Abstract
Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism, the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism.
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Notes
Internalism and externalism are sometimes defined in terms of moral opinions and sometimes in terms of sincere moral statements (both often described as moral judgments). I focus on internalism and externalism about moral opinions since these seem to be more fundamental. If sincere moral statements are (or are not) necessarily accompanied by motivation, this is because the attitudes they express—the moral opinions—are (or are not) necessarily motivational. Some of the externalists and internalists I refer to have stated their positions in terms of moral statements rather than opinions, but I will skip over this complication in what follows. As far as I can tell, it does not affect my arguments or conclusions.
Another example might be Stevenson’s “magnetism requirement” (Stevenson 1937).
This might not be Tresan’s current position, however. Rather, he might accept “practice internalism,” that is, that there must be a relevant motivational practice, regardless of whether it is at the communal or individual level (Tresan, personal communication). This seems to imply something like Community internalism 2.
Others still argue that we can even imagine whole communities of amoralists, but only if people in the communities have previously been motivated in accordance with their moral opinions (Gert and Mele 2005).
Neither does it say anything about where to draw the line between internalism and externalism—how much, or which kinds of, non-motivating cases can you acknowledge and still be an internalist? For example, some philosophers who call themselves externalists might want keep open the possibility of what I (and others) have called community internalism, just excluding a necessary connection on the individual level. This is irrelevant to the present paper, however. What matters is that the different positions exist in the debate and are intuitively accepted by different philosophers, not what we call them.
Another way to argue that some intuitions, intuitions that x is the case, have none or low evidential value would be to argue that they are predictable even if not veridical; that is, that we can expect people to have these intuitions whether or not x is the case. If that is the case, the fact that people have the intuitions is no reliable indication that x is the case. See note 9 for an argument that can be interpreted this way.
Depending on the notion of intuition we are working with, some specific ways of arguing will be possible to interpret as either instances of the first or the second strategy. See note 9 for an illustrative example.
It might be objected that we need none of these strategies, since the assumption that metaethicists, and people in general, even seem to have different intuitions is unwarranted in the first place. Rather, what is going on in metaethical debate is that philosophers disagree about the best explanation of shared intuitions (Thanks to Caj Strandberg for pointing to this possibility). I find this highly implausible. Philosophers really do seem to express disagreement about whether unmotivated people described in specific scenarios have moral opinions or not. We will soon see examples of this. It might of course be argued that they seem to disagree on an intuitive level just because they (perhaps unconsciously) let their judgments be influenced by theoretical concerns about which theory best explains the intuitions that they share. But the claim that all apparent intuitive disagreement would disappear if we removed such theoretical influences is something that has to be argued for (and that argument would be an instance of either the first or the second strategy).
Alternatively, it can be interpreted as an instance of the first strategy. Interpreted this way, the claim would be that (some) people do have the intuition that the Sadists do not have moral beliefs, but that these intuitions are not evidential since they are the effect of excessive fondness for a simple internalist theory. Or, more modestly, the claim could be that the intuition that the Sadists do not have moral beliefs is of low evidential value since it is plausible to expect that people have this intuition whether or not it is true, due to people’s reasoning often being influenced by concerns about theoretic simplicity.
See Sect. 4.2 for a discussion of one kind of scenarios that might be thought to be able to do this job.
It might seem that I neglect one possibility. It could turn out that different moral opinions have different intrinsic natures. Perhaps, for example, some people’s moral opinions are beliefs (which are only contingently connected to motivation) and other people’s moral opinions are desire-like attitudes (cf. Francén 2007; Gill 2009; Loeb 2008). Would that not imply that none of the internalist or externalist theses is the single correct one, but that different theories about moral motivation hold for different people’s moral opinions? This seems to be Gill’s view (2009). He argues that even if there are cases where people are not motivated in accordance with their moral opinions, this does not establish the externalist thesis that moral opinions are never necessarily connected to motivation. For there still might be other people (or other contexts) whose moral opinions are necessarily connected to motivation. There might for example be “global internalists” who always use moral terms to express opinions whose intrinsic nature is such that they are necessarily connected to motivation. However, I think Gill is too quick to conclude from this that externalism is not true about everyone. The reason is that it does not follow that internalism is true about someone who is a global internalist—that is, it does not follow from the fact that her moral opinions are of an intrinsic nature that necessitates motivation, that she could not have had the opinion that x is wrong without being motivated. For, considering that other people have moral opinions of another nature, it is plausibly a contingent fact about her that makes her have moral opinions of that intrinsically motivational nature. So she could have had moral opinions of another kind, only contingently connected to motivation. Which means that she—as well as anyone else—could have had the opinion that x is morally wrong without being motivated—which means that externalism is true. Thus, the idea that different people have moral opinions of different intrinsic natures does not seem to take us away from the view that one thesis about moral motivation is the single correct thesis.
Tresan describes internalism as the view that moral beliefs are accompanied by conations, rather than motivation.
De dicto internalism is in principle consistent with any form of internalism. The concept of moral opinions might be such that an opinion counts as a moral opinion just in case it is accompanied by motivation, or just in case it is accompanied by motivation unless there are some special conditions pertaining, or just in case it is related in the right way to a community where there is an established moral practice where moral opinions in general motivate. Tresan accepts a view of the latter form, that is community internalism.
