Abstract
Normative realism faces a problem concerning the practicality of normative judgment, the presumptive view that normative judgments are motivational states. Normative judgments, for the normative realist, must be beliefs. This is problematic because it is difficult to see how any belief could have the necessary connection to motivation required to account for the practicality of normative judgment. After all, the Humean theory of motivation has it that motivated action is only brought about by a belief and a desire working in tandem. Here I show how the normative realist, simply by embracing a certain philosophical psychology, can hold that normative judgments are both beliefs and motivational states, all consistent with the Humean theory of motivation. Given the plausibility of both the practicality of normative judgment and Humean psychology, a theory that allows the realist to reconcile them is preferable (ceteris paribus) to any picture in which one must be rejected. The (low) price to pay for this reconciliation is the acceptance of a strong form of cognitivism about intention, the doctrine that your intentions to act are beliefs about what you are going to do, and a small—yet highly plausible—adjustment to our theory of what it is to be a motivational state.
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Notes
Better: as good evidence for the proposition that first-person normative judgments are motivational states—that is, judgments of the form ‘I ought to F’. Gregory (2017) has argued, convincingly in my view, that normative judgments concerning others—‘He ought to F’—are not themselves motivational states.
A normative judgment then can count as a motivational state for one of two reasons: either because the normative judgment itself can combine with a belief to cause action or because the normative judgment causally suffices for the reality of a certain desire, a desire that can then combine with a belief to cause action.
This motivation need only be conduct-controlling—that is, disposed to prompt you, at the appropriate time (by your lights), to attempt to perform the action represented by its content—in a practically rational agent: if you are a less than fully practically rational agent, the judgment the judgment that you ought to F can fail to prompt you to form the intention to F. Suffering weakness of the will, a form of practical irrationality, you might decide instead to do incompatible action G, an action that you strongly desire to perform. Nothing in the rest of this paper will turn on issues connected to whether the motivation that normative judgment provides is conduct-controlling in a practically rational agent.
The practical problem is, in essence, simply the generalization of Smith’s moral problem to practical normativity beyond (though including) the moral. A very similar problem is discussed under the name ‘the Humean argument’ by Parfit (2011).
Of course, given that I am developing my own reconciliation here, it can be safely assumed that I don’t think that Smith’s solution works. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space here to explain why I think that. The reader should consult reviews by Darwall (1996), Dreier (1996), and Copp (1997) for incisive criticism of Smith’s solution. (Though, see Smith (1997, 2013) for a defense and development of his strategy).
Just like the earlier definition (MOTIVATIONAL), (MOTIVATIONAL2) defines the sense of ‘motivational state’ that includes desires, urges, and normative judgments, but excludes intentions. The motivational character of intentions must be theorized independently and differently.
Of course, some philosophers hold that your desires are subject to the evidence about what you ought, or have reason, to do (Parfit 2011). But I follow Gregory (2017) in thinking that this proposition, if true, would simply constitute a very strong reason to accept cognitivism about desire, the view that your desire that p just is your belief that there is practical reason to bring it about that p. On this anti-Humean philosophical psychology, all your desires would be a kind of normative judgment and the practical problem would not arise.
Of course, most externalists would be happy to accept that there are possible agents who are wholly unmoved to any degree by their (practical) normative judgments. Indeed, they may well motivate their view through appeal to the possibility of some kind of generalized version of the a-moralist (Shafer-Landau 2003): a person who is wholly unmoved, to any degree, by any of his practical normative judgments.
Some philosophers—such as Sharon Street (2012)—have defended the view that some of our values, or core ‘pro-moral’ desires, are essential to our identity, in some sense of the term, such that we could not lose them and survive as the same person. A loss of our core values, in other words, would be a kind of death. But this claim is completely consistent with the proposition that there are possible (rational) agents who lack these values or ‘pro-moral’ desires. The only relevant implication of Street’s view here is that we couldn’t be one and the same person—in some sense of ‘person’—as these agents.
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Ratoff, W. How Humeans can make normative beliefs motivating. Philos Stud 178, 1245–1265 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01473-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01473-4