Abstract
De dicto moral motivation is typically characterized by the agent’s conceiving of her goal in thin normative terms such as to do what is right. I argue that lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation (at least in a certain broad sense of this term) would put the agent in a bad position for responding in the morally-best manner (relative to her epistemic state) in a certain type of situations. Two central features of the relevant type of situations are (1) the appropriateness of the agent’s uncertainty concerning her underived moral values, and (2) the practical, moral importance of resolving this uncertainty. I argue that in some situations that are marked by these two features the most virtuous response is deciding to conduct a deep moral inquiry for a de dicto moral purpose. In such situations lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would amount to a moral shortcoming. I show the implications for Michael Smith’s (1994) argument against Motivational Judgment Externalism and for Brian Weatherson’s (2014) argument against avoiding moral recklessness: both arguments rely on a depreciating view of de dicto moral motivation, and both fail; or so I argue.
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Notes
To illustrate the relevant distinction between thin and thick with some paradigmatic examples: good, right, and obligatory are thin moral concepts; kind, honest and even just are considered thick moral concepts. The exact nature of this distinction is a matter of dispute (see, for instance, Smith 2013).
Sometimes Smith (1996: 177, for instance) allows using the term de re moral motivation to denote motivation to φ in cases where the agent falsely believes that φ-ing is right. I do not use the term de re moral motivation in this way.
From this point on I use the term virtuous in the sense of morally virtuous, unless noted otherwise.
For such defenses see for instance: Lillehammer (1997); Svavarsdóttir (1999: 199–215); Enoch (2011: 255) Hurka (2014) and Aboodi (2015). Olson (2002: 92–94) proposes two particular cases where he claims that an effective de dicto moral motivation seems more virtuous than particular effective de re moral motivations, but he fails to establish conclusively that effective de dicto moral motivation would be the most virtuous type of motivation under those circumstances. See also my references to Vanessa Carbonell and Arnon Keren in the beginning of the following section.
Throughout this paper, the locution “moral inquiry” refers to inquiries into moral matters rather than referring to morally virtuous inquiries.
Keren A, “The Risk of Wrongdoing: On the Moral Significance of Moral Uncertainty,” Unpublished Manuscript.
For example, Joshua May (2013) argues that beliefs about what’s right can generate new desires on their own, without any antecedent motivation.
Notice that my stipulated sense of derived/underived is psychological and agent-specific, rather than metaphysical or epistemological. (In this respect it is similar to the notion of derivative motivation, as Smith and his respondents—including myself—use this term.) For further clarification, here is another example: if the agent’s view is that we ought to respect human rights merely for the reason that it is a good means to maximizing universal happiness, then her belief in human rights is derived. In contrast, if an agent holds that respecting human rights is one of her fundamental duties, her belief in human rights is underived. If an agent does not base human rights on another normative principle in any way, I classify her belief in human rights as underived (and this probably renders most of the moral beliefs and values of non-philosophers as underived).
Smith and Weatherson would probably agree to this claim, as it seems to lie in the background of their arguments that I discuss in section 2.
See also the discussion regarding morally perfect people in Svavarsdóttir 1999: 214–215.
David Christensen makes a similar point regarding what he calls “ideally rational agents” (Christensen 2007: 10–16).
It may even be argued, along those lines, that for every underived belief in a principle that could serve as the object of a non-derivative de re moral motivation, there are some possible circumstances under which full confidence in it would not be justified; but this would not be necessary for my argument.
Compare: “oh no, keeping that promise requires me to get up from bed so early in the morning. I must break it. But breaking a promise is bad, at least as I used to think. Well I am free to change my mind. From now on I shall hold that breaking a promise is the right thing to do if the promise requires you to get up early in the morning. This way I can allow myself to break the promise now, and stay in bed.”
Note that if Isabel changes her mind about the moral value of keeping promises without such a concern, merely in order to minimize suffering, then she seems guilty of wishful thinking. This applies also to cases where Isabel’s desire to minimize suffering would lead her (by itself) to start believing that the value of keeping promises is grounded in minimizing suffering, without genuinely trying to determine whether this is right.
Reevaluating an underived belief in equality, as I use the term reevaluating, may sometimes consist in trying to figure out whether equality is of intrinsic value or whether it is valuable merely as a means to something else.
Perhaps some think that reevaluation does not help to improve views concerning basic moral values. Responding to such a view would take away from the focus of this paper. Note that I am not claiming that there cannot be good people whose observable behavior is morally exemplary, who are not constituted to reevaluate their underived moral beliefs. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this possibility.) However, given that such people are fallible in basic moral matters, I think they would be more virtuous if they also had the capacity and tendency to reevaluate underived moral beliefs when this is called for.
See, for instance, Smith’s (2002) description of how “the capacity to have coherent psychological states” (which I interpret as a type of disposition which Smith does not count as a motivation) can change the relative strength of some desires in correlation with changes in the person’s relative certitude in some of her values, without any de dicto moral motivation.
