Abstract
It is sometimes observed that the debate between internalists and externalists about moral motivation seems to have reached a deadlock. There are those who do, and those who don’t, recognize the intuitive possibility of amoralists: i.e. people having moral opinions without being motivated to act accordingly. This makes Sigrun Svavarsdóttir’s methodological objection to internalism especially interesting, since it promises to break the deadlock through building a case against internalism (construed as a conceptual thesis), not on such intuitions, but on a methodological principle for empirical investigations. According to the objection, internalists incur the burden of argument, since they have to exclude certain explanations of the (verbal and non-verbal) behavior of apparent amoralists, while externalists don’t. In this paper I argue that the objection fails: the principle for empirical investigations is plausible, but Svavarsdóttir’s application of it to internalism is not. Once we clearly distinguish between the conceptual and the empirical aspects of the internalist and externalist explanations of apparent amoralists, we see that these views incur an equal burden of explanation. I end the paper with a positive suggestion to the effect that there is a third alternative, a view that involves accepting neither internalism nor externalism, which does not incur an explanatory burden of the relevant sort.
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Notes
For a more detailed overview of these different views, see (Björklund et al Forthcoming).
Svavarsdóttir refers to this argument also in later articles (Svavarsdóttir 2006, 2009). R Jay Wallace refers to the argument approvingly in (Wallace 2001, 2006). Objections to the argument is given by Robert N Johnson in a BEARS review of the paper (Johnson 2001), and by Danielle Bromwich in her doctoral thesis (Bromwich 2008). I will not discuss Johnson’s objections since I think that Svavarsdóttir successfully answers them in her reply (Svavarsdóttir 2001). I will briefly comment on Bromwich’s objection later, arguing that it fails to identify the real problem with Svavarsdóttir’s argument.
It can be asked whether it is really the fact that the explanations are suggested by intelligent and sensible people itself that gives rise to the burden of argument, or whether we find the principle plausible since one has a burden of argument whenever one wishes to exclude a prima facie plausible hypothesis and we assume that intelligent and sensible people tend to believe in such hypotheses.
Probably, these claims are true about non-philosophers as well as philosophers, so we could talk about “sensitive and intelligent people” instead. I focus on philosophers for two reasons. First, metaethical literature makes it a well established fact that each of the two hypotheses has its supporters among philosophers. Second, the fact that this is true about philosophers (and not only non-philosophers) makes the claim that an argumentative burden rests on anyone who wishes to rule out one of the hypotheses as impossible extra plausible. For it means that each hypothesis has its supporters even among the experts in the field, those who are trained to understand the subtleties of hypothetical scenarios like that about Patrick.
Bromwich objects that, if we instead consider someone who is motivated in line with her expressed moral opinions—Patricia, in Bromwich’s example—it is externalists who incur the burden of proof. Externalists “must deny [the explanatory hypothesis] that Patricia is motivated by the mere fact that she fully understands the content of her moral judgement” (Bromwich 2008, 169). My first complaint to this is that it simply isn’t true that externalism excludes that people are sometimes motivated by the mere understanding of the content of their moral judgments (even though standard variants of externalism excludes this). What it excludes is that people are necessarily thus motivated. My second complaint is that (even if we focus on variants of externalism that do deny that people are sometimes motivated by the mere understanding of the content of moral judgments) Bromwich’s objection fails to identify the real fault in Svavarsdóttir’s reasoning. In the next section I shall argue that Svavarsdóttir’s claim that internalists incur a burden of proof is incorrect since it fails to properly distinguish between conceptual and non-conceptual matters. Bromwich’s claim that externalists incur a burden of proof is incorrect for the same reason.
It is perhaps somewhat misleading to call the first part purely explanatory. Of course, any given explanation makes use of some concepts. The point with the first part is to consider explanations that do not make use of the concept of moral judgments, in order to see whether there are explanations that internalists must rule out, even if we bracket the conceptual question of what it takes to be a moral judgment (or, more specifically, a judgment about moral obligations, wrongness, etc.). In this sense, the question we ask is purely explanatory rather than conceptual.
Alternatively, internalists can accept the cognitivist view that judging that x is morally obligatory is indeed to have a belief with the content that x is F, but reject the view that it is sufficient to have a belief with that content to have a belief that x is morally obligatory. That is, our concept of judging that x is morally obligatory, is such that someone counts as judging that x is morally obligatory if, and only if, she has a belief with the content that x is F and is motivated to do x. To have a moral belief is to have a belief with a certain content which is accompanied by motivation (cf. Tresan 2006, 2009a). This makes it possible to say that Patrick has beliefs with the same content as the rest of us do when we have moral beliefs, but since he fails to be motivated accordingly, they are not moral beliefs.
I have argued extensively to that effect in Francén (2010).
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Acknowledgements
This research was in part supported by the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2009-1517). I am grateful to the participants of the higher seminar in practical philosophy at Stockholm University, and to Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson and Caj Strandberg for valuable comments on previous drafts of this article.
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Francén Olinder, R. Svavarsdóttir’s Burden. Philosophia 40, 577–589 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9339-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9339-0