## 1. The Basic Phenomenon of Moral Motivation



The basic phenomenon of moral motivation might be given a more
systematic depiction as follows, using '*P*' to
stand for some person or individual and 'ph' and
'ps' each to stand for some action:



When *P* judges that it would be morally right to ph, she is
ordinarily motivated to ph; should *P* later become
convinced that it would be wrong to ph and right to ps instead,
she ordinarily ceases to be motivated to ph and comes to be
motivated to ps.



This depiction aims to capture features of our common experience. As
observation suggests, people generally feel moved to do what they
judge it right to do; what is more, their motivation ordinarily shifts
to match or "track" changes in their moral judgments. If
an individual judges it right to keep a promise rather than to aid a
stranger in need, she will ordinarily feel moved, at least to some
degree, to act so as to fulfill the promise. If she comes to change
her mind about the priority of her promise, she will ordinarily no
longer be moved to keep the promise and will be moved instead to
provide aid.



Before we turn to the many questions which the foregoing depiction
leaves open, and which lie at the heart of debates about the nature of
moral motivation, we should make note of two important points. First,
the depiction says nothing about the *strength* of moral
motivation. For all that it tells us, the motivation all or some
people feel to do what they judge right might be extraordinarily weak.
Common experience suggests that moral motivation in fact tends to be
fairly robust, but with one qualification to be noted later,
philosophical views about moral motivation generally follow the
depiction in taking no position regarding the exact strength of moral
motivation. Second, the depiction reflects a widely shared assumption,
one which forms part of the backdrop for debates about the nature of
moral motivation, namely, that moral motivation is a *strikingly
regular and reliable* phenomenon. Throughout social life, in both
our personal relations and our public interactions, we take it for
granted that moral judgments dependably, if not unfailingly, motivate,
that they effectively influence and guide how people feel and act.
Still, the assumption is not wholly uncontroversial; indeed, some have
expressed serious doubts regarding whether moral motivation is as
regular and reliable as we commonly suppose (Copp 1997, 50).



The basic phenomenon of moral motivation seems relatively
straightforward. The difficult philosophical task becomes one of
attempting to understand and explain more fully and precisely the
nature of moral motivation. Sections 2 and 3 explore two approaches to
the task. While the approach discussed in section 3 has been
predominant, the approach to be considered briefly in section 2
provides an instructive contrast, as well as a useful first glimpse of
how ideas about moral motivation have been thought to bear on broader
metaethical questions. Section 4 explores more general considerations
about moral motivation and metaethics, while section 5 considers
alleged implications for philosophical theories about moral motivation
from recent work in empirical psychology. 


## 2. Moral Motivation and the Nature of Moral Properties



When we judge that an action is right or wrong or that a state of
affairs is good or bad, we seem to represent the world as being a
certain way. We seem to express a moral belief, attributing a
particular moral property or normative characteristic to the action or
state of affairs. Taking the apparent representational form of moral
judgments as our lead, we might try to explain moral motivation by
appealing to the nature of the *properties* that figure in our
moral judgments. Perhaps we are reliably motivated by our moral
judgments, at least when those judgments are roughly correct, because
moral properties like *rightness* and *goodness*
themselves motivate us, when we apprehend them.



J.L. Mackie (1977) famously criticizes this picture of moral
properties in his extended argument against the objectivity of ethics.
Mackie claims to find something like it in the work of a number of
historical figures, including Kant and Sidgwick, but his clearest
presentation of the picture comes in his remarks about Plato. Mackie
writes: "In Plato's theory the Forms, and in particular
the Form of the Good, are eternal, extra-mental, realities. They are a
very central structural element in the fabric of the world. But it is
held also that just knowing them or 'seeing' them will not
merely tell men what to do but will ensure that they do it, overruling
any contrary inclinations. The philosopher-kings in the
*Republic* can, Plato thinks, be trusted with unchecked power
because their education will have given them knowledge of the Forms.
Being acquainted with the Forms of the Good and Justice and Beauty and
the rest they will, by this knowledge alone, without any further
motivation, be impelled to pursue and promote these ideals"
(Mackie 1977, 23-24).



Certain features of Plato's picture of moral motivation--or
at least Mackie's characterization of it--merit attention.
First, as Mackie construes Plato's view, moral motivation
springs directly and entirely from grasping the presence of the moral
properties themselves. Apprehension of these properties move an agent
to act, and to do so unaided by any additional source of motivation;
their motivational power depends on no desire or disposition of the
individual herself. Second, apprehension of moral properties not only
motivates on its own: it provides *overriding* motivation. Once
an agent does apprehends them, their motivating power overcomes any
opposing desires or inclinations.



In maintaining, as he does, that Plato's theory of the Forms
depicts what objective values would have to be like, Mackie, in
effect, subscribes to (and attributes to Plato) a view called
*existence internalism*. According to existence internalism, a
necessary connection exists between having a certain normative status
and
 motivation.[1]
 A state of affairs couldn't *be* good, for example,
unless apprehension of it was capable of motivating, though it need
not motivate overridingly. If an individual apprehends something and
fails to be moved, then *ceteris paribus*, it isn't good.
As Mackie describes Plato's view, objective values provide
overriding motivation, and so the view reflects a particularly strong
form of existence internalism. According to that form of existence
internalism, a state of affairs wouldn't be good or valuable
unless apprehension of it would provide overriding motivation. The
internalist character of Mackie's Platonic picture curiously
aligns it with contemporary views that similarly accept forms of
existence internalism, while holding that the capacity for motivation
in fact depends on a preexisting desire. Consider a view about reasons
associated most prominently with Bernard Williams (1981). According to
what is called *internalism about reasons* or *reasons
internalism*, necessarily, if an individual has a reason to do an
action, he must be able to be motivated to do that action. On
Williams' view, in order to be motivated, an individual must
have some motivating attitude in her current "motivational
set." Roughly speaking, then, if a consideration does not
motivate a person given her current desires or motivational set, it
cannot be a reason for her to act. Both the views of Williams and of
Mackie's Plato posit a necessary connection between normative
status and motivation, but the former view makes normative status
depend, in a way the latter view would flatly reject, on an
individual's subjective motives. 



Mackie's discussion provides a first illustration of how
accounts of moral motivation have been deployed to defend or rebut
broader positions in metaethics. According to Mackie, the motivating
power of objective values, if there were such values, would have to be
just as Plato depicted it. "Plato's Forms give a dramatic
picture of what objective values would have to be. The Form of the
Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a
direction and an overriding motive; something's being good both
tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it.
An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with
it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every
person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because
the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it" (Mackie
1977, 40). Mackie contends that the moral sentences we utter when we
make moral judgments in fact express propositions about just such
"objectively prescriptive" properties; as a result, our
moral judgments can be true or false. So *moral
cognitivism*--the view that moral judgments and beliefs, and
the sentences that express them, can be true or false--provides
the correct account of moral semantics, of what our moral judgments
mean. Given that our moral discourse is *cognitivist*, it would
seem to presume the correctness of *moral realism*, the view,
roughly, that moral judgments and beliefs are truth evaluable, and
some of them are literally
 true.[2]
 But moral discourse suffers from what is called "presupposition
failure," according to Mackie: moral discourse presupposes
objectively prescriptive properties, but there aren't any; such
properties would have to be "queer entities" unlike
anything else in the world. Talk about morality is, Mackie evidently
thinks, rather like talk about unicorns. Our "unicorn
talk" expresses propositions (at least assuming it follows
medieval legend) about horse-like creatures, tamable only by virgins,
whose spiral horns possess magical powers. But there are no such
creatures, and so our unicorn talk is systematically in error, though
few of us any longer succumb to the error. In denying the existence of
moral properties, Mackie rejects moral realism, combining a
cognitivist moral semantics with an *error theory*. According
to the error theory, "although most people in making moral
judgments implicitly claim...to be pointing to something
objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false" (Mackie
1977,
 35).[3]



