Motivational Internalism

Introduction : la motivation morale 1. Les variétés de l'internalisme a. L'Internalisme Moral b. L'Internalisme du Jugement moral c. L'Internalisme des Raisons d'Agir 2. Une explication par la nature des faits moraux a. L'Internalisme Moral Non Naturaliste i. Les faits moraux causent une motivation nouvelle ii. L'objection de « l'étrangeté » des faits moraux b. L'Internalisme Moral Naturaliste i. Des faits moraux constitués par des états motivationnels ii. Quelques problèmes de l'Internalisme Moral Naturaliste 3. Une explication par la nature des jugements moraux a. Le Non-Cognitivisme i. La syntaxe des jugements moraux ii. Les raisonnements moraux valides iii. Les désaccords moraux b. Le Cognitivisme i. Le problème de la motivation morale ii. Un désir de dicto de « faire ce qui est juste » iii. Le désir d'avoir une image positive de soi iv. Une multiplicité de désirs favorables à l'action morale 4. Une explication par la nature des raisons d'agir a. Trois conceptions des raisons d'agir i. Le passage de la morale au normatif en général ii. Externalisme et Internalisme des Raisons d'Agir iii. Universalistes et individualistes b. Les raisons d'agir et la motivation c. Un argument en faveur de l'Internalisme des Raison d'Agir i. L'explication de l'action par les raisons ii. Critiques de l'argument aux trois niveaux d. L'Externalisme des Raisons d'Agir i. Les raisons d'agir existent indépendamment des états motivationnels des agents ii. Quelques difficultés de l'Externalisme des Raisons d'Agir iii. La normativité, les possibilités et les mathématiques Conclusion Bibliographie fiable et régulière à un changement dans les motivations. Formellement, la donnée empirique initiale s'exprime ainsi :

This essay appears in the Auslegen volume on Kierkegaard's Either / Or (Entweder-Oder).I argue that my earlier interpretations of the "choice" to become an ethical chooser is supported by Judge Wilhelm’s defense of marriage in Either/Or II. In particular, I refine those earlier views, argue against a meta-internalist reading of motivation in Kierkegaard's early pseudonymous work, and claim that Wilhelm's account is consistent with Kierkegaard's later agapic ethics (pace certain critics of the Judge such as Amy Laura Hall).

In contemporary metaethics, various versions of hybrid expressivism have been proposed according to which moral sentences express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs. One important advantage with such positions, its proponents argue, is that they, in contrast to pure expressivism, have a straightforward way of avoiding the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper, I provide a systematic examination of different versions of hybrid expressivism with particular regard to how they are assumed to evade this problem. The major conclusion is that none of these views succeeds to provide both a fully satisfying interpretation of moral sentences and convincing response to the Frege-Geach problem. I end by briefly considering alternative hybrid views that employ the notion of conventional or conversational implicature.

A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment which is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative (either generally or in some particular respect), but which is in fact normative (either generally or in that particular respect). The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but it has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as cryptonormative judgments. Second, they reveal that normative judgment is a state which can be quite deeply non-transparent to its bearer, in a way that is not, for example, assimilable to the phenomenon of self-deception. Third, they shed light on debates over amoralism and lend some support to a picture of normative psychology that links normative judgment constitutively to motivation. In the conclusion, I make some remarks about the social and political insidiousness of cryptonormativity, looking forward to future work.

Some parts of language and thought plausibly mix the doxastic with the attitudinal. An effective example of this is provided by racial or ethnic slurs, such as 'roundhead', 'China Swede', or 'dumb Finn' -derisive terms used for the (allegedly) clannish, heavy drinking, knife-fighting, radicalism-tending, trouble-breeding Finnish immigrants in Minnesota and Michigan (or thereabouts) in early 1900s. Let us consider the following sentence:

We argue that a relational model of normative concepts can explain why the relation between normative judgment and motivation isn't purely external and contingent. This approach undercuts the motivation for adopting a hybrid theory of normative judgment.

