This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Thanks to a helpful anonymous referee for suggesting that I expand on this.
This excludes unconscious reasons, which are fully unknown for the agents. I will come back to it soon.
I am not going to pursue any historical explication here, and by HTR, I just follow the common conception about Humean practical reason theory.
I come back to this notion in Section 4.
Imaginary belief plays a central role in Williamsian deliberations; however, his theory of internal reason is constrained by desires, not by belief (including imaginary ones).
For still more implausible cases which are considered as reasons by Williams, see his 1989, p. 37, in which he allows some paradoxical desires to be reason-makers in self-deception cases.
Many philosophers take a sense of ‘desire’ for granted, without scrutinizing it, or they use it interchangeably with some other terms like ‘disposition,’ ‘inclination,’ etc. Some scholars take desire as a belief about normative reasons (Gregory 2017, 2021). If so, it is allowed to be Humean and nonetheless agree that normative beliefs are states that motivate agents toward actions. Some other scholars have also proposed basic desires as necessary conditions of normative reason, defining such desires in terms of effective feel or affective experiences, which are “phenomenally conscious in the sense that there’s something it’s like for us to have them.” (Quinn 1993, Chang 2004, Smithies and Weiss 2019) The idea, roughly speaking, is that there is a basic desire (and consequently normative reason) only if there is a feeling of attraction and aversion toward the action. I am not concerned here with the nature or kind of desire per se; however, it seems to me that it is difficult to draw a decisive or meaningful distinction between basic desires and non-basic desires or simply reduce the latter to the so-called basic ones; moreover, it is not easy to explain why basic desires are reason makers, while non-basic desires are not. For my purposes, in this paper, which is primarily to deal with motivation, it suffices to take desires in its broadly admitted commonsensical sense which, among other things, is a contingent cause of an agent’s motivation. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting to expand on this.)
Hume, famously, holds that it is impossible to derive an ought from an is. That is, he holds that it doesn’t make sense to posit inferred evaluative terms (oughts) without the presence of some evaluative term among the premises from which they are inferred. Yet his slogan “reason [i.e., oughts] is, and ought only to be slave of the passion [defined in terms of desires]” itself includes a derivative ought inferred from an is (see Korsgaard 1997). The same objection, with still stronger force, applies to Williams’s account, who states “reasons not only ought to be defined or be governed by our affective attitudes, but they also ought to be excluded from effective false beliefs, and they ought to be included by effective neglected reason for action.” Such oughts are constituents of Williamsian instrumental reason, and it seems that by no means can they be understood as hypothetical imperatives. They are intended as substantive (not even borderline instrumental) reasons for every agent, irrespective of their affective attitudes. Otherwise, if you treat similarly with the ought in the slogan, and define it in terms of passions, then it would be justificatory only for those who are passionate about it!
This theory, as a third-person view, is different from motivational internalism (i.e., moral judgment internalism), which refers to a first-person mental state, and says, necessarily, if an agent sincerely believes that -ing is morally bad, then she is motivated not to do.
For a roughly similar contextual definition, see Henning (2014).
I have been inspired in this part by the Telic Desire Theory in Parfit (2011, p. 59).
References
Alvarez, Maria. 2010. Kinds of reasons: An essay on the philosophy of action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alvarez, Maria. 2017. Reasons for action: Justification, motivation, explanation. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2017 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/reasons-just-vs-expl/.
Brandt, R. 1979. A theory of the good and the right. New York: Clarendon Press.
Chang, Ruth. 2004. Can desires provide reasons for action? In Reason and value: Themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R.J. Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, and M. Smith, 56–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohon, Rachel. 1986. are external reasons impossible? Ethics 96: 545–556.
Darwall, S. 1983. Impartial reason. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Elgin, Catherine Z. 2009. Is understanding factive? In Epistemic value (Appendix C), ed. Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard, 322–330. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finlay, S. 2014. Confusion of tongues: A theory of normative language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Finlay, S. 2009. The obscurity of internal reasons. Philosophers’ Imprint 9 (7): 1–22.