Although contemporary philosophers have been divided with respect to
Mackie's moral skepticism, they have mostly agreed in rejecting
his extremely strong claims about what moral motivation, and the
objective moral properties that figure in our moral judgments, would
have to be like. They have uniformly rejected the suggestion that a
grasp of morality's requirements would produce overriding
motivation to act accordingly. And most have rejected efforts to
explain moral motivation by appealing to a motivating power emanating
from moral properties and the acts and states of affairs that
instantiate them. One partial exception to this last claim may be
worth noting. Christine Korsgaard (1996) has endorsed the idea of
something like objectively prescriptive entities, though these
entities are not, in her view, moral properties. Korsgaard shares
Mackie's skepticism about objective values of the sort he
describes as figuring in the moral realist views of philosophers like
Plato. Nevertheless, she observes, Mackie is wrong and the realist is
right with respect to whether any extant entities can meet the dual
criteria of providing the agent who knows of them with "both a
direction and a motive." It is, she insists, "the most
familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can
tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the others
animals" (Korsgaard 1996, 166). Most philosophers, even those
sympathetic to Kant's moral philosophy and to Korsgaard's
brand of Kantianism, find the idea that people (and non-human animals)
have value and can in that regard "tell us what to do" and
"make us do it" rather elusive. But Korsgaard's
claims are part of a large, extremely rich picture of ethics that
cannot be explored here, and a fair assessment of her claims would
require attention to this larger picture. The important point, for
present purposes, is that at least some philosophers, Korsgaard, and
perhaps others drawn to ideas deriving from Kant's moral
philosophy, retain some attraction to the idea that moral motivation
and normativity find their source in inherently normative or
"objectively prescriptive" entities.



Whether or not there are any properties or entities with anything like
the powers Mackie describes, it is a mistake to suppose that moral
realists and objectivists must be committed to their existence. No
realist or objectivist need think that moral properties, or facts
about their instantiation, will, when apprehended, be sufficient to
motivate all persons regardless of their circumstances, including
their cognitive and motivational makeup. And realists certainly need
not take the view that Mackie ascribes to Plato, that seeing objective
values will ensure that one acts, "overruling any contrary
inclination" (Mackie 1977,23). An individual might grasp a moral
fact, for example, but suffer from temporary irrationality or weakness
of will; she might be free of such temporary defects but possess a
more indelible motivational makeup that impedes or defeats the
motivating power of moral facts. Any plausible account of moral
motivation will, and must, acknowledge these sources of motivational
failure; and any plausible analysis of moral properties must allow for
them. Even those realists or objectivists who maintain that all
*rational* and *motivationally unimpaired* persons will
be moved by moral facts need not think they will be
*overridingly* indefeasibly motivated. As already noted,
regardless of their views with respect to broader metaethical
questions, contemporary philosophers do not take any position on the
precise strength of moral motivation--with the qualification
(alluded to earlier) that they reject, apparently universally, the
idea that moral motivation is ordinarily overriding.


## 3. Moral Judgment and Motivation



Philosophers have most often attempted to explain moral motivation not
by appealing to the special powers of moral properties but by
appealing to the nature of *moral judgments*. Perhaps moral
judgments are such that no person could sincerely judge an act morally
right or a state of affairs good, while remaining *wholly*
unmoved. Efforts to understand moral motivation in terms of motivation
by moral judgments must confront two central questions. First, what is
the nature of the connection between moral judgment and
motivation--do moral judgments motivate *necessarily* or
do they motivate only *contingently*? Second, can moral
judgments motivate on their own or can they motivate only by the
intermediation of a desire or other conative state? Of course,
philosophers have answered these questions in varying ways.


### 3.1 Humeanism v. Anti-Humeanism



Let's consider the second question first. Now one way in which
moral judgments could motivate, and, indeed, motivate on their own,
would be if moral judgments were not representational after all.
Suppose moral judgments did not ascribe properties and express moral
beliefs about what things have those properties. Suppose instead, as
*moral noncognitivism* maintains, that moral judgments express
desires or other *conative* states--what philosophers
sometimes call "pro-attitudes." Then it would be clear how
moral judgments connect to motivation. They simply express a
motivating state that the individual already has; to make a (sincere)
moral judgment is already to be motivated, at least to some degree.
The real puzzle as to how moral judgments can motivate arises for
those who maintain that moral judgments express *moral
beliefs*, for the connection between belief, a *cognitive*
state, and motivation is uncertain.



How philosophers resolve the puzzle turns on a central issue in moral
psychology, namely, whether what is called the *Humean theory*
of motivation is true. According to the Humean view, belief is
insufficient for motivation, which always requires, in addition to
belief, the presence of a desire or conative state. Moral motivation
thus cannot arise from moral belief alone but must depend as well upon
a preexisting desire or other conative or intrinsically motivating
state. It would perhaps be fair to say that Humeanism continues to be
the dominant view. It has been held both by some who accept and by
some who reject cognitivism and moral realism, so it has not alone
been considered decisive in settling broader issues in metaethics. The
view has been held by noncognitivist anti-realists, for example, but
also by moral realists like Michael Smith (1994) and Peter Railton
(1986a). A number of prominent philosophers, including Thomas Nagel
(1970), John McDowell (1979), Mark Platts (1980), David McNaughton
(1988), Jonathan Dancy (1993), Thomas Scanlon (1998), and Russ
Shafer-Landau (2003), have rejected the Humean picture, however,
arguing that, in fact, moral motivation does not depend on the
existence of desire: moral belief can itself give rise to
motivation.



Precisely how and under what conditions moral belief can itself
motivate is a matter of dispute among anti-Humeans. Some hold that
moral belief is sufficient to motivate directly. Merely believing that
it is right, say, to keep a promise will move the believer, at least
to some degree, to act so as to keep the promise. Others hold that
moral beliefs produce desires, which then motivate in conjunction with
the moral beliefs that produced them. Believing that it is right to
keep a promise produces a desire to do so, and these cognitive and
conative states jointly move the believer, at least to some degree, to
act so as to keep the promise. Certain virtue theorists offer a quite
refined version of the latter idea, arguing that only a particular
type of moral belief--one tied to an ideal or complete conception
of a situation in light of a more expansive understanding of how to
live--necessarily generates in an individual the motivation to do
as a moral belief of that type indicates she ought (Little 1997;
McDowell 1978). The virtuous person has not mere moral beliefs but a
complex of moral belief and outlook which will reliably move her to
behave morally. Proponents of various anti-Humean views readily
acknowledge that persons often fail to be moved and to act as they
believe they ought. According to any of these views, however, a
failure of motivation springs from a cognitive failure.



