In Gunnar Björnsson (ed.), Moral Internalism. Oxford University Press (2015)
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Abstract |
It seems to many that moral opinions must make a difference to what we’re motivated to do, at least in suitable conditions. For others, it seems that it is possible to have genuine moral opinions that make no motivational difference. Both sides – internalists and externalists about moral motivation – can tell persuasive stories of actual and hypothetical cases. My proposal for a kind of reconciliation is to distinguish between two kinds of psychological states with moral content. There are both moral thoughts or opinions that intrinsically motivate, and moral thoughts or opinions that don’t. The thoughts that intrinsically motivate are moral intuitions – spontaneous and compelling non-doxastic appearances of right or wrong that both attract assent and incline us to act or react. I argue that there is good reason to think that these intuitions, but not moral judgments, are constituted by manifestations of moral sentiments. The moral thoughts that do not intrinsically motivate are moral beliefs, which are in themselves as inert as any ordinary beliefs. Thus, roughly, internalism is true about intuitions and externalism is true about beliefs or judgments.
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Keywords | moral internalism moral intuition moral motivation |
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References found in this work BETA
A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge.Ernest Sosa - 2007 - Oxford University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Motivational Internalism and Folk Intuitions.Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Caj Strandberg, Ragnar Francén Olinder & Fredrik Björklund - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (5):715-734.
In the Thick of Moral Motivation.Wesley Buckwalter & John Turri - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):433-453.
Models of Moral Cognition.Jeffrey White - 2013 - In Lorenzo Magnani (ed.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology, 1. springer. pp. last 20.
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