Motivational internalism and externalism – that is, theories about moral motivation – have played central roles in meta-ethical debate mainly because they have been thought to have implications for the constitutive nature of moral judgements. Thus, internalism and externalism have been adduced in favour of and against various versions of cognitivism and non-cognitivism. This article aims to question a fundamental presupposition behind such arguments. It has standardly been assumed (i) that if motivational internalism is true then moral judgements must consist of attitudes that cannot be had without the relevant motivation, and (ii) that if motivational exter-nalism is true, then moral judgements must consist of attitudes that one can have without being motivated. Against the background of a recent argument to the effect that the first of these assumptions is false, this article develops a parallel argument against the second. If this argument is correct , then motivational externalism is consistent with moral judgements being attitudes that one cannot have without being motivated. Together with the parallel argument concerning internalism, this means that the meta-ethical significance of internalism and externalism must be reconsidered.

According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something, irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to cognitivist internalism according to which moral judgments consist in motivating beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating.

The Nicomachean Ethics opens with some preparatory, although important, claims about the nature of the end for which all other things we do are said to be means. After having labelled this end "the highest good," Aristotle asks: "Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on our way of life, and would we not [as a consequence] be more likely to attain the desired end, like archers who have a mark to aim at?" 1 The question is never explicitly considered, but an affirmative answer presupposed. We have thus at least some reason to believe that Aristotle embraces a species of internalism when it comes to moral motivation, although, admittedly, Aristotle's initial formulation is weak. He does not say that there is any necessary link between someone knowing that an act has the indicated role and being motivated to perform it, just that someone's knowledge somehow will influence him in that direction. Nevertheless, we will see that Aristotle can be interpreted as an internalist of the qualified kind in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is reasonable to claim that Aristotle there embraces a specific sort of internalism, to the effect that a person is motivated to perform the acts which are virtuous for him to perform, actions which will make him happy, unless he suffers from some sort of epistemic defect. A person who is virtuous can be said to know what happiness is, and such a person is motivated to perform actions that result in happiness. Moreover, Aristotle can be interpreted as an internalist in the Humean tradition, in the sense that in order to be motivated to perform an action, desires are needed as well as beliefs.

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism , the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism.

According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it
is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it
is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which
moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something,
irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies
to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to
cognitivist internalism according to which moral judgments consist in motivating
beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it
should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating.

Motivational internalism (MI) holds that, necessarily, if an agent judges that she is morally obligated to ø, then, that agent is, to at least some minimal extent, motivated to ø. Opponents of MI sometimes invoke depression as a counterexample on the grounds that depressed individuals appear to sincerely affirm moral judgments but are ‘listless’ and unmotivated by such judgments. Such listlessness is a credible counterexample to MI, I argue, only if the actual clinical disorder of depression, rather than a merely hypothetical example of such listlessness, is the source of this listlessness. However, empirical evidence concerning depression shows that, to the extent that the depressed are motivationally listless at all, they are abnormally listless only with respect to an important class of non-moral judgments, namely, their prudential normative judgments (i.e., those concerning their own happiness and well-being), not their moral judgments. Hence, depressed individuals do not constitute a counterexample to MI. This conclusion has important methodological implications concerning how supporters and opponents of MI can best defend their respective theses.

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider "moral judgments". We argue that if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting that all moral judgments necessarily share common features: if diverse brain processes give rise to what we refer to as "moral judgments", then we have reason to suspect that these judgments may have different features. After advancing this argument, we show that giving up the unity of moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/externalism debate concerning motivation within the field of metaethics.

It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person's utterance of a sentence according to which F 0 6 6 ing has a moral characteristic, such as " F 0 6 6 ing is wrong, " conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that F 0 6 6 ing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action-guiding attitude in relation to F 0 6 6 ing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: (i) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. (ii) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, " meaning-like, " connection between moral language and attitudes. (iii) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. (iv) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. (v) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable.

According to (cognitivist) judgment internalism, there is a conceptual connection between moral judgment and motivation. This paper offers an argument against that kind of internalism that does not involve counterexamples of the amoralist sort. Instead, it is argued that these forms of judgment internalism fall prey to a Frege-Geach type argument.

We argue that a relational model of normative concepts can explain why the relation between normative judgment and motivation isn't purely external and contingent. This approach undercuts the motivation for adopting a hybrid theory of normative judgment.