As already noted, many have found the basic Humean picture most
plausible. Before examining a few of the considerations thought to
favor it, we should make note of the fact that Humeanism does not
itself commit one to any particular view as to the sorts of desires
responsible for moral motivation. A Humean might well take the view
that no particular desire is implicated in moral motivation. On the
contrary, varying desires may, when contingently present, move an
individual to do what she judges she ought to do, including the desire
to be well regarded by her neighbors, to advance her interests in some
way, or to promote the welfare of those who matter to her. Appealing
simply to some contingent desire or other may be inadequate, however,
to explain the basic phenomenon of moral motivation. After all, what
needs to be explained, many would argue, is not merely how we may, on
occasion or even frequently, be motivated to do as we think we ought:
what needs to be explained is how we are *reliably* motivated
to do as we think we ought. That includes explaining why motivation
reliably *shifts* so as to track changes in our moral beliefs.
As we will see, those who accept the Humean picture have sometimes
suggested that we look to quite particular desires or to deep features
of human psychology to explain moral motivation.



One argument in favor of the Humean picture alleges that if beliefs
were sufficient to motivate, then we would expect people with the same
beliefs to be motivated in the same way. In fact, however, whereas
some people are motivated by their moral belief, say, that
contributing to famine relief is a duty, to write a check to Oxfam,
others feel no such inclination whatsoever. But anti-Humeans claim
that they can explain away these differences by showing either that
differential motivation is in fact due to other differences in belief
or to motives that compete with and override the desires generated by
moral beliefs (Shafer-Landau 2003, 129-130). 



A second argument in favor of Humeanism appeals to the view about
reasons associated with Williams (1981), briefly discussed earlier.
Recall that according to internalism about reasons or reasons
internalism, it is necessarily the case that if an individual has a
reason to do an action, then he must be able to be motivated to do
that action. On a more specific version of the view, an individual has
a reason to do an action only if he has a desire to perform that
action or to achieve some end that requires doing that action. If
internalism about reasons is correct, then when an individual
correctly judges himself to have a reason to perform an action, he
must already have a preexisting desire. Anti-Humeans sometimes reject
reasons internalism, as well as the Humean theory of motivation. But
even allowing that reasons internalism is correct, they believe this
second argument fails to undermine their position. For it seems
possible that not all of our moral judgments involve the judgment
(correct or otherwise) that we have a reason for action. An individual
could, for example, judge that it would be right to fulfill a promise
without judging that she has a reason to do anything. What might
explain this? Perhaps, for instance, she fails to reflect on the
connection between what it is right to do and what one has reason to
do; or perhaps she mistakenly believes that truths about morally right
action do not entail truths about what one has reason to do. If an
individual can judge an action right without judging that she has a
reason to perform the action, then even if an action's being
right entails a reason for action and reasons entail desires, moral
beliefs need not involve preexisting desires (Shafer-Landau 2003,
 128-129).[4]



Perhaps the most sophisticated argument in favor of the Humean theory
of motivation appeals to considerations in the philosophy of mind and
moral psychology, specifically, to fundamental differences between
belief and desire that would seem to count against
 anti-Humeanism.[5]
 Belief and desire, as a conceptual matter, it is argued, differ in
what has been called their "direction of fit" (Anscombe
1963). They differ in such a way, it would seem, that belief states
cannot entail desire states. Whereas beliefs aim to fit the world,
desires aim to change the world. That is to say, whereas beliefs have
a "mind-to-world" direction of fit, desires have a
"world-to-mind" direction of fit. For a mental state to
count as a belief, it must be at least somewhat responsive to evidence
that bears on the truth or falsity of its propositional content; that
the facts are contrary to a belief counts against it. In contrast,
facts contrary to the propositional content of a desire--the fact
that the world is not currently as one wants--need not count
against that desire. Precisely because desires aim not to answer to
the world but to make the world answer to them (to make the world fit
their propositional contents or what the desires are desires for),
they may well persist even when the world refuses to cooperate.
Assuming the foregoing claims about belief and desire are true, so the
argument goes, at least some versions of anti-Humeanism would require
what is incoherent, namely, mental states with incompatible directions
of fit: mental states that could be at once representational in the
way that beliefs are and motivational in the way that desires are. But
anti-Humeans would argue that their picture of moral motivation via
moral belief need involve no incoherence. To see this, we need merely
consider the possibility that a mental state *could* have
opposing directions of fit so long as in exhibiting each direction of
fit, the mental state was directed at different propositions: the
virtuous agent "believes" (belief direction of fit), say,
*that a state of affairs S ought to be promoted* and
"desires" (desire direction of fit) *that S be brought
about* (Little 1997,
 64).[6]



Anti-Humeans have offered various considerations--some positive,
others negative--to support their rejection of Humeanism. On the
negative side, they attempt to defeat considerations thought to favor
the Humean theory, as we have already seen in the course of exploring
some of those considerations. On the positive side, Anti-Humeans
sometimes appeal to the phenomenology of moral motivation, arguing
that it supports their view. Ask the agent who is sorely tempted to do
otherwise why he ultimately acted as he believed morality required and
he will not report his desires at the moment of action; rather, he
will explain that he believed the action was *the right thing to
do* (Shafer-Landau 2003, 123). Our own experience and that of
others tells us that although our actions often arise from our
desires, sometimes they arise instead from our evaluative beliefs. As
further support for these claims about the phenomenology of moral
motivation, Shafer-Landau has appealed to nonmoral cases in which
motivation seems to follow from belief. Consider the individual who
convinces herself that she has a desire she in fact lacks, such as the
desire to become a lawyer. She enrolls in law school only to find
herself unmotivated by her coursework and dropping out of school,
after a summer spent working as a carpenter reveals her love of
carpentry (Shafer-Landau 2003, 125). What most plausibly explains the
individual's enrollment in law school and her half-hearted
efforts during that first year would seem to be her mistaken belief
that she desired to become a lawyer. Given that many of our choices
will involve subjecting ourselves to tedious, even painful,
experiences--experiences that surely none of us desire for their
own sake--the Humean owes us some explanation of our willingness
to persist in such choices. The Humean will, it seems, be forced to
appeal to some further desire we thereby seek to satisfy, such as, in
the case of the law school drop-out, the desire to become a lawyer.
But such an explanation will be implausible in cases in which we are
mistaken about our desires. No compelling reason can be given to
accept a desire-based explanation of our actions, Shafer-Landau
argues, over the more straightforward explanation in terms of our
beliefs.



Yet Humeans would insist that there is nothing straightforward about
attempts to explain moral motivation and action in terms of beliefs;
just recall the argument for Humeanism based on differences in
"direction of fit" between belief and desire. Leaving that
argument to one side, however, neither the phenomenology of moral
motivation nor cases in which individuals are mistaken about their
desires support the anti-Humean view. The fact that an individual may
cite a belief rather than a desire in explaining why she did what she
judged to be right does nothing to show either that her moral belief
directly moved her to act or that it generated a desire that moved her
to act. Individual self-reports are notoriously unreliable and can
hardly settle so fundamental a question about moral psychology. As for
cases in which individuals are (allegedly) mistaken about their
desires, common sense suggests that the Humean has the more
straightforward explanation. The Humean might argue that the law
school drop-out in fact did desire to become a lawyer, or at least to
enroll in law school; she simply didn't understand what studying
law would be like. Once she experienced it, she lost her desire to
continue her studies. Alternatively, perhaps she really didn't
desire to become a lawyer, though she told herself that she did.
Still, she was moved to enter law school not by her bare belief, but
by a more deep seated, perhaps not fully conscious desire, such as the
desire to please her parents or to have the prestige or pay that comes
with being a lawyer. Anti-Humeans have given us no reason to favor
their explanation over the Humean alternatives. Of course,
anti-Humeans need not think the phenomenology, as they suppose it to
be, settles the dispute, but Humeans will insist that it does not even
tend to favor the anti-Humean position.



