Abstract
Contemporary philosophy of moral motivation has much to say about the nature of moral beliefs and truths, but it has less to say about emancipation. By neglecting to discuss the emancipatory aspect of motivation, I argue, moral epistemology is neglecting a topic that should be central. Starting from Charles Taylor’s concern for the status of moral sources, the paper’s main points are (1) that moral motivation has a distinctive emancipatory dimension which has been largely neglected in mainstream debates; (2) that the issue of emancipation can only be adequately conceptualized at the intersection of normative ethics and metaethics; (3) that a full-blooded account of motivation must incorporate a phenomenology of motivational experience, which in turn requires (4) extending the concept of motivation beyond a narrow definition to include such notions as meaning, articulation, identity, and freedom, and (5) criticizing conceptions of motivation that are blind to or take for granted the quality of motivation; and thus (6) providing the resources for a thick conception of motivation that breaks new ground by overcoming the existing boundaries between normative ethics and metaethics.
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Notes
Taylor himself calls his arguments in ethics an exploration of “moral phenomenology” (1989, 68, 74, 81).
Although my focus here is on the individual level, this aspiration can be both individual (involving personal ends and constrains) and collective (involving social and political goals and obstacles).
Nor do I imply that metaethics—a wide, complex, and diverse field of ethical inquiry—is a unitarian approach to moral motivation.
In opposing theism against secular worldviews, I am presenting Taylor’s view of the available options rather than my own.
For example, Mackie’s error theory, Korsgaard’s Kantianism, Copp’s naturalism, Shafer-Landau’s non-naturalism, and Williams’ reasons internalism.
Although Taylor sometimes writes about our “perception” of value, his moral phenomenology largely takes an agential form. The (interesting) debate whether ethics is primarily an agential or perceptual discipline, and/or how Taylor’s view relates to perception-like moral phenomenology (such as in the views of Nussbaum and Murdoch, but also McDowell and Bilgrami) lies beyond the scope of this paper. Another relevant debate (which I discuss in detail in Meijer 2017a) is about the ontological implications of moral phenomenology, as taken up and explored by Horgan and Timmons in their rehabilitation of the work of Mandelbaum. Although related, the issue I explore here is different as it concerns not so much the methodological question whether one can draw ontological conclusions from moral phenomenology but the more substantive question how to make best sense of moral motivation—and as will emerge, moral realism—when working from within a moral-phenomenological perspective. The significance of Taylor’s work is too often overlooked in these discussions, and showing its significance is an important aim of this paper.
I will not delve into the specifics of the widely debated metaethical disputes that surround robust realism. Rather, I am assuming a familiarity with these debates and focus instead on the contrast with Taylor’s view for conceptualizing the notion of moral motivation.
In distinguishing these three types, I am indebted to Blakely’s insightful discussion of Taylor’s paper (Blakely 2013, 391–393).
The many ways in which Taylor uses the concept of strong evaluation in elaborating his views are explored and critiqued in detail in Meijer (2017b).
See also Shafer-Landau’s image of moral agents as “epistemic judges” (2003, 17) and Enoch’s view of moral agents being more or less like “the scientist who tries to discover the laws of nature (which exist independently of her investigations)” (2018, 215). I have elsewhere argued that because of such claims, robust realism is committed to an implicit anthropology which is both reifying and alienating with regard to moral experience (Compaijen and Meijer 2021).
The illuminating title of Taylor’s “Leading a Life” (1997) is particularly revealing in this respect.
By this I do not mean, of course, that we are all robust realists, but that many people—more often than not—struggle to find the right words in trying to make sense of their motivations, that is, in trying to spell out “what it is that we presuppose when we judge that a certain form of life is truly worthwhile, or place our dignity in a certain achievement or status, or define our moral obligations in a certain manner” (Taylor 1989, 26).
In this respect, the trend towards “quietism” in ethics is perhaps even more devastating than the increasing popularity of naturalist-inspired views.
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Meijer, M. Articulating Better, Being Better: Ethical Emancipation and the Sources of Motivation. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 25, 107–122 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10233-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10233-0