Even though Tresan has given the most detailed description and defence of de dicto internalism, he is not alone. Jackson seems to suggest something like de dicto internalism when he argues that cognitivists can accommodate internalism “by refusing to call something a moral belief unless it is accompanied by the relevant pro-attitude” (Jackson 1998, p. 161). And Elizabeth Radcliffe (2006) develops a similar view which she proposes to make sense of a cognitivist reading of David Hume.
This is a slight simplification. The relevant concept is not just the concept of moral opinions, since different kinds of moral opinions—such as opinions about moral wrongness and opinions about moral rightness—are differently connected to motivation. Rather (to exemplify with wrongness) the idea is that the concept of opinions about moral wrongness is such that something counts as an opinion about moral wrongness only if it is accompanied by motivation not to act in accordance with the act judged to be wrong. This also means—contrary to what one might expect—that opinions are not opinions about moral wrongness merely due to what they are about, they also have to be accompanied by motivation. For more about this, see (Tresan 2006) and Francén (2007). For sake of simplicity, however, I will continue to write in terms of concepts of moral opinions.
A further and related qualification is that it is what we are disposed to think about scenarios when we think rationally, in some relevant sense, that reveals something about our concepts. Sometimes we do not think clearly or carefully enough about the details or implications of a certain scenario, to realise that it does (or does not) constitute a counter-example [See the use of “rational reflection” in Chalmers (2004) and Chalmers and Jackson (2001). See also Francén (2007) and Chalmers and Jackson (2001), Jackson (1998) for the dispositional view in general.].
It should also be noticed that to the extent that motivation pluralism (and de dicto views in general) depend on the intrinsic nature of moral opinions being non-motivational, my arguments for pluralism are also arguments that the intrinsic nature of moral opinions is non-motivational. But, on the other hand, it is also true that if there are independent reasons to think that moral opinions are of an intrinsically motivational sort, then these are also reasons to reject pluralism. We return to this question in Sect. 4.3 where I argue that it is no problem for pluralism, since pluralism does not depend on the intrinsic nature of all moral opinions being non-motivational: what it requires is that the intrinsic nature of some opinions that count as moral opinions by some people’s concepts of moral opinions is non-motivational.
This also explains why many of us have quite vague or unclear intuitions about whether the people described in some of the scenarios in the debate count as having moral opinions or not. We have simply never had a reason to form a concept of moral opinions that give a clear verdict in these cases.
Perhaps people do not have that clear intuitions about whether the pope is a bachelor or not. In that case this might be a case of “peripheral concept indeterminacy” rather than peripheral concept variation. But that is an empirical matter—empirical studies could well show that different people are disposed to classify the Pope differently here, in which case it is a case of peripheral concept variation.
For simplicity I focus on a non-cognitivist version of the internalist story. It could equally well be stated in terms of other views about the intrinsic nature of moral opinions that are committed to some form of internalism, such as perhaps a rationalist cognitivism of the sort defended by Smith (1994).
I keep open the possibility that non-cognitivism is not committed to an unconditional form of individual internalism. This actually seems to be the view of leading non-cognitivists (Blackburn 1995, 1998; Gibbard 1993, 2003) and there are good reasons to think that attitudes like desires can lose their motivational upshot due to general motivational disorders like depression without the desire itself being lost (Björnsson 2002; Eriksson 2006). If this is correct, non-cognitivism is committed at most to a conditional form of individual internalism. The same holds for every form of cognitivism according to which the internal nature or content of moral beliefs is such that they are necessarily accompanied by desires.
This is not to deny that, perhaps, many (actual) people were at first disposed to reject the idea that water is H2O, only because they were disposed not to believe in the empirical findings. For purposes of figuring out the content of their concept, however, what matters is how they would react given that they came to believe in the empirical finding (or under the assumption that the empirical findings are correct).
Perhaps we do not want to count both as concepts of water, however, since we might see it as a necessary condition for C to count as a concept of water, that C applies at least to that which our concept actually applies to (that is H2O). If the watery stuff in our surrounding would have been a simple substance, both concepts might have counted as concepts of water, however, since both would have picked out this substance.
Of course, for either of the stories to be part of a successful causal-reference-argument, this would also require that the story is true. I will not state anything about this, however, since this is irrelevant to my objections below.
Of course, one cannot “conceptualize away” the fact (if it is a fact) that the intrinsic nature of the opinions that originally caused our use of the concept of moral opinions is non-motivational—but it is possible to set extra constrains on what counts as a moral opinions, such as that it is accompanied by motivation.
Of course, one cannot “conceptualize away” the fact (if it is a fact) that the intrinsic nature of the opinions that originally caused our use of the concept of moral opinions is motivational—but it is possible to also include some mental states of a different nature—states that are not intrinsically motivating.
We should notice that such a revisionist strategy can be used even if some people have concepts of moral opinions according to which they are of an intrinsically motivational nature. Say that it turns out that the core class of moral opinions (most opinions actually pointed out by most people as being moral opinions) are beliefs only contingently connected to motivation. An externalist cognitivist can construe her theory as being about this class of opinions, whether or not some people might be unwilling to classify these opinions as moral opinions once they find out that they are not intrinsically motivating. And internalists can make the corresponding move if some people have concepts of moral opinions according to which they are of an intrinsically non-motivating nature.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Caj Strandberg, Jon Tresan and an anonymous reviewer of The Journal of Ethics for helpful comments and discussions on earlier versions of this paper.
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Francén, R. Moral Motivation Pluralism. J Ethics 14, 117–148 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9074-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9074-y