The foregoing discussion does not, of course, cover every argument
that has been offered in the longstanding debate between Humeans and
anti-Humeans, just a few of the ones that philosophers have evidently
found most persuasive. Whether and how the debate might be resolved
remains uncertain, in part, because the nature of the dispute is
rather unclear. Is it at bottom a conceptual dispute to be resolved,
for instance, by analysis of the concepts of belief and desire?
Perhaps, though arguments that appeal to considerations in the
philosophy of mind and moral psychology have thus far proved less than
fully convincing. Is the dispute instead fundamentally empirical? The
tendency to appeal to common sense and the phenomenology of moral
action would seem to betray some temptation to treat the issue as at
least partly empirical, though perhaps these appeals are meant to
serve merely as a check on conceptual claims. Appeals to our
experience can, in any case, be just as well, and just as
inconclusively, invoked by those on either side of the debate. In the
context of warding off criticisms of the view that virtue is
knowledge, Little (1997) suggests that the dispute is fundamentally
theoretical, implicating large and complex questions about the nature
of agency, normativity, and responsibility. Whether or not that is so,
Little may be right in suggesting that the dispute will not be
resolvable by appeal to merely local arguments of the sort we have
considered. How plausible one finds either side may turn, in the end,
on the plausibility of the larger theories in which these views
respectively figure.


### 3.2 Internalism v. Externalism



Whatever one might conclude as to whether moral judgments or beliefs
motivate on their own or only by means of some preexisting conative
state, a question remains as to the precise nature of the connection
between moral judgment and motivation. Do moral judgments motivate
*necessarily* or do they motivate only *contingently*?
If the latter, then how are we to explain why the contingent
connection between moral judgment and motivation is as strong and
reliable as it appears to be?



The main division of opinion regarding the nature of the connection
between moral judgment and motivation is between those philosophers
who accept and those who reject a thesis known as *motivational
judgment internalism*. This thesis is a form of *judgment
internalism*. Traditionally, judgment internalism has been
characterized as claiming either that motivation is internal to moral
judgment, in the sense that moral judgment itself motivates without
need of an accompanying desire ("strong internalism") or
that there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and
motivation ("weak internalism"). As currently
characterized in the literature, judgment internalism makes the
conceptual claim that a necessary connection exists between sincere
moral judgment and either justifying reasons or motives: necessarily,
if an individual sincerely judges that she ought to ph, then she
has a reason or motive to ph. Judgment internalism must be
distinguished from the thesis of existence internalism, which we
considered earlier. Recall that according to *existence*
internalism, a necessary connection exists between having a certain
normative status and
 motivation.[7]
 A consideration can *be* a reason or *be* right-making,
for example, only if it is capable of motivating. Whereas judgment
internalism states a necessary condition on being a judgment of a
certain kind, existence internalism states a necessary condition on
being an act or state or consideration of a certain normative
kind.



*Motivational* judgment internalism, hereafter
"internalism," holds that a person cannot sincerely make a
moral judgment without being *motivated* at least to some
degree to abide by her judgment. Internalism can assume weaker or
stronger forms. On Mackie's account of Plato, is it the view
that necessarily a person who makes a sincere moral judgment will be
*overridingly* motivated to comply with her judgment. Thus,
what objective moral properties must be like involves a rather extreme
form of existence internalism, which would be allied with a rather
extreme form of judgment internalism. Contemporary moral philosophers
have been no more attracted to so strong a claim when moral motivation
is tied to moral judgment than they have been when moral motivation is
tied to moral properties. Instead, they have accepted weaker forms of
internalism, which allow that even though, necessarily, the person who
makes a sincere moral judgment will feel *some* motivation to
comply with it, that motivation can be overridden by conflicting
desires and defeated by a variety of mental maladies, such as
depression and weakness of will (Svavarsdottir 1999, sec.1). 



As should already be evident, those who accept one or another form of
motivational judgment internalism have a ready explanation of the
reliability of moral motivation, including the reliability of
motivational shifting so as to track changes in moral judgment.
Indeed, one argument offered in favor of internalism is that only if
we accept it can we plausibly explain why changes in moral motivation
reliably follow upon changes in moral judgment (Smith 1994,
71-76). Suppose Jones and Thomson are debating the moral
permissibility of abortion. Jones is inclined to believe that abortion
is morally wrong. She has been known to join the protest line outside
of a local abortion clinic and to try to dissuade women from having
abortions. Thomson, in contrast, believes that abortion is morally
permissible. Suppose that after extensive discussion, Thomson
convinces Jones that the more plausible arguments support the
permissibility of abortion. What would people reasonably predict in
terms of Jones's future conduct? They would reasonably predict,
among other things, that she would no longer be inclined to join the
protest line and that she would desist from her efforts to discourage
other women from having abortions. But that prediction rests precisely
on the expectation that, at least insofar as Jones is a good and
strong-willed person--not depressed or apathetic or suffering
from weakness of will--what she is motivated to do will have been
altered in response to the change in her moral judgment, which is just
what internalism would lead us to expect. If internalism is true,
then, we can readily account for motivational changes. The reliable
connection between moral judgment and motivation is, ultimately, best
explained internally as due to the very content or nature of moral
judgment itself (Smith 1994, 72). Those who accept internalism will,
of course, ultimately owe us an account of the nature of moral
judgments that explains and captures the necessary connection that
supposedly exists between moral judgment and
 motivation.[8]



The thesis that directly opposes motivational judgment internalism,
*motivational externalism*, or just *externalism*,
denies that it is a conceptual platitude that necessarily moral
judgments motivate. According to externalism, any connection that
exists between moral judgment and motivation is purely contingent,
though it may turn out to rest on deep features of human
 nature.[9]
 Moral motivation occurs when a moral judgment combines with a desire,
and the content of the judgment is related to the content of the
desire so as to rationalize the action. The foregoing argument in
favor of internalism in effect denies that externalism can adequately
explain the basic phenomenon of moral motivation and, in particular,
the seemingly reliable shifting of moral motivation to match changes
in moral judgment. But why think externalism will be explanatorily
inadequate? Once we have the internalist thesis about the necessary
connection between moral judgment and motivation, it seems we have, as
it were, the whole story: if an individual makes a moral judgment, she
is, *ceteris paribus*, motivated; if she is not motivated, she
was not making a sincere and competent moral judgment at all,
appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Because the externalist
denies the existence of a necessary connection between moral judgment
and motivation, the externalist thesis leaves us in need of an
independent explanation of moral motivation. The internalist maintains
that any such explanation will fall short--call this the
"internist challenge" to externalism.



According to one important version of the internalist challenge,
offered by Michael Smith, the externalist would have to explain the
connection between moral judgment and motivation *externally*
as due not to the content of moral judgments but, rather, the
"content of the motivational dispositions possessed by the good
and strong-willed person" (Smith 1994, 72). But this allegedly
commits the externalist to an unacceptable picture of moral
motivation. The internalist will say that an agent who is moved to do
the right thing is moved to do the very thing that is given by the
content of her moral judgment; she is motivated to do the very thing
she judges to be right (73). The person who judges it right to perform
an act that advances another's welfare, for example, acquires
and is moved by a non-derivative desire or concern to advance his
welfare. In contrast, the externalist must say that an agent is moved
to do what she judges right due to the content of the motivational
dispositions that she has in being a good person. The question then is
what those dispositions might be. Recall that when a person's
judgment changes, her motivation tends to change. If such motivational
shifting is to be explained in terms of the motivational dispositions
of the good person, rather than in terms of the content of her moral
judgments, then the only disposition that could do the explaining
would be the motivation *to do the right thing*, whatever it
happens to be (75). According to Smith, such a view implausibly treats
moral motivation as derivative; it derives from the desire to do the
right thing together with a person's current moral judgment
about the right thing to do. A person desires to promote
another's good, *not* non-derivatively because she judges
it right to promote his good and so desires to do just that, but
because she desires to do what is right, and that just happens to be
promoting his good. But the good person, Smith claims, cares
*non-derivatively* about justice, equality, and the welfare of
loved ones. To care non-derivatively only about doing what one
believes right, to be motivated in that way, and not by these other
things, is "a fetish or moral vice" (75). Smith suggests
that in taking the good person to be motivated to do what she believes
morally right, whatever that might be, the externalist picture
"alienates her from the ends at which morality properly
aims" (76).



