Internalism says that if an agent judges that it is right for her to φ, then she is motivated to φ. The disagreement between Internalists and Externalists runs deep, and it lingers even in the face of clever intuition pumps. An argument in Michael Smith's The Moral Problem seeks some leverage against Externalism from a point within normative theory. Smith argues by dilemma: Externalists either fail to explain why motivation tracks moral judgment in a good moral agent or they attribute (...) a kind of fetishism to good moral agents. I argue that there are alternative models of moral motivation available to Externalists, in particular a model according to which a good moral agent is one who is effectively regulated by a second order desire to desire to do what is right. (shrink)

Ruling Passions is about human nature. It is an invitation to see human nature a certain way. It defends this way of looking at ourselves against competitors, including rational choice theory, modern Kantianism, various applications of evolutionary psychology, views that enchant our natures, and those that disenchant them in the direction of relativism or nihilism. It is a story centred upon a view of human ethical nature, which it places amongst other facets of human nature, as just one of the (...) elements which give us the manifold objects of our concerns and cares. (shrink)

The impact moral judgments have on our deliberations and actions seems to vary a great deal. Moral judgments play a large part in the lives of some people, who are apt not only to make them, but also to be guided by them in the sense that they tend to pursue what they judge to be of moral value, and shun what they judge to be of moral disvalue. But it seems unrealistic to claim that moral judgments play a pervasive (...) role in the lives of all or even most people. There are considerable variations in how strong a tendency people have to think in moral terms, and in how such thoughts affect their decisions and actions. For every moral hero who single-mindedly pursues moral values, there are thousands of less committed people who only do so when it does not cost them too much in material comfort, personal relations, or social standing. And of course, what counts as too much varies from person to person. On top of such variations, there are those who consistently display moral indifference—people who concede, for example, that certain investment policies have morally problematic consequences, but who can readily and without compunction ignore that in their business decisions. There even seem to be moral subversives, people who intentionally and knowingly pursue what they acknowledge to be morally wrong or bad, and do so for that very reason. (shrink)

In sum, the non-cognitivist account of motivation is far from unproblematic. The non-cognitivist has trouble telling us what moral attitudes are in a way that is consistent with the phenomenon of variable motivation. Given that the cognitivist has an easy explanation of variable motivation, it seems that cognitivism is preferable to non-cognitivism on the score of motivation, which is a reversal of the way the issue is usually perceived.

The impact moral judgments have on our deliberations and actions seems to vary a great deal. Moral judgments play a large part in the lives of some people, who are apt not only to make them, but also to be guided by them in the sense that they tend to pursue what they judge to be of moral value, and shun what they judge to be of moral disvalue. But it seems unrealistic to claim that moral judgments play a pervasive (...) role in the lives of all or even most people. There are considerable variations in how strong a tendency people have to think in moral terms, and in how such thoughts affect their decisions and actions. For every moral hero who single- mindedly pursues moral values, there are thousands of less com- mitted people who only do so when it does not cost them too much in material comfort, personal relations, or social standing. And of course, what counts as too much varies from person to person. On top of such variations, there are those who consistently display mor- al indifference-people who concede, for example, that certain investment policies have morally problematic consequences, but who can readily and without compunction ignore that in their busi- ness decisions. There even seem to be moral subversives, people who intentionally and knowingly pursue what they acknourledge to be morally u~ong or bad, and do so for that very reason. (shrink)

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 ϕ conveys two things: the sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that she ought to ϕ, and her utterance carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that she is motivated to ϕ. This view also makes it possible to defend cognitivism against a well-known internalist argument. (shrink)

What is the Moral Problem? NORMATIVE ETHICS VS. META-ETHICS It is a common fact of everyday life that we appraise each others' behaviour and attitudes from ...

The main objection to non‐cognitivism explored in the philosophical literature to date has been semantic in nature. How can normative claims lack truth conditions when they have so many features in common with claims that have truth conditions? The main aim of this paper is to shift attention away from this dominant line of objection onto a range of other problems that non‐cognitivists face. Specifically, I argue that, contrary to the non‐cognitivists, normative claims do express beliefs, even by their own (...) lights; that the truth of Normative Judgement Internalism does not support non‐cognitivism; that arguing for non‐cognitivism on the basis of the Open Question Argument, as non‐cognitivists do, leads them to embrace a contradiction; and, finally, that non‐cognitivists do not provide us with plausible candidates for the desires and aversions that, as they see things, get expressed in normative claims. (shrink)

Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. His central thesis, as well as the many novel supporting arguments used to defend it, will spark much controversy among those concerned with the foundations of ethics.

Is non-cognitivism compatible with minimalism about truth? A contemporary argument claims not, and therefore that moral realists, for example, should take heart from the popularity of semantic minimalism. The same is said to apply to cognitivism about other topics—conditionals, for example—for the argument depends only on the fact that ordinary usage applies the notions of truth and falsity to utterances of the kind in question. Given this much, minimalism about truth is said to leave no room for the view that (...) the utterances concerned are non-cognitive in nature. (shrink)

Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set (...) of counterexamples to motivational internalism, examples which are effective both against traditional formulations of the thesis as well as against many of these more recent restricted proposals. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the conjunction of two theses: 1) cognitivism about first-person moral ought-beliefs, the thesis (roughly) that such beliefs are attitudes with truth-valued contents; 2) robust internalism about these beliefs, the thesis that, necessarily, agents' beliefs that they ought, morally, to A constitute motivation to A. It is argued that the conjunction of these two theses places our moral agency at serious risk. The argument, which centrally involves attention to clinical depression, is extended to a less demanding, recent brand (...) of internalist moral cognitivism. Philosophers discussed include Dancy, McDowell, McNaughton, and Nagel. (shrink)

