Do judgements about normativity necessarily motivate?
(I'm not super-up-to-date on the motivation internalism/externalism literature, so feel free to correct me if there's some key article that says this, refutes this, or that makes this besides the point.)
Plausibly, judgements about what you should do have some connection with motivation. Internalists think that making a normative judgement necessarily entails that you are motivated to act to some degree. But externalists disagree. Why? Well, consider the following case:
Imagine someone knocks on my door, asking for money for Oxfam. I reply that whilst I believe I ought to so give my money, I am not at all bothered about doing so.
The externalist thinks that this situation is obviously imaginable. And if it's imaginable, then agents can make normative judgements and not feel any corresponding motivation.
But it seems to me that the externalists’ counter-example is defective. A neat example in favour of externalism would be one where all of the reasons the agent recognised supported them doing one thing, and yet they do the other (are motivated to do the other). This is false in the present case. For this agent has some reason not to give money away: it requires effort. This will be true of all of agents who fail to do something that they believe they ought to. Clearer examples would be ones where the agent did do something that they judge they have literally no reason to do, and saw some reason not to.
Now the externalist has a very obvious reply to this. They can claim that this agent should still be motivated to some degree to give their money away, and they take it that this is false. Even if their example isn’t ideal, it is still sufficient to demonstrate their point that agents aren’t necessarily motivated in proportion to the reasons that they recognise. Their example, they might say, isn't perfect, but is good enough.
But I think the externalist is now in a difficult position. For I think the only reason that they think that this agent is not motivated at all is because this is what the agent says: they feel no "pull" towards giving their money away. But we should not identify motivation with felt motivation, since people may be motivated to do things without having any phenomenal feel of motivation at all (c.f. Smith 1994:104-11).
I presume it is instead standard to identify motivation with counter-factual claims about what the agent would do in other circumstances. But then externalists need to do more to show that such counter-factual claims are true with respect to the agent in the example. In fact, they need to provide the kind of neat example that I originally suggested that they should. Only in these circumstances would it be clear that motivation and recognition of reasons come apart.
Al, you've got a nice blog
Al, you've got a nice blog here, this is my first time posting.
I'm not up-to-date on the relevant literature either. But is there recent literature on this? My impression is that it was a hot topic in the early to mid-20th century, and that the last person to seriously engage the topic was Frankena. I hope someone can prove that impression wrong. But moving on...
(1) Let me see if I've understood your first argument. Against the putative counterexample you seem to offer a general line of argument as follows. A clear counterexample must be one where an agent has all the reasons in favor of doing X, and no reasons against it. But, for any reason to do X, the agent has a countervailing reason not to do X, given the effort required to do X. So no clear counterexamples can be offered against internalism. (Not sure if I got your argument right, but my criticism will be directed against this reconstruction.)
It's an interesting argument. But if it's sound, I can't decide whether it's a virtue or a vice of internalism that no clear counterexample can even be entertained against it.
Also, in the argument you seem to have in mind something like the economists' assumption that people prefer leisure to labor; exerting effort is a cost to be avoided. But I wonder about this assumption. Perhaps effort exerted in enjoyable activities or worthwhile goals are not seen as a cost at all. Perhaps some people are just not lazy, either by nature or nurture (think of what has been called the "Protestant" work ethic, or the "Confucian" work ethic). And certainly some activities like fishing, hunting, mountain-climbing, philosophical problem-solving, etc., are enjoyable, and people find reason to do them, in large part because they are difficult, challenging, and require a lot of effort.
(2) As to the externalists' response that their not-so-clear counterexample at least shows "agents aren’t necessarily motivated in proportion to the reasons that they recognise". I think there's something to this point that you don't address in your reply. In cases of weakness of will, what one recognizes as one's BEST reason does not correlate with one's STRONGEST motivation. But then the connection between reasons and motivations begins to look arbitrary. Based on this, an externalist might press the following worry: if the strength of one's reasons does not correlate with the strength of one's motivations, then what evidence do we have for believing that internalism is true? (Hume I think addresses this sort of worry in the Treatise....)
Anyway, I consider myself a motivation internalist (or is it judgment internalism... I'm getting confused).
Hi Boram, thanks for the
Hi Boram, thanks for the interesting thoughts!
Your summary is correct except that my conclusion was not that there is no possible counter-example to internalism. Let me try and state my thoughts more clearly:
So this particular counter-example could be made to work on some understandings of what "being motivated to some degree" consisted in. But without knowledge of that, we don't know what it would mean for the agent to be motivated to some degree to give some money away, and the supposed counter-example is completely unclear.
One way of resolving that problem: We could understand "being motivated to some degree" to mean that the agent would do that action under certain different circumstances. But on this understanding, the counter-example seems to me to favour the internalist. It does seem true that if there were no reason not to give money away, the agent would donate some. So on this understanding, it fails as an objection.
We could avoid all this "motivated to some degree" trouble, and find a counter-example where an agent had some reason to do one thing, no reason at all to do another, and yet they do the second anyway. This would enable us to ignore all of the "to some degree" stuff, since there would only be one relevant consideration here. I find it very hard to imagine plausible counter-examples of this kind.
So I'm certainly happy to admit that there are things that would count as counter-examples to internalism. But, I am inclined to think that none of them actually succeeds. Is that clearer?
Your points on effort sometimes being a value are well-taken. I'll give that some thought.
The points on weakness of will are relevant, forceful and interesting, but I was intending to follow this up with a seperate post on weakness of will anyway.
(I think motivation internalism is synonymous with judgement internalism. Both claim that there is an internal link between making judgements and being motivated.)
Alex