Externalists have responded to this challenge by pointing out that the
fact that a good person is motivated to do what she thinks right does
not preclude her from also being motivated non-derivately by direct
concern, for example, for the welfare of loved ones. They have also
argued that there is nothing fetishistic in supposing that the good
person is motivationally disposed to do the right thing and that, in
any case, alternative externalist explanations of a reliable
connection between moral judgment and motivation are available (Copp
1997, 49-50). An individual could, for example, simply be
disposed to desire immediately to do whatever she believes it right to
do or whatever she judges to be valuable, rather than being disposed
to do the right thing, whatever it turns out to be (Copp 1997,
50-51). Sigrun Svavarsdottir (1999) has argued that Smith is
mistaken when he claims that the externalist's only option for
explaining motivational shifting is to appeal to a desire to do the
right thing, but she thinks that something close to the view Smith
rejects provides just the right externalist picture of moral
motivation. We should, on her view, understand the good person as
concerned with doing what is morally valuable or required, where that
concern should be understood to encompass what is honest, fair, kind,
considerate, just, and so on. The fact that the good person is so
motivationally disposed does not mean, as Smith seems to suggest, that
she cares only about one thing, namely, doing what she believes is
right. Nor does it mean that she undertakes an act conceiving of it
simply as the right thing to do. On the contrary, it is compatible
with the externalist picture that the good person will often simply
respond directly to another's need for comfort or relief.
Moreover, an externalist view that conceives of the good person as
motivated by the desire to be moral does not involve introducing an
alien (or alienating) thought--"it's the right thing
to do"-- into her consciousness in order to explain moral
motivation. Rather, having formed the moral judgment that she ought to
ph, the desire to be moral plays, in the good person, a role in
effecting the "psychological transition" from judging it
right to ph to wanting to ph (Svavarsdottir 1999, 201). Finally,
Svavarsdottir argues that although a desire to do the morally right
action, say, aid another in need, may derive at first from a desire to
be moral, it may come to operate independently of the latter desire,
so that her desire to aid is not simply an instrumental desire
(Svavarsdottir 1999, 205-206, 213-214).



Indeed, the point on which externalists want to insist is that some
conative state must be at work in the movement from judging it right
to ph to wanting or being moved to ph. After all, the
externalist will remind us, this movement does not occur in
*all* moral agents; some of them will judge it right to ph
without being moved to ph. Externalists typically take it as a
point of common sense observation that wide variation exists in the
impact moral judgments have on people's feelings, deliberations,
and actions (Svavarsdottir 1999, 161).



Debates between internalists and externalists often center on the
figure of the "amoralist"--the person who apparently
makes moral judgments, while remaining wholly unmoved to comply with
them. Various efforts have been made to respond to the problem of the
amoralist, and these efforts have led to the development of numerous
versions of motivational judgment internalism. Generally, internalists
have insisted that the amoralist is a conceptual impossibility. The
standard strategy internalists employ to cope with the hypothetical
amoralist is to identify a content for moral judgments which would
have the result that no agent (or no *rational* agent, anyway)
could employ moral concepts competently and make a sincere moral
judgment, while remaining unmoved. Internalists allow that moral
motivation need not be overriding; competing desires may be stronger
and so may win out. They allow, too, that moral motivation is
defeasible; a person may judge it right to ph, while failing to be
moved to ph, due to depression or weakness of will. Cases of
irrationality aside, however, the person who *appears* to be
making a moral judgment, while remaining unmoved, must really either
lack competence with moral concepts or be speaking insincerely. In the
latter case, she judges an act "right" only in an
"inverted commas" sense (R. M Hare, 1963), as when the
unrepentant criminal, seeking a lesser sentence, tells the judge, in a
remorseful tone, that he knows what he did was
"wrong".



Externalists, of course, maintain that the amoralist is not a
conceptual impossibility. After all, if we can *conceive of*
amoralists, as we surely can, then they are not conceptually
impossible (Shafer-Landau 2003, 146). Contrary to what internalists
claim, individuals can sincerely and competently apply moral concepts
without being motivated in any specific way. While some amoralists may
use moral terms only in an inverted commas sense, not all cases of
motivational failure can be explained away as cases of irrationality,
conceptual incompetence, or insincerity.



At this point in the dialectic, internalists and externalists tend to
produce additional arguments in an effort to overcome what seems an
impasse. Externalists, for example, may invite us to consider cases in
which a person judges it right to ph, while believing it would in
fact be impossible to succeed in doing ph, or cases in which she
thinks doing ph would markedly interfere with her welfare or would
prevent her from obtaining something she dearly desires. Doesn't
it seem plausible that in such cases a person could judge it right to
ph, while failing to be moved to ph? More generally,
externalists argue that internalists cannot make sense of
morality's historical challenger--the skeptic who asks,
"Why be moral?" Externalists may also offer arguments
aimed at shifting the burden on to the internalist to establish that
internalism is a conceptual platitude (Svavarsdottir 1999, 2006).



In order more fully to address the variety of cases in which the
connection between moral judgment and motivation fails, internalists
have offered more qualified versions of internalism. These more
qualified versions of internalism maintain that the necessary
connection between moral judgment and motivation holds only under
certain conditions. As for what these conditions are, a variety of
views have been advanced. For example, Smith (1994) has advanced a
version of internalism, or what he calls the "practicality
requirement," maintaining that a necessary connection holds
between moral judgment and motivation, at least in the "good and
strong-willed person." The connection between moral judgment and
motivation holds, he claims, in the person who is "practically
rational." Others have suggested that it holds in the person who
is "psychologically normal" (Dreier 1990) or in the person
who is "morally perceptive" (Bjorklund et al. 2012:
126-128).



But problems remain. What about the person who made a certain moral
judgment in the past and had always been moved to act in accordance
with that judgment but who ceases to be motivated, while continuing to
make the judgment? Perhaps she judges that she morally ought to work
actively to aid the sick and poor. After 20 years of doing so, she
concludes that she has done enough and ceases to be motivated to act
on her judgment, yet she continues to judge that she morally ought to
work actively to aid the sick and poor. Doesn't it seem
plausible that she is competent with the moral concepts, that she
speaks sincerely, that she uses moral terms in their ordinary sense,
rather than an "inverted commas" sense? Yet she need not
be apathetic or depressed or otherwise mentally ill.



Cases like these have led some to move away from the idea that the
necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation holds with
respect to each individual moral judgment. Those who advance forms of
what Bjorklund et al. (2012) (see also Bjornsson et al. 2015) call
"deferred internalism" hold that the necessary connection
between moral judgment and motivation can be more attenuated.