Assertions of statements such as 'it's raining, but I don't believe it' are standard examples of what is known as Moore's paradox. Here I consider moral equivalents of such statements, statements wherein individuals affirm moral judgments while also expressing motivational indifference to those judgments (such as 'hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don't care'). I argue for four main conclusions concerning such statements:
1. Such statements are genuinely paradoxical, even if not contradictory.
2. This paradoxicality can be traced to a form of epistemic self-defeat that also explains the paradoxicality of ordinary Moore-paradoxical statements.
3. Although a simple form of internalism about moral judgment and motivation can explain the paradoxicality of these moral equivalents, a more plausible explanation can be provided that does not rely on this simple form of internalism.
4. The paradoxicality of such statements suggests a more credible understanding of the thesis that those who are not motivated by their moral judgments are irrational.

Absstrad Inspired by an analogy between moral and secondary properties, some moral philosophers have argued that moral properties are dispositions. According to one version of this view, most clearly represented by Jonathan Dancy, a moral property is the property of being such, having base properties such, that an entity with the property elicits morally merited and motivating responses. Its proponents have argued that this notion can explain how moral judgements can be objective in the sense of expressing properties that are independent of will and yet imply motivation by those who assert them. In special consideration of Dancy's Moral Reasons, I argue that the dispositional account does not save the idea of objectivity in the required sense and implies an unten-able view of moral motivation. I therefore conclude that the dispositional account fails to explain the two features of moral judgements.

(1) Urteile sind die einzigen Typen von Gegenständen, die Inhalt unserer Erkenntnisse sein können, und die einzigen, die Thesen von Argumentationen sein können. Epistemische Rationalität ist deshalb an Urteile gebunden: Ziel der epistemischen Rationalität ist u. a., daß wir möglichst nur an Urteile mit wahren Propositionen glauben. Handlungen können an dieser Rationalität nur teilhaben, wenn es spezielle Urteile (über Handlungen) gibt, an die zu glauben, die entsprechende Handlung aus anthropologischen Gründen nach sich zieht oder rationaliter nach sich ziehen sollte. Gibt es keine solchen Urteile, dann klafft eine Lücke zwischen Urteilen und Handeln, und das Handeln ist in einem gewissen Sinne nicht rationalisierbar, Ethiken sind praktisch irrelevant. Gibt es hingegen solche Urteile, d. h. ist die Lücke zu schließen, dann besteht Handlungsrationalität u. a. gerade darin, den Glauben an Urteile dieser Art epistemisch zu rationalisieren. (2) Ein großer Teil der metaethischen Arbeiten Hares ist (wenigstens implizit) dem Versuch gewidmet, die Lücke zwischen Urteil und Handeln zu schließen. (3) Seine Konzepte von 'Präskriptivität' sind Versuche, die Lücke zwischen Urteil und Handeln innerhalb der Bedeutung präskriptiver Sätze zu schließen u. a. durch die Verbindung von Urteilen mit Imperativen. Vier dieser Konzepte werden untersucht; keines von ihnen weist einen Weg, wie die Lücke geschlossen werden kann. (4) Gemäß einer entscheidungstheoretischen empirischen Handlungstheorie schließen bestimmte Werturteile die Lücke: Der Glaube an ein spezielles Optimalitätsurteil über Handlungsalternativen ist jeweils der eigentliche Handlungsauslöser. Hares bleibender Beitrag zur Schließung der Lücke zwischen Urteil und Handeln besteht dann in wichtigen Einzelergebnissen seiner Bedeutungsanalysen von Werturteilen: Supervenience von Werturteilen, ihre Beziehung zu Wählakten, Unterschied zwischen der Bedeutung von "gut" und Gütekriterien etc. (5) Diese Ergebnisse können zu einer - handlungstheoretisch begründeten - Definition von "x ist im Maße u gut für die Person y" vervollständigt werden, einer Definition, 1. mit der erklärt werden kann, wieso entsprechende Optimalitätsurteile handlungsmotivierend wirken können, und 2. die dennoch genügend epistemische Rationalisierungsmöglichkeiten offenläßt, die also nicht das Gute mit dem für gut Gehaltenen gleichsetzt.

Analyses of moral value judgements must meet a practicality requirement: moral speech acts characteristically express pro- or con-attitudes, indicate that speakers are motivated in certain ways, and exert influence on others’ motivations. Nondescriptivists including Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard claim that no descriptivist analysis can satisfy this requirement. I argue first that while the practicality requirement is defeasible, it indeed demands a connection between value judgement and motivation that resembles a semantic or conceptual rather than merely contingent psychological link. I then show how a form of descriptivism, the interest-relational theory, satisfies the requirement as a pragmatic and conversational feature of value judgement – thereby also accommodating its defeasibility. The word ‘good’ is always indexed to some set of motivations: when this index is unarticulated in many contexts the speaker conversationally implicates possession of those motivations.

