into the definition of moral terms . . . [and] are passing moral judgment on agents of a certain type instead of constructing a genuine metaethical view” (Dreier 1990: 12).

  39. On the assumption that practical rational and irrationality are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, (R) is equivalent to:

    1. (R*)

      Necessarily, for any agent S, if S judges that some available action is morally right for S to perform and S is practically rational, then S is motivated at least to some extent to perform that action.

    But since the assumption is controversial and since nothing will hang on our choice of (R) as opposed to (R*), we can take the former to be representative of rationality versions of MI.

  40. Two well-known examples of an ideal observer view of the ontology of practical reasons are Brandt 1979 and Smith 1994.

  41. For similar views, see Gibbard 1990: 18–22, Copp 1997: 42, 44, 52–53, Joyce 2001: 53–55, and especially Sobel 2001. Note that the same holds in the case of theoretical rationality. Here it is common to say that someone has a true but irrationally held belief, or a false but rational one. As an example of the former, I might continue to stubbornly believe p and it so happen that p is true, even though I am also aware that I have overwhelming evidence for not-p. The same holds for false but rational beliefs. I might rationally believe that I am seeing a real barn, but unbeknownst to me I am in a barn façade Gettier case. Nonetheless, I can hardly be accused of failing to satisfy the norms of epistemic rationality by believing as I did in such a deceptive environment. What is important about such cases is that they seem to show that theoretical rationality has more to do with the manner in which one arrives at and holds a belief, rather than with the content of what is believed. It is such responsiveness to background evidence, available defeaters, and the like which is primarily determinative of whether an epistemic agent fulfills his norms governing epistemic rationality, and not necessarily the ratio of true to false beliefs he might have in his noetic structure. Whether the same is true for justification and warrant, on the other hand, is a matter best left for another occasion.

  42. For related discussion, see Stocker 1979: 745, Brink 1997: 18–21, Audi 1997: 231, Blackburn 1998: 65, and Joyce 2001: 22.

  43. In Miller 2004, I develop these considerations further in the context of evaluating Michael Smith’s restricted version of MI.

  44. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

  45. Alternatively the thesis could be stated in terms of particular virtues, i.e.,

    1. (V+)

      Necessarily, for any agent S, if S judges that it is a requirement of courage for S to perform some available action and S is courageous, then S is motivated at least to some extent to perform that action.

    Fortunately nothing hangs on whether (V) or (V+) is employed in what follows.

  46. See McDowell 1978: 91–93.

  47. For similar claims about virtue possession coming in degrees, see Wallace 1978: 143, Watson 1984: 58, and Brandt 1992: 285–287. This view of the virtues is controversial, however, and I discuss it in more detail in Miller 2003.

  48. Shafer-Landau (2003: 153 fn. 8) also expresses this worry.

  49. For such a view, see for example Cuneo 1999: 370.

  50. See McDowell 1978 and 1979.

  51. For related concerns, see also Smith 1994: 121–125.

  52. When faced with the choice, McDowell seems to reject naturalism. See his 1978: 82–83.

  53. Much the same seems to be true of particular virtues. For example, a courageous person is someone who acts courageously in courage-eliciting circumstances. Similarly, “[a] kind person can be relied on to behave kindly when that is what the situation requires” (McDowell 1979: 51). And more generally, “the concept of a virtue is the concept of a state whose possession accounts for the actions that manifest it” (Ibid., 52). Of course, the virtuous agent need not perform a virtuous act under that very description, i.e., as virtuous or as what a particular virtue requires.

  54. McDowell seems to make this move explicitly when he defines the propositions believed by virtuous agents to be those which, “are not so much as possessed except by those whose wills are influenced appropriately” (1978: 87). See also his 1979: 52.

  55. See Miller 2004, 2007a.

  56. The basic idea for this paper arose out of discussions with David Velleman when I was a visitor at the University of Michigan during the 2002–2003 academic year. I am grateful to the University of Notre Dame for funding this visit, as well as to David for being so generous with his time. An earlier version of this paper was delivered in a symposium on internalism at the 2005 American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting. For helpful written comments on the paper, I am very grateful to the late Philip Quinn, Michael DePaul, Alan Goldman, Steven Sverdlik, and an anonymous referee for this journal.

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Miller, C.B. Motivational internalism. Philos Stud 139, 233–255 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9115-y

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