> 
> **Deferred internalism**:
>   
> 
> Necessarily if a person judges that she morally ought to ph, then
> she is either (at least somewhat) motivated to ph or some
> relevantly connected moral judgments are accompanied by motivation.
> (Bjorklund et al. 2012: 128)
> 



So, in the example above, our aid worker who has ceased to be
motivated but still judges that she morally ought to ph had some
relevantly connected moral judgments that were accompanied by
motivation, namely, her own past judgments. Others maintain that the
amoralist is only intelligible relative to conditions in which moral
motivation ordinarily holds, and this has led some to find the
relevantly connected moral judgments in an agent's community.
Tresan (2009a and 2009b), for example, considers the possibility of a
"communal" version of deferred internalism, which counts
an individual's beliefs as moral only when, in the
believer's community, beliefs with that content are motivating.
(And see Blackburn 2001, 63.)



As versions of internalism become increasingly qualified, one might be
inclined to wonder whether there is much distinction any longer
between internalism and externalism. One might be inclined to wonder
whether either has the edge in explaining the reliability of moral
motivation. And if that is the case, one might be attracted to what
seems to be the simpler story the externalist has to tell about the
connection between moral judgment and motivation.



Externalists maintain that they can fully and adequately account for
the strong but ultimately contingent connection between moral judgment
and motivation, offering various explanations of how moral judgments
reliably motivate. As we have seen, Svavarsdottir seeks to explain
moral motivation by appealing to a particular conative state, namely,
the desire to do what is morally valuable or required--the
desire, in short to be moral. Peter Railton appeals to the concern
people generally have to be able to justify their choices and conduct
from a more impartial standpoint. But he also apparently thinks that
people's more ordinary motives play a part; at least this is
suggested when he remarks that, if we really want people to take
morality seriously, "we should ask how we might change the ways
we live so that moral conduct would more regularly be rational given
the ends we actually have" (Railton 1986a, 203). According to
David Brink, externalism makes the motivational force of our moral
judgments "a matter of contingent psychological fact, depending
on both the content of people's moral views and their attitudes
and desires" (Brink 1989, 49). Still, these attitudes and
desires may be widely shared and rooted in central features of human
nature. Suppose, as the philosopher David Hume maintained, that
sympathy is a deep and widely shared feature of human psychology.
Then, Brink observes, while it may be a contingent fact that most
people will have some desire to comply with what they believe morality
requires, it will also be a deep fact about them. "Moral
motivation, on such a view, can be widespread and predictable, even if
it is neither necessary, nor universal, nor overriding" (Brink
1989, 49; Boyd 1998, sec. 4.7).



Philosophers who endorse externalism commonly also endorse Humeanism,
though it is important to remember that many internalists, including
most noncognitivists and expressivists about moral judgment, also
accept the Humean theory of motivation. Indeed, some contend that the
basic observation that supports externalism also lends support to the
Humean theory: wide variation in the motivational impact of moral
judgments suggests not only that they motivate contingently but that
they do so via some conative state. Still, externalists need not be
Humeans. Shafer-Landau, who rejects both Humeanism and internalism,
holds that moral beliefs are indeed intrinsically
motivating--they can motivate by themselves. But contra
internalism, they are not necessarily motivating. Intrinsically
motivating beliefs may fail to motivate under conditions of extreme
exhaustion, serious depression, or overwhelming contrary impulses
(Shafer-Landau 2003, 147-148). The fact that Shafer-Landau
treats the defeasibility of moral motivation under such conditions as
supporting a form of externalism, whereas Smith treats defeasibility
under like conditions as compatible with a form of internalism,
suggests some disagreement among philosophers as to precisely when a
view should be classified as a form of internalism or
 externalism.[10]


## 4. Moral Motivation and Metaethics



Philosophical thinking about the phenomenon of moral motivation has
long overlapped with and influenced ongoing efforts to address
foundational questions in ethics. Of special importance has been the
use of ideas concerning the nature of moral motivation to support
*anti-realism* in ethics--the view that contrary to the
claims of moral realists, there are no moral facts, no truths about
what morality requires, forbids, or permits, except, perhaps, in some
minimalist sense. We have already seen one example of how ideas about
moral motivation might bear on broader metaethical views in
Mackie's critique of ethical objectivism. As noted earlier,
Mackie defends *cognitivist anti-realism*, a form of
anti-realism that couples cognitivism with an error theory. According
to cognitivist anti-realism, although ethical sentences express
propositions about objectively prescriptive properties--ones with
"to-be-pursuedness" built in--no such properties
exist; and due to this presupposition failure, we are systematically
in error in our moral judgments.



The development of metaethical theories over roughly the past eighty
some years has perhaps been shaped most profoundly by the use of
certain theses about moral motivation to support *noncognitivist
anti-realism*. *Noncognitivist* anti-realism, like
cognitivist anti-realism, rejects the existence of robust moral
properties and moral facts. But unlike the latter view, it rejects
cognitivism in favor of *noncognitivism*, which as
traditionally depicted is the view that moral judgments express
attitudes rather than beliefs or propositions, and that, consequently,
they are not truth
 evaluable.[11]



Shafer-Landau (2003) offers a formulation of what he calls the
*Non-cognitivist Argument*, which helpfully makes explicit how
theses that have figured in efforts to understand moral motivation
have been employed to support noncognitivist anti-realism:


1. Necessarily, if one sincerely judges an action right, then one is
motivated to some extent to act in accordance with that judgment.
(*Motivational Judgment Internalism*)
2. When taken by themselves, beliefs neither motivate nor generate
any motivationally efficacious states. (*Motivational
Humeanism*)
3. Therefore, moral judgments are not beliefs. (*Moral
 Non-cognitivism*)[12]



Since moral realism incorporates the cognitivist claim that moral
judgments are beliefs, the conclusion of the Non-cognitivist Argument
entails that moral realism is false.



Contemporary philosophers who have sought to defend versions of moral
realism or objectivism have had to come to grips with this basic line
of argument, even if they have not always engaged with it explicitly.
The Non-cognitivist Argument therefore provides us with a useful tool
for mapping out competing positions in metaethics. We can categorize
philosophers' positions negatively in terms of which premises of
the noncognitivist argument they accept or
 reject.[13]
 Some have rejected premise 1, often going on to defend forms of
*naturalist moral realism* that embrace externalism (e.g.
Railton 1986; Boyd 1988; Brink 1989). According to the latter views,
moral properties are a kind of natural property and moral facts are
natural facts. Judgments about these facts express propositions, and
so they can be true or false, but these judgment do not necessarily
motivate. Whether our moral judgments motivate us is fixed by
contingent facts about our psychologies and our substantive moral
beliefs. Some have rejected premise 2 (McDowell 1978, 1979), and some
of those who have rejected premise 2 have aligned themselves with
versions of moral constructivism or rationalism (e.g. Darwall 1983;
Scanlon 1998). The latter views take widely varying forms, but they
generally see moral principles as requirements of rationality or
reason, or as the output of a hypothetical agreement among reasonable,
suitably situated persons. Moral reasons are considerations that are
motivating, at least when we properly reflect on them, but their
motivating force does not depend on a prior desire. Some have rejected
both premises 1 and 2, defending forms of *nonnaturalist moral
realism* (Shafer-Landau 2003). Moral properties, on this view, are
not identical with natural or descriptive properties, although they
may be wholly constituted by them. Moral judgments are intrinsically
motivating--they can motivate in the absence of a preexisting
desire, but they are not necessarily motivating. Finally, some have
accepted both premises 1 and 2, at least appropriately refined,
arguing that we can see them both to be compatible with moral
cognitivism, and further, with moral realism (Smith 1994). For
example, Smith understands the subject matter of judgments about right
action as being normative reasons for action. According to him,
normative reasons are given by facts about what we would, suitably
idealized, want ourselves to desire; and the existence of such facts
means that some desires are rationally required. If we believe
ourselves to have a normative reason to ph, then rationally we
ought to ph, and in judging that we have normative reason to ph,
we will necessarily, insofar as we are rational, be moved to ph.
The concept of rightness is the concept of what we would, were we
fully rational, desire ourselves to desire in our actual world. When
we believe it would be right to ph, then, we will, insofar as we
are rational, be motivated to ph.