Motivational internalism is the thesis that captures the commonplace thought that moral judgements are necessarily motivationally efficacious. But this thesis appears to be 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 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 non-defeasible formulation of motivational internalism.

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering
the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive
category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and
arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to
indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts
that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that
if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting
that all moral judgments necessarily share common features:
if diverse brain processes give rise to what we refer to
as “moral judgments”, then we have reason to suspect that
these judgments may have different features. After advancing
this argument, we show that giving up the unity of
moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/
externalism debate concerning motivation within the
field of metaethics.

A persistent objection against metaethical expressivism is that it is committed to a strong version of internalism which is unable to explain the fact that a person's moral judgment and her motivation may come apart in certain circumstances. Recently, renowned ...

Philip Pettit, Michael Smith, and Tyler Burge have suggested that the similarities between theoretical and practical reasoning can bolster the case for judgment internalism - i.e. the claim that normative judgments are necessarily connected to motivation. In this paper, I first flesh out the rationale for this new approach to internalism. I then argue that even if there are reasons for thinking that internalism holds in the theoretical domain, these reasons don't generalize to the practical domain.

According to pure expressivism, some normative sentences express only desire-like states. In this paper I examine the prospects of pure expressivism with regard to capturing the truth of (PRACTICALITY), a form of motivational internalism, which says: Necessarily, if one judges that φ-ing would be desirable, then, if one is rational, one is thereby also motivated to φ. I distinguish, among pure expressivist views, between the first-order views and the second-order views. A first-order view about some type of normative judgment says that judgments of the relevant kind concerning, say, some action, φ, are at least in part desire-like attitudes toward φ. A second-order view of some type of normative judgment says that judgments of the relevant kind concerning φ do not involve a desire-like attitude toward φ, but rather consist in desire-like attitudes toward something other than φ (which nevertheless is somehow appropriately related to φ itself). I argue that, contrary to what is sometimes suggested, the first-order views about judgments of desirability offer a promising explanation for (PRACTICALITY) (section 1), and that the second-order views about such judgments fail in this regard, and should for this reason be rejected (section 2). I also suggest that these arguments generalize to judgments concerning what there would be reason to do.

Cognitivist motivational internalism is the thesis that, if one believes that 'It is right to ϕ', then one will be motivated to ϕ. This thesis—which captures the practical nature of morality—is in tension with a Humean constraint on belief: belief cannot motivate action without the assistance of a conceptually independent desire. When defending cognitivist motivational internalism it is tempting to either argue that the Humean constraint only applies to non-moral beliefs or that moral beliefs only motivate ceteris paribus. But succumbing to the first temptation places one under a burden to justify what is motivationally exceptional about moral beliefs and succumbing to the second temptation saddles one with a thesis that fails to do justice to the practicality intuition that cognitivist motivational internalism is suppose to capture. In this paper, I offer a way of defending cognitivist motivational internalism, which does not require accepting that there is anything motivationally unusual about moral beliefs. I argue that no belief satisfies the Humean constraint: all beliefs are capable of motivating without the assistance of a conceptually independent desire.

According to a persistent objection against metaethical expressivism, this view is committed to a strong version of internalism which is unable to account for cases where a person's moral judgment and motivation come apart. Recently, leading expressivists have argued that they can meet this objection by maintaining that moral judgments consist in non-cognitive states that motivate in normal conditions. In this paper, it is maintained that an important dimension of internalism has, on the whole, gone unnoticed: Internalist claims vary depending on whether moral judgments and motivation are understood as dispositional states or occurrent states. This variation can be invoked in an argument showing that expressivists are indeed committed to versions of internalism that make it impossible to account for cases in which moral judgment and motivation diverge.

(This could be the maddest paper I have ever written.)  I argue that aesthetic concepts are different from ethical and epistemic concepts with regards to action-guidance and motivation.  I draw on Williams' discussion of thick concepts and the debate between internalists and externalists about motivation.  (This draft paper is pencilled in for a collection edited by Louise Hanson and Daan Evers, called 'Aesthetics and Metaethics'.)