I argue against motivational internalism. First I recharacterise the issue over moral motivation. Second I describe the indifference argument against motivation internalism. Third I consider appeals to irrationality that are often made in the face of this argument, and I show that they are ineffective. Lastly, I draw the motivational externalist conclusion and reflect on the nature of the issue.

I describe and defend the view in a philosophy of mind that I call 'Normative Essentialism', according to which propositional attitudes have normative essences. Those normative essences are 'horizontal' rational requirements, by which I mean the requirement to have certain propositional attitudes given other propositional attitudes. Different propositional attitudes impose different horizontal rational requirements. I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this doctrine and argue for the weaker version. I explore the consequences for knowledge of mind, and I (...) then consider objections to the view from mental causation, from empirical psychology, and from animals and small children. (shrink)

There is a substantial disagreement in the literature over whether ‘remembering’ is a normative concept. Some philosophers have attempted to defend the normativity of ‘remembering’ by highlighting its normative importance or its conceptual affinities with ‘knowing’ or ‘duties’. This paper will first reveal defects of these existing normativist arguments. After that, I will propose and defend a new normativist argument, according to which the concept ‘remembering’ is partly constituted by a paradigmatically normative concept, namely ‘rational’. To be more specific, I (...) argue that full possession of the concept of ‘remembering’ requires having an inclination to believe that ‘if S remembers that p, then S would be (at least defeasibly) rational in holding a memory-based belief that p’. This, according to a persuasive constitutive account of normative concepts, suffices to demonstrate the normative nature of remembering. (shrink)

Traditionally, the problem of defeating scepticism about the rationality of morality is that of showing that every morally required act is rationally required. Little or no direct attention has been paid to whether we must also show that it is rational for the agent to have and act from the morally appropriate motive, whatever that may be. This is not to say that philosophers have entirely ignored the issue of motives; a fair number—Kant and Aristotle come to mind—are concerned in (...) part with the kind of motive agents ought to have and from which they ought to act. But the link to scepticism has not been clearly made. At issue is whether scepticism is fully defeated if we show that every morally required act is rationally required, even if we leave it possible that a fully rational person who performs the act just “goes through the motions” in doing so. (shrink)