I thank two anonymous reviewers for pressing me here.
Notice also how difficult it is to come up with a non-derivative de re moral goal that provides a motive for reflecting—for the purpose of deciding what to do—on whether this goal itself should be pursued and to what extent. None of the goals that appear in Smith’s (1994: 75) sample list of de re moral motivations fits this bill. Wanting to promote equality, for instance, does not provide any motive to reevaluate equality. This point seems particularly important if it turns out—due to considerations that were raised in section 1.1—that for every non-derivative de re moral goal there are some possible circumstances under which it is appropriate to reevaluate it for the purpose of deciding what to do. (Does this apply also to de dicto moral goals? It probably does. But such goals can unproblematically motivate the reevaluation of their own appropriateness. I discuss this asymmetry and its implications further in Aboodi MS).
I include within this broad sense of de dicto moral motivation goals that the agent conceives of as normative but not moral, such as “to do what I have most reason to do” (“rightness” could be interpreted in this way as well). I also include thin normative goals that the agent conceives of as restricted to a particular context or domain, such as “to vote for the candidate that is best overall.” Finally, I include also the psychological state of being committed to a thin normative constraint such as “not to act immorally” or “not to choose wrongly” (I thank David Heyd for raising this).
This part of my argument might be less exciting for those utilitarians and other monists who also hold that the most virtuous human beings believe in the one fundamental principle that exhausts all of morality, and recognize its special status. Such agents would never experience a conflict between two underived values because, by definition, they have only one underived value. But, going back to my argument in the previous subsection, notice that it would sometimes be irresponsible for such agents not to reevaluate their monistic view in light of the many known counter-intuitions and counter-arguments to such monistic views.
Note that merely attributing to an agent independent non-derivative motivations to fulfill the relevant conflicting values does not explain why the agent is conducting a moral inquiry rather than just being led to action unreflectively by the strongest motivation. The discussion of Isabel’s case in section 1.2 helps to clarify this, even though it focuses on reevaluations of underived moral beliefs.
The particular version of Externalism that Smith attacks denies the existence of the type of conceptual or necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation that certain Motivational Judgment Internalists assume; but the details need not concern us here.
In conversation, Michael Smith seemed to confirm that his argument was meant to rely on something like the depreciating view as I formulated it (which does not square with the narrow interpretation of Smith's moral fetishism charge that Sepielli 2016 offers). I find that this version of his argument has two advantages: (1) It is not committed to the implausible claim—criticized for instance by Copp (1997) and Svavarsdóttir (1999: 199)—that Externalists must assume that the only primary moral motivation that good people have is de dicto moral motivation; and (2) It is not immediately refuted by the fact that virtuous behaviors can be motivated simultaneously by both de dicto and de re moral motivations (Olson 2002: 91; Enoch 2011: 255).
This could also be illustrated by Smith’s (1996: 180) example of a Utilitarian who at some point comes to believe that “it is sometimes right to give extra benefits to his family and friends, even when doing so cannot be given a utilitarian justification.” (Smith argues that this case presents an explanatory problem for Externalists of the relevant kind.)
In response to my argument (and I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this possible way out), Smith could concede that throughout the relevant types of moral inquiries de dicto moral motivation is not fetishistic, but insist on a restricted version of what I called his depreciating view of de dicto moral motivation that claims it is always inferior in non-deliberative activities. I think that such a view would be hard to defend: For instance, given that Simon’s effective motivation for reexamining the relevant moral issue was de dicto moral motivation, and that it was virtuous for him to be so motivated up until the point of changing his views, it is not intuitively less virtuous for Simon to vote according to his new views—at least partly—out of de dicto moral motivation, than to do so purely out of new non-derivative de re moral motivations. But there’s room for further discussion about this. This relates to the general question of when de dicto moral motivation is less virtuous, which I briefly address in section 3, referring to my 2015 article.
This way of coping with moral uncertainty may be considered as a kind of moral hedging.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to address such cases in this paper.
This formulation might seem circular at first glance, but notice that not every non-derivative de re moral motivation is a non-deliberative disposition.
I discuss the relevant significance of such non-deliberative dispositions in Aboodi 2015: 310, 312.
I make some progress with this project in Aboodi MS.
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Acknowledgments
This work was conducted as part of a research project of Nikkonna, registered Amuta. Many thanks to all those who have provided valuable feedback: Dan Baras, David Enoch, David Heyd, Alex Hyun, Tom Hurka, Hasko von Kriegstein, Nethanel Lipshitz, Ofer Malcai, Joshua May, Eli Pitcovski, Ittay Nissan-Rosen, Saul Smilansky, Etye Steinberg, Preston Werner, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I thank Sarah Paul for the title.
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Aboodi, R. One Thought Too Few: Where De Dicto Moral Motivation is Necessary. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 223–237 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9742-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9742-5