European Journal of Philosophy 24 (2):452-471 (2016)
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Abstract |
Motivational internalism is the thesis that captures the commonplace thought that moral judgements are necessarily motivationally efficacious. But this thesis appears to be in tension with another aspect of our ordinary moral experience. Proponents of the contrast thesis, motivational externalism, cite everyday examples of amoralism to demonstrate that it is conceptually possible to be completely unmoved by what seem to be sincere first-person moral judgements. This paper argues that the challenge of amoralism gives us no reason to reject or modify motivational internalism. Instead of attempting to diagnose the motivational failure of the amoral agent or restrict the internalist thesis in the face of these examples, I argue that we should critically examine the assumptions that underlie the challenge. Such an examination reveals that the examples smuggle in substantive assumptions that the internalist has no reason to accept. This argument has two important implications for the debate in moral motivation: first, it reveals that the motivational externalist needs a new argumentative strategy; and second, it shows that there is nothing especially problematic about a formulation of the thesis that captures the core internalist intuition that first-person moral judgements are necessarily accompanied by motivation.
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Keywords | Motivational Internalism Amoralism |
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DOI | 10.1111/ejop.12053 |
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References found in this work BETA
Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology.Michael Stocker - 1979 - Journal of Philosophy 76 (12):738-753.
Virtue and Reason.John McDowell - 1997 - In Roger Crisp & Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Famine, Affluence, and Amorality.David Sackris - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(A1)5-29.
Ethical Judgment and Motivation.David Faraci & Tristram McPherson - 2017 - In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. Routledge. pp. 308-323.
Options for Hybrid Expressivism.Caj Strandberg - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (1):91-111.
Smith’s Practicality Requirement Meets Dual-Process Models of Moral Judgment.Brendan Cline - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (8):1043-1063.
View all 13 citations / Add more citations
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