More recently, some (e.g. Tresan 2006, 2009a, 2009b) have argued that
when understood as what Bjorklund et al. (2012) call
"non-constitutional," motivational judgment internalism is
compatible not only with Smithian rationalism, but with a wide variety
of cognitivist metaethical theories. "Non-constitutional
internalism" (or what Tresan calls "SM internalism")
is the view that according to our concept of a moral belief, a mental
state counts as a moral belief only if it is accompanied by
motivation. Necessarily, if p is a moral belief, then p is accompanied
by motivation. According to Tresan, once we recognize this form of
internalism, we see that it is compatible with almost any version of
cognitivism, and so with a range of metaethical views, including forms
of ethical naturalism (2006: 68). This contrasts with attempts to
combine internalism and cognitivism on the grounds that the nature of
moral belief is such as to guarantee motivation (at least under
certain conditions) either because of the content of moral beliefs
(Smith 1994) or because moral beliefs are themselves intrinsically
motivating states (Dancy 1993). (See Bjorklund et al. 2011).


## 5. Moral Motivation and Experimental Psychology



Work in experimental psychology may also shape how we understand and
answer our questions about moral motivation. A number of philosophers
have recently brought work in psychology to bear on questions in
metaethics and on the question of moral motivation in particular. Such
work has been argued to have implications for the nature of motivation
generally, for the debate between motivational internalists and
externalists, and for the plausibility of various philosophical
accounts of the nature of moral motivation. 



Schroeder et al. sketch what they describe as caricatures of four
possible theories of moral motivation, which they label
instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist, and
argue that "theories of morally worthy motivation that best fit
the current scientific picture are ones that owe much more to Hume or
Aristotle than to Kant"
 (72).[14]
 According to the instrumentalist, "people are motivated when
they form beliefs about how to satisfy preexisting [intrinsic]
desires" (74), which lead in turn to the formation of
nonintrinsic desires to take specific actions aimed at satisfying
their intrinsic desires. When a person has an intrinsic desire, D, and
comes to believe that ph-ing will satisfy D, she comes to desire
(nonintrinsically) to ph. On the instrumentalist view, commonly
called "Humean," the specifically moral character of
motivation comes from an intrinsic desire to do what one judges to be
right. In contrast to the instrumentalist, the cognitivist holds that
moral motivation begins, not with desires, but with beliefs about
which actions are right. Such beliefs motivate independently of
preexisting intrinsic desires. Morally worthy action arises not from
desires, at least not in the first instance, but from moral judgments
(76). The sentimentalist sees the emotions as playing a central role
in moral motivation, and for an action to be the result of moral
motivation, certain emotions must cause that action. The right kind of
emotions are things like compassion or sympathy (77). Finally, the
personalist sees the source of moral motivation in morally good
character, more specifically, in the virtues. "Good character
involves knowledge of the good, wanting what is good for its own sake,
long-standing emotional dispositions that favor good action, and
long-standing habits of responding to one's knowledge, desires
and emotions with good actions" (77). Moral action begins when a
person's sensitivity to moral patterns and moral heuristics
(such as that lying tends to be bad) leads her to judge that an action
would be good, which engages her long-standing emotional dispositions
and habits, thereby resulting in moral motivation. 



According to Schroeder et al., each of these views "presuppose
commitments regarding the nature of psychological states such as
beliefs, desires, choices, emotions, and so on, together with
commitments regarding the functional and causal roles they play"
(79). Because these commitments are not only philosophical but also
empirical, they go on to summarize the empirical
work--"textbook neuroscience"--on the
neurophysiology of motivation and to assess the implications of the
science for these four philosophical views about moral motivation.




The instrumentalist view, they argue, fares well given the
neuroscience, as does the personalist account. In contrast, the
cognitivist account of moral motivation runs into trouble "since
our moral behavior does not appear to be under the control of
cognitive states alone independently of desire" (106). The
sentimentalist's view likewise runs into difficulty
"because the emotional system, while closely linked to the
system underlying voluntary action, will turn out to be nonetheless
distinct from it unless emotions are themselves built in part from
desires" (106). Schroeder et al. acknowledge that our current
understanding of the neuroscience is incomplete and that responses can
be offered to the criticisms that they make (106). Nevertheless, they
suggest that attention to the neuroscience "could serve to
constrain future theorizing about the structure of moral
agency..." (107).



Roskies (2003) attempts to draw conclusions about a particular kind of
internalism about moral motivation by focusing on empirical evidence
drawn from patients with damage to the ventromedial (VM) cortex. More
precisely, she argues against the view that moral belief entails moral
motivation, a view she calls "motive-internalism", which
is the view called "strong internalism" in section 3.2 As
she describes it, motive-internalism is the view that
"motivation is intrinsic to, or a necessary component of moral
belief or judgment" (52). The person who sincerely believes that
she ought to F is thereby motivated, to some degree, to F. The
externalist holds, in contrast, that moral belief does not entail
moral motivation; a person can believe that she ought to F, while
lacking any motivation to F. Roskies explains that the internalist
claim involves necessity, intrinsicness, and specificity. According to
the motive-internalist, it is a *necessary* truth that
motivation accompanies moral belief or judgment, and so it is true
"of any agent capable of moral beliefs" (52). The
*intrinsicness* of motive-internalism consists in the idea that
the connection between moral belief or judgment and motivation holds
because of the content of the moral belief, rather than because of
something unrelated to the content of that belief. As for
*specificity*, motive-internalism sees moral beliefs as
different from other kinds of beliefs, which are not intrinsically
motivating (52). 



According to Roskies, the "motive-internalist" faces a
dilemma: either her internalist thesis is too weak and so is
philosophically uninteresting, or it is strong enough to be
philosophically interesting but also "demonstrably false"
(51). On the first horn of the dilemma, the internalist thesis is too
weak and so is philosophically uninteresting. Roskies illustrates this
horn of the dilemma with Smith's view that there is a necessary
connection between moral judgment and motivation, except when an agent
fails to be practically rational. This thesis requires a specification
of what it is to be practically rational, but if being practically
rational amounts to desiring to act as one judges best, she contends,
then the thesis is trivial. It is not a strong claim about a necessary
connection between moral judgment and motivation but a mere
definitional claim about practical rationality. What's more, it
lacks specificity, because it applies as well to what an agent judges
to be nonmorally best. Other version of motive-internalism likewise
render the thesis trivial (53-55).



