One Thought Too Few: Where De Dicto Moral Motivation is Necessary

2015

I argue that there are (only) two contingent factors that can render an instantiation of de dicto moral motivation — which is typically characterised by the agent’s conceiving of her goal in moral terms such as doing what’s right — less virtuous than some alternative motivation that would lead to the same (right) action: (1) The circumstances are such that it would be more virtuous to be moved directly by certain non-deliberative dispositions (such as an emotional attachment to one’s spouse), and (2) The circumstances are such that de dicto moral motivation has practical disadvantages (such as generating unnecessary moral reflections that waste precious time).

Philosophical Studies, 2022

I argue that there are some situations in which it is praiseworthy to be motivated only by moral rightness de dicto, even if this results in wrongdoing. I consider a set of cases that are challenging for views that dispute this, prioritising concern for what is morally important (de re, and not de dicto) in moral evaluation (for example, Arpaly, 2003; Arpaly & Schroeder, 2013; Harman 2015; Weatherson, 2019). In these cases, the agent is not concerned about what is morally important (de re), does the wrong thing, but nevertheless seems praiseworthy rather than blameworthy. I argue that the views under discussion cannot accommodate this, and should be amended to recognise that it is often praiseworthy to be motivated to do what is right (de dicto).

In David Plunkett & Billy Dunnaway (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard. Ann Arbor, MI: Maize Books. pp. 125-144 (2022) , 2022

It is often assumed that the best explanation of why we should be moral must involve a substantive account of what there is reason to do and how this is related to what morality requires and recommends. In this paper I argue to the contrary that the best explanation of why we should be moral is neutral about the content of morality, and does not invoke an independent substantive account of what there is practical reason to do. I contend that an act’s deontic status as recommended or required by morality is best understood as its being fitting for us to feel obligated to perform it, which essentially involves motivation to perform it. I argue, moreover, that our having reason to do something is a matter of its being fitting for us to be motivated to do it. Since an act’s being favored by morality conceptually entails the fittingness of our being motivated to perform it, and the fittingness of this motivation conceptually entails that there is reason to perform it, it is actually a conceptual truth that there are reasons to do what morality requires and recommends, whatever that turns out to be. I contend, finally, that this kind of account best explains why, although moral considerations are not always overriding, we necessarily have conclusive reasons to do what morality requires. I argue that an act counts as morally required only if the reasons to feel obligated to perform it are conclusive, which entails that it is unfitting to fail to be most strongly motivated to perform it. This, together with my account of the connection between fitting motives and practical reasons, entails that whatever considerations are weighty enough to make the act morally required are conclusive reasons to perform it. I believe that this conceptual account of reasons to be moral is important, because it removes the explanation of why we should be moral as a desideratum on normative ethical theories, which may significantly decrease the attractions of some and increase the attractions of others.

2001

order to decide what to do. As a result of this ill-advised assumption, the moral agent is alienated from a whole wealth of methods of decision-making that I claim are, under certain conditions, morally pennissible or even, more controversially, morally compulsory. Contrary to that, I believe that the substantive moral rules that apply to decision-making processes are rather more complex. The fact that so much of contemporary practical philosophy assumes that reasoning is always the best way to make decisions is at least partly due to the lack of a clear distinction between reasoning as a way that leads to the morally correct action and reasoning as a means to know what is the morally correct action. The failure to understand the distinction between those two modalities of reasoning processes blurs the perception of the peculiar moral rules that apply to the use of reasoning as a tool of moral decision-making. My claim that there is a complex relation between the morality of actions and the morality of decision-making methods is not to be confused with the much more familiar claim that the rationality (in the sense of means-end calculation1) of decision-making is independent of the morality of the action to be performed. What is at stake is the morality of decision-making processes and their relation to the morality of the actions performed as a result of the decision-making processes. This complex relation is a recurring theme in many of the arguments presented below, notably in the first and the fourth chapters. However, the fact that there is a distinction between the morality of decision-making and the morality of actions does not imply that there is no relation between them. Indeed, I shall try to explain this connection in chapter four, in doing so, I expect to clarify the moral relevance ofthe distinction. The alienation between the moral agent and her decision-making might take yet another form. Namely, it might take the form of an argument that tries to justify the thesis that some sorts of rational decision-making, notably public decision-making, should be regarded as 'non-comprehensive' or 'non-plenary'. I use those expressions to refer to processes of decision-making in which the agent should not use all the reasons that could 1 Pursuing this sort of 'rationality', means to engage into what Habennas 'pragmatic discourse' which, as he pointed out, is only one sort of practical discourse (see his Between Facts and Norms Translated by William Rehg, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, p. 151-168, see also his On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason in Habermas, Jurgen Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Transl. by Ciaran P. Cronin) Cambrige/Mass: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1-17.

Principia, 2019

In this paper I will analyze John McDowell's broad account of practical rationality and moral reasons, which he displays mainly in his articles "Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?" (1978) and "Might There Be External Reasons?" (1995). My main aim is to argue that from a philosophical perspective, no less than from an empirical one, McDowell's account of practical rationality is not a realistic one. From a philosophical point of view, I will argue that his intellectualist account is not convincing; and if we consider his virtue-ethical ideal of practical rationality in light of the model of human cognition, we also realize that moral behavior is not immune to cognitive biases and does not always flow from robust traits of character like virtues. At the same time, this puts at stake his strong thesis of moral autonomy-the idea that with the 'onset of reason' moral beings are no longer determined by 'first nature' features.

The Journal of Ethics, 2011

One of the most prevalent and influential assumptions in metaethics is that our conception of the relation between moral language and motivation provides strong support to internalism about moral judgments. In the present paper, I argue that this supposition is unfounded. Our responses to the type of thought experiments that internalists employ do not lend confirmation to this view to the extent they are assumed to do. In particular, they are as readily explained by an externalist view according to which there is a pragmatic and standardized connection between moral utterances and motivation. The pragmatic account I propose states that a person's utterance of a sentence according to which she ought to  conveys two things: the sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that she ought to , and her utterance carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that she is motivated to . This view also makes it possible to defend cognitivism against a well-known internalist argument.

Handbook of Moral Motivation, 2013

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.

Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2009

Moral judgments are important, intuitive, and complex. These factors make moral judgment particularly fertile ground for motivated reasoning. This chapter reviews research (both our own and that of others) examining two general pathways by which motivational forces can alter the moral implications of an act: by affecting perceptions of an actor's moral accountability for the act, and by influencing the normative moral principles people rely on to evaluate the morality of the act. We conclude by discussing the implications of research on motivated moral reasoning for both classic and contemporary views of the moral thinker.

Philosophia, 2007

In his fetishist argument, Michael Smith raises an important question: What is the content of the motivational states that constitute moral motivation? Although the argument has been widely discussed, this question has not received the attention it deserves. In the present paper, I use Smith's argument as a point of departure for a discussion of how advocates of externalism as regards moral judgements can account for moral motivation. More precisely, I explore various explanations of moral motivation that externalists can employ to answer the question Smith poses.