Finlay, S., and Mark Schroeder. 2017. Reasons for action: Internal vs. external. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2017 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/reasons-internal-external/.
Gibbard, A. 2012. Meaning and normativity. Oxford University Press.
Gregory, Alex. 2017. Might desires be beliefs about normative reasons for action? In The nature of desire, ed. Julien Deonna and Federico Lauria, 201–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gregory, Alex. 2021. Desire as belief: A study of desire, motivation, and rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hattiangadi, A. 2007. Oughts and thoughts: Rule-following and the normativity of content. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Henning, Tim. 2014. Normative reasons contextualism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88: 593–624.
Hirstein, W. (2009), Confabulation. In Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A., & Wilken, P. (eds.), Oxford companion to consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hubin, D.C., 1996. Hypothetical motivation. Noûs, 30(1): 31–54.
Hume, D. 1739/1940. In A treatise of human nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Johnson, R.N. 1999. Internal reasons and the conditional fallacy. The Philosophical Quarterly, 4(194): 53–71.
Joyce, R. 2001. The myth of morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsgaard, C. 1996. The sources of normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsgaard, C. 1986. Skepticism about practical reason. Journal of Philosophy 83: 5–25.
Korsgaard, C. 1997. The Normativity of Instrumental Reason. In Ethics and practical reason, eds. G. Cullity and B. Gaut, 215–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kvanvig, Jonathan L. 2003. The Value of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDowell, J. 1978. Are moral requirements hypothetical imperatives? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement Series 52 (1): 13–14.
McDowell, J. 1995. Might there be external reasons? In World, mind and ethics: Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. J.E.J. Altham and R. Harrison, 68–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nagel, T., (1970). The possibility of altruism, Princeton: Princeton University Press; reprinted 1978.
Parfit, D. 2011. On what matters. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Quinn, Warren. 1993. Putting rationality in its place. In Morality and action, 228–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Riggs, Wayne D. (2009). Understanding, knowledge, and the meno requirement. In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic value (Appendix D). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 331–338 (Appendix D).
Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schroeder, M. 2007. Slaves of the passions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Setiya, Kieran. 2012. Introduction: Internal reasons. In Internal reasons: Contemporary readings, ed. Kieran Setiya and Hille Paakkunainen, 1–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shope, R. 1978. The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy. Journal of Philosophy, 75: 397–413.
Sobel, D. 2001. Explanation, internalism, and reasons for action. Social philosophy and policy, 1(2): 218–235.
Smit, M. 1994. The moral problem. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smithies, Declan, and Jeremy Weiss. 2019. Affective experience, desire, and reasons for action. Analytic Philosophy 60 (1): 27–54.
Tresan, J. 2006. De dicto internalist cognitivism. Noûs 40: 143–165.
Tresan, J. 2009. The challenge of communal internalism. The Journal of Value Inquiry 43: 179–199.
Velleman, J.D. 2000. The possibility of practical reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, B. 1979. Internal and external reasons. Reprinted in Moral luck, 101–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Williams, B. 1989. Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame. Reprinted in Making sense of humanity, ed. B. Williams, 35–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Williams, B. 1995b. Reply to MacDowell. In Internal reasons: Contemporary readings, ed. Keiran Setiya. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to Jason D'Cruz, Martin Peterson, Kenny Easwaran, and Theodore George with whom, in the course of this research, I discussed earlier versions of this paper and had the benefit of their insightful comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank Bradley Armour-Garb for all his support and guidance, and an anonymous referees of this journal for their comments. I would also like to show my gratitude to Yasser Pouresmaeil, Mahmoud Morvarid, and Ali Deilamy for invaluable discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Afroogh, S. The Mirage of Motivation Reason Internalism. J Value Inquiry 58, 111–129 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09871-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09871-5