On the other horn of the dilemma, the internalist claim is
philosophically interesting but false. Here, Roskies argues that
persons with injury to the VM cortex are a "walking
counterexample" to internalism. As Roskies describes them, such
patients "appear cognitively normal on a wide spectrum of
standard psychological tests, including those measuring intelligence
and reasoning abilities", however, they "all appear to
have particular difficulty in acting in accordance with social mores
despite their retained ability to judge appropriately in such
situations" (56). The condition of these patients has been
referred to as "acquired sociopathy". According to
Roskies, VM patients are able to "reason morally at a normal
level" and their moral claims "accord with those of
normals", but they fail to reliably act as normal persons do
and, what's more, "seem to lack appropriate motivational
and emotional responses" (57). VM patients do not exhibit the
skin-conductive response (SCR) to emotionally-charged stimuli that
normal persons exhibit, which Roskies take to be evidence of the
absence of motivation. VM patients allegedly present a counterexample
to motive-internalism because they have mastery of moral terms and
appear to make sincere moral judgments, while lacking any motivation
to act in accordance with them (59). 



Various arguments have been offered against the alleged results of
empirical findings for motivational internalism. Some have argued that
VM patients lack moral concepts (Kennett and Fine 2007), that VM
patients make moral judgments only in what R. M Hare (1963) called the
"inverted commas" sense (Kennett and Fine 2007), that VM
patients are, in fact motivated when they make moral judgments
(Kennett and Fine 2007), that the evidence offered for the claim that
VM patients make moral judgments without experiencing emotion
"is not decisive" (Prinz 2015), that we have reasons to
doubt that VM patients have moral beliefs (Cholbi 2006), and that VM
patients have impaired agency and so do not make genuine moral
judgments, which require agency (Gerrans and Kennett 2010). In varying
ways, these responses challenge whether it is conceptually coherent to
treat cases of VM patients as cases of amoralism. Insofar as the
disagreement concerns the conceptual coherence of amoralism, it is
uncertain how appealing to the empirical literature helps to advance
the debate. Of course, Roskies might (following Prinz (2015), see
below) maintain that internalism is in fact a psychological rather
than a conceptual thesis, in which case these criticisms of the
conceptual coherence of treating cases of VM patients as cases of
amoralism would no longer apply.



Whether or not Roskies' (2006 and 2007) replies to many of these
objections are successful, there are reasons to doubt that the data
Roskies cites is sufficient to undermine internalism. Roskies herself
acknowledges that some versions of internalism (though ones she
considers problematic or as yet insufficiently developed) may be
consistent with the data on VM patients.(2003: 62-63) Schroeder
et al. (2010: 95) note that research suggests that psychopaths have a
"diminished capacity to distinguish moral from conventional
violations," which has led some to conclude that they have
"impaired moral concepts" (2010: 96, citing Nichols 2004).
If they do have impaired moral concepts, then they pose no problem for
the internalist. In the case of VM patients, however, they note that
it has "been argued that people exhibiting acquired sociopathy
do not exhibit moral deficits at all, but that their deficits in
non-moral aspects of life merely manifest occasionally in moral
situations." Further studies, they indicate, will be needed to
resolve the question of whether VM patients pose a threat to what
Schroeder et al. call cognitivism and Roskies calls motive-internalism
(2010: 97). In any case, it is disputed how best to explain the extant
data on VM patients. VM patients who suffer injury early in life
exhibit sociopathic behavior, including violent behavior, whereas VM
patients who acquire their injuries later in life do not. In dispute
is whether the latter patients are not violent, for example, because
their moral judgments are to some degree motivating or whether their
nonviolent behavior is a function of habit (98). Finally, as Roskies
(2007: 205) carefully explains, "the evidence is inconclusive
because the best-designed tests of the cognition and behavior of VM
patients have not yet been done". 



Prinz (2015) has argued, in contrast to Roskies, that empirical
evidence supports internalism. He argues first that "internalism
can be understood as a psychological thesis" (61), rather than a
conceptual or a priori truth, and then offers several empirical
arguments in support of it. The first appeals to a view called
"sentimentalism". 


1. Moral judgments consist of emotional attitudes.
2. Emotional attitudes are motivating.
3. Therefore, moral judgments are motivating. (70)



The controversial step in the argument is the first premise. Prinz
says that premise 1 is a statement of sentimentalism, the view that
"moral judgments consist of feelings directed at whatever it is
that we moralize" (70). He argues that the thesis supports
various empirical predictions, which studies bear out. First,
neuroimaging studies on moral cognition provide evidence that
"people enter emotional states when they make moral
judgments" (71). Second, studies show that induced emotions have
an impact on moral judgment, and "different emotions have
different effects" (72). For example, inducing disgust leads
people to judge a scenario involving moral wrongness more harshly.
Induced happiness increases positive moral judgments but not negative,
whereas anger increases negative moral judgments but not positive
moral judgments (72). Finally, people with differing emotional
dispositions differ in moral judgments. For example,
"psychopaths, who have deficits in several negative emotions,
but not disgust, show insensitivity to crimes against persons, but are
not known for sexual deviancy" (73), whereas those with
Huntington's disease have deficits in disgust, and exhibit
patterns of sexual deviancy (72). These findings, Prinz contends,
"add support to the claim that emotions are components of moral
judgments. Emotions occur when people make moral judgments, they are
used as information when reporting strength of moral attitudes, and
emotional deficits lead to corresponding deficits in moral
sensitivity" (73). According to Prinz, given this evidence, and
given decades of research that links emotion to behavior, thereby
supporting premise 2, this argument provides strong support for
internalism.



What the sentimentalist's claim comes to is far less clear than
Prinz allows. Sometimes he says that moral judgments "consist
of" emotional attitudes, sometimes that they are
"components" of moral judgments. It isn't clear,
however, that the evidence provides adequate support for
sentimentalism, as opposed to the view that emotions (contingently)
accompany moral judgment. That emotions would accompany moral judgment
is unsurprising, given the importance of morality to human welfare.




Prinz offers four additional arguments, only two of which are
considered briefly here. The first argues from experimental evidence
that seems to show that people ordinarily "regard emotions as
necessary for having moral attitudes" (75). For example,
subjects in one study were asked to assess the moral attitudes of two
individuals. Person A smokes marijuana, feels no guilt for doing so,
does not have negative attitudes toward others who do, but
nevertheless says that he thinks smoking marijuana is morally wrong.
Person B smokes marijuana, feels guilt for doing so, has negative
feelings toward those who do, but nevertheless says she thinks that
smoking marijuana is not morally wrong. The majority of respondents
concluded that the first smoker does not really think smoking
marijuana is morally wrong, whereas the second really does think it is
morally wrong, despite his claims to the contrary. Prinz says that
"the majority treat emotions as necessary and sufficient for
moral attribution," which suggests that "the ordinary folk
are committed to a kind of sentimentalism." This at most would
show us what ordinary folks think, though; it would not support
sentimentalism as a metaphysical thesis "that it is part of the
essence of moral judgments that they can be motivating" (64).
Prinz speculates that more research might "establish a more
consistent conceptual link between emotions and moral judgments"
(76). At present, though, the studies Prinz cites are insufficient to
lend much support to internalism.



The second of Prinz's other arguments appeals to studies showing
that people are sometimes motivated to act morally, even when it would
be instrumentally rational not to. He suggests that the
"simplest explanation is that moral judgments have motivational
force, independent of nonmoral motivation" (77). But
externalists are at least as well-positioned to explain the evidence
by appealing to acculturation and common desires to help others or to
do the right thing. 



Empirical research on moral motivation is, of course, of great
interest in its own right. But many would doubt the relevance of such
research to what internalists take to be a conceptual claim, a claim
about a necessary connection between moral judgment and moral
motivation. Even supposing that empirical research could help to
resolve the impasse between internalists and externalists, the extant
research is far from doing so.