In this article I set out a reason for believing in a form of metaethical relativism. In rough terms, the reason is this: a widely held thesis, internalism, tells us that to accept (sincerely assert, believe, etc.) a moral judgment logically requires having a motivating reason. Since the connection is logical, or conceptual, it must be explained by a theory of what it is to accept a moral claim. I argue that the internalist feature of moral expressions can best be (...) explained by my version of moral relativism, which I call "speaker relativism.". (shrink)

Internalism says that if an agent judges that it is right for her to φ, then she is motivated to φ. The disagreement between Internalists and Externalists runs deep, and it lingers even in the face of clever intuition pumps. An argument in Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem seeks some leverage against Externalism from a point within normative theory. Smith argues by dilemma: Externalists either fail to explain why motivation tracks moral judgment in a good moral agent or they attribute (...) a kind of fetishism to good moral agents. I argue that there are alternative models of moral motivation available to Externalists, in particular a model according to which a good moral agent is one who is effectively regulated by a second order desire to desire to do what is right. (shrink)

This book attempts to place a realist view of ethics (the claim that there are facts of the matter in ethics as elsewhere) within a broader context. It starts with a discussion of why we should mind about the difference between right and wrong, asks what account we should give of our ability to learn from our moral experience, and looks in some detail at the different sorts of ways in which moral reasons can combine to show us what we (...) should do in the circumstances. The second half of the book uses these results to mount an attack on consequentialism in ethics, arguing that there are more sorts of reasons around than consequentialists can even dream of. (shrink)

Hume is committed, By one of his criticisms of reason as the route to moral knowledge, To an internalist position. In the argument from motivation, Hume starts by observing that morality is practical--That morals excite passions and produce or prevent actions. But, Hume argues, Rationalist moral theories cannot explain how moral considerations motivate. This is because reason alone is incapable of motivating us. The premise that morality is practical, However, May be interpreted in two ways--Either in an externalist or internalist (...) manner. Charity requires us to adopt the internalist reading because only then is the argument valid. An internalist reading of the argument, However, Commits hume, In his constructive phase, To construing the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval as possessing motivational influence by themselves. But an examination of what hume has to say about the motives that prompt us to do what is right shows that he fails to provide such an account himself. This points to an inconsistency in hume's moral theory. (shrink)

Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.

This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundation of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalistic world view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational life plan. In striking contrast to many traditional authors and to other recent writers in the field, David Brink offers an integrated defense of (...) the objectivity of ethics. (shrink)

Contemporary ethical thought owes a great deal to David Hume whose work has inspired theories as diverse as non-cognitivism, error theory, quasi-realism, and instrumentalism about practical reason. This timely volume brings together an international range of distinguished scholars to discuss and dispute issues revolving around three closely related Humean themes which have recently come under close scrutiny. First is Hume's infamous claim that 'Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions'. Second, the Motivation Argument for the (...) view that 'The rules of morality...are not conclusions of our reason'. The third and final theme is that of virtue, re-examined here in the context of new interpretational debates concerning Hume's thought on moral motivation. Contributors: Annette Baier, Stephen Finlay, Kent Hurtig, Rosalind Hursthouse, Richard Joyce, Norva Y. S. Lo, Graham Oddie, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Luke Russell, Constantine Sandis, Michael Smith, Christine Swanton. (shrink)

Introduction to the work David Hume described as the best of his many writings.

This collection of essays showcases recent work on Hume and the Is/Ought question. There are four distinct attempts to redefine and prove Hume's no-ought-from-is thesis in such a way as to evade the famous counterexamples of A.N. Prior. The rival approaches are explained and discussed together with their implications for meta-ethical theory" --Provided by publisher.

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with (...) a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege-Geach’ problem. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

As a metaethicist, I am interested in whether expressivism is true, and thus interested in whether the argument that people think they find in Hume is a sound one. Not being a Hume scholar (but merely a devoted fan), I am less interested in whether Hume really was an expressivist or whether he really did present an argument in its favor. Hume’s metaethical views are very difficult to nail down, and by a careful selection of quotes one can present him (...) as advocating expressivism, or cognitivist subjectivism, or moral skepticism, or a dispositional theory, or an ideal observer theory, or even utilitarianism. It is entirely possible that Hume’s position is indeterminate when considered against these terms of modern moral philosophy; it is also entirely possible that he was hopelessly confused (much as it pains me to admit it). However, I doubt very much that Hume should be interpreted as an expressivist in any straightforward manner, and therefore I am doubtful that he should be interpreted as arguing in its favor. Most of this paper does not discuss Hume directly at all: I critically discuss the motivation argument and I advocate a certain positive metaethical view—one that mixes elements of traditional expressivism with elements of cognitivism. This position is neutral between moral realism and radical moral skepticism. I close by wondering—very briefly— whether Hume might have held such a view. Given my reservations about the determinacy of Hume’s metaethical outlook, the case is not pressed with any vigor, but because it is an interpretation of Hume that has not, so far as I know, been articulated before, it may be of interest to note that it seems to be consistent with much of what he says—at least as much as any other precise interpretation. (shrink)