Moral Motivation

Here, I discuss how David Hume is wrong about moral motivation. Reason sometimes produces moral judgments, which can motivate and justify actions, independent of desires.*

[ *Based on: Ethical Intuitionism, ch. 7. ]

This part of my book was unjustly ignored. :( It deserves attention since it refutes the leading theory of action and the most common argument against moral realism. It also helps us understand free will and weakness of will.

1. The Humean Argument Against Moral Realism

Maybe the most popular argument in all of the ethics literature is the Humean argument against moral realism:

1. The Humean Theory of Reasons: All reasons for action derive from desires. I.e., you have reason to do A (only) insofar as A would raise the chances of your getting something you already want.

2. Beliefs about objective facts do not entail the presence of any desires.

3. Moral attitudes (the attitudes expressed by moral claims) entail reasons for action. E.g., if you sincerely say “x is wrong,” then you must have some motivation to avoid x.

4. Conclusion: Moral attitudes are not beliefs about objective facts.

   (Maybe they are expressions of emotion or desire, or reports of emotions or desires, or something like that.)

Many philosophers think this is a great argument. It is generally used to support subjectivism or non-cognitivism, especially the latter.

Note: “Reasons for action” can be understood in 2 ways:

• a. Motivating reasons: The sorts of things that tend to cause actions; they explain, psychologically, why a person in fact does what they do.

• b. Normative reasons: The sorts of things that tend to make an action rational. They explain why a person (rationally) should do a given thing.

The Humean argument can be understood using either sense of “reason.” There is also an argument that the two kinds of reason are closely connected. Roughly: To say you should do A (or that it would be rational to do A) implies that you can do A of your own free will. But you cannot do A of your own free will unless you have some motivation for doing A. Therefore, you have a normative reason for A only if you have a motivating reason for A.

2. A Non-Humean View of Reasons

Here are four kinds of motivations that we have:

1. Appetites: These are simple, instinctive desires, whose satisfaction normally gives sensory pleasure. (Think of hunger, thirst, lust.) [Aside: Here, I was thinking mostly of positive desires, where one is attracted to some outcome. But there are also negative desires, where one is averse to an outcome, in which case one would get pain or discomfort from that outcome.]

2. Emotions: These are mental states with a particular feel (affect) and a particular motivation, such as fear, anger, love. These are also often instinctive, but more sophisticated in the processing behind them, often drawing on abstract background knowledge and memories.

3. Prudence: This is the motivation you have to promote your overall, long-term self-interest. This often conflicts with (1) or (2). E.g., you want to eat the chocolate cake (appetite), but you also know it’s bad for you (prudential motive).

4. Impartial reasons: These are the reasons you have to do things you judge to be overall good or right (not merely beneficial to yourself). These often conflict with (1), (2), or (3).

How does this relate to desire? You could just define “desire” to cover (1)-(4) (and anything else I’ve missed). In that case, it’s trivial that all intentional action stems from desire. But this trivial truth would not rebut moral realism, nor would it show anything else interesting.

I think the ordinary use of “desire” covers (1)-(2), not (3)-(4). In that case, it is obviously false that all intentional action stems from desire. Sometimes, you want to do X but you judge that doing X would be unwise, unjust, dishonorable, or otherwise bad. In such cases, at least sometimes, you refrain from doing X because of that judgment.

3. The False Appeal of the Humean Theory

Humeans deny that beliefs alone can motivate action. One reason this seems plausible in most cases is that, for most beliefs, it’s hard to say what goal or action they would support. Say you’re at Union Station and you believe [The train for the airport is leaving shortly]. That belief, by itself, doesn’t tell you whether getting to the airport is good or bad, so it doesn’t speak either for or against getting on that train. If you pair the belief with a desire to get to the airport, then you know what action is called for: get on the train. (But if you have a desire to avoid the airport, then don’t board the train.)

That’s all well and good, for most beliefs. But one set of beliefs is an obvious exception: evaluative beliefs, by definition, do single out goals or tell you what course of action to do. E.g., the belief that going to the airport is good just does tell you what to do. It isn’t like the neutral belief that the train is leaving soon.

In other words, the intuitive plausibility of the Humean theory stems from just looking at examples of descriptive beliefs. Then you hastily extend what’s true of descriptive beliefs to evaluative beliefs.

4. The Moderate Humean Theory Is Unstable

The moderate Humean view

David Hume’s actual view was that there is no such thing as rational or irrational behavior; only beliefs can be rational or irrational.

“Actions may be laudable or blamable, but they cannot be reasonable or unreasonable.” (Hume, Treatise, III.I.i)

Most philosophers who embrace a “Humean theory of reasons,” however, do not say that because it is too absurd. Instead, they try to explain what makes behavior rational in terms of the agent’s beliefs and desires.

There’s a prima facie puzzle, though: If what motivates action is the same as what makes action rational—namely, the agent’s desires—then how can any action ever be irrational?

Most Humeans definitely do not want to say that all intentional actions are equally rational. Again, that’s too absurd; they want to make at least some effort to capture our intuitive sense of rational and irrational behavior. So they give conditions like the following:

1. Foresight condition: You’re irrational if you ignore your future desires or give them too little weight. This could make it irrational, e.g., to eat the slice of chocolate cake when you’re on a diet.

2. Imagination condition: You have reason to do x if, if you were to vividly imagine the results of x, you would desire them.

3. Coherence condition: You have reason to try to make your desires coherent with each other, and you have reason to act on the desires you would then have.

4. Deliberation condition: You’re irrational if you do something that, if you had deliberated fully and rationally, you would have realized that you don’t want to do.

These are important, because these sorts of conditions are what make the Humean theory appear even minimally adequate to accounting for ordinary judgments of what is rational or irrational. I claim, however, that none of these conditions are sustainable.

Foresight

Two cases:

(a) You want to stay up partying tonight, but you also have a test tomorrow that you need to study for. You know that if you don’t study, you will be unhappy with the results, and this unhappiness will outweigh the pleasure of partying tonight. In this case, you rationally ought to study.

(b) Odysseus plans to sail past the Sirens and hear their song. He knows that once he hears it, he will have an incredibly strong desire to sail towards them, such that (let’s suppose) he will then deem it worth it to sail to his death just to be closer to them. However, he now desires that he not join the Sirens. So he has himself tied to the mast, thus frustrating what he knows will be his stronger, future desire. This is rational.

The difference: sailing to the Sirens would be objectively bad, while passing the test would be objectively good. That’s why it’s rational to deliberately frustrate the desire in (b) but not (a).

Imagination

(a) If you were to vividly imagine the plight of the starving people in the Third World, let’s say, you would then be moved to donate to famine relief. Some say that this means that you currently, actually have a reason to donate to famine relief (even if you haven’t done that vivid imagining). This seems plausible.

(b) Say you need a surgery. However, you are squeamish, so if you were to vividly imagine the surgery, you would be unable to go through with it. This does not mean you should refuse the surgery; rather, you should just refrain from vividly imagining it.

Again, the difference is made by what is objectively good: helping the poor is objectively good; avoiding the surgery is objectively bad. That’s why it’s rational to listen to the desire you would have in the first case but not in the second case.

Coherence

Anti-realists try to preserve a role for moral reasoning by saying that we have reason to try to make our desires consistent and coherent, even if there is no objectively correct set of desires.

However, the reason why consistency matters for beliefs is that (i) beliefs aim at truth, and (ii) inconsistent beliefs are guaranteed to be false. Similarly, coherence matters only because coherent sets of beliefs are more likely to be true.

But desires don’t aim at truth, and there is nothing defective about a desire that is unsatisfied. E.g., my desire for an end to human suffering is not to any degree defective merely because it is extremely unlikely to ever be satisfied.

So there is no reason to pursue consistency or coherence for desires. Hence, if morality is really just about desires, there is no reason to pursue a consistent or coherent morality.

Deliberation

Say you do A after deliberating briefly, but you would have done B if you had deliberated longer and more carefully. Can you be rationally criticized on Humean grounds?

I say no. Given your actual deliberation, your action was rational. And you can’t be criticized for not deliberating longer or better, because that action (the action of deliberating in a certain way) was itself prompted by the beliefs and desires you had at that moment. Had your actual beliefs and desires at the time supported deliberating more, you would have done so.

Conclusion

The moderate Humean view is unstable. Humeans will have to move to an extreme position, e.g., that no actual behavior is irrational. This is just about a maximally unsatisfactory account of what makes behavior rational or irrational.

We should thus reject the Humean view in favor of a rationalist view: There are objective, evaluative facts, which we are sometimes aware of. These affect what it is rational for us to do.

5. Freedom and Weakness of Will

The Humean theory of motivation makes both free will and weakness of will hard to understand: Why wouldn’t it be that everyone just always has to do whatever action is supported by the strongest desire? If that’s what you have to do, then it seems that there’s no free will. Also, if your strongest desire happens to be an inclination or emotion, rather than a prudential or moral judgment, what would be “weak” about acting on that inclination or emotion? Why wouldn’t that just be rational?

The rationalist view avoids these problems. In a conflict between reason and inclination, there is no such thing as “the strongest desire” or “the strongest motive” because the motives are of qualitatively different kinds. One is an evaluative judgment, while the other is a desire. There is thus no common scale on which you can compare them such that you could say one is “stronger” than the other.

This doesn’t prove that you have free will, but it eliminates the simple argument against free will that the Humean has. You can also understand in what sense weak-willed actions are less rational: your prudential and moral judgments are produced by reason, after taking into account the weight of your desires.