Weakness of will and motivational internalism

Abstract

The unconditional version of motivational internalism says that if an agent sincerely judges that to φ in circumstances C is the best option available to her, then, as a matter of conceptual necessity, she will be motivated to φ in C. This position faces a powerful counterargument according to which it is possible for various cases of practical irrationality to completely defeat an agent’s moral motivation while, at the same time, leaving her appreciation of her moral reasons intact. In this paper, I will argue that weakness of will, as the paradigmatic case of practical irrationality, and all other cases of practical irrationality that feature in standard formulations of this argument do not represent genuine counterexamples to this version of motivational internalism. In this sense, the main aim of this paper is to show that proponents of this internalist position are well justified in their denial of the claim that there are people who are completely unmotivated by their judgments about what is the best option available to them.

Keywords:

• Depression
• moral motivation
• motivational internalism
• practical irrationality
• psychopathy
• weakness of will

Acknowledgment

I would also like to thank the anonymous referees from this journal for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. In this paper, I will rely on the characterization of practical irrationality according to which an agent S is practically irrational to the extent that S’s practical thought and action are not guided by what S takes to be her reasons for action from the first-person perspective. On this characterization, practical irrationality is a subjective matter of improper motivational responsiveness to the practical reasons that an agent has available to her by her own lights (see Miller, 2008). In this sense, it seems that rage, passion, depression, distraction, grief, or physical or mental illness could cause us to act irrationally; that is to say, they could cause us to fail to be motivationally responsive to the rational considerations available to us (Korsgaard, 1986, p. 13).

2. These conditions are typically described in terms of practical irrationality (Korsgaard, 1986; Smith, 1994, p. 61; van Roojen, 2010; Wallace, 2006; Wedgwood, 2007, pp. 23–26), psychological normality (Blackburn, 1998, pp. 59–68; Eriksson, 2006, pp. 172–187; Gibbard, 2003, p. 154; Timmons, 1999, p. 140), or moral perceptivity (McDowell, 1978, 1979; McNaughton, 1988; Tolhurst, 1995; Wiggins, 1991).

3. Motivational externalists tell us that moral judgments have no necessary or conceptual connection with motivation; rather, the connection is contingent and external. In that sense, a person who judges that a type of action is morally right but consistently claims that she sees no reason to perform actions of that type betrays no conceptual confusion. Suppose, for instance, that John is a good and strong-willed person and that he judges that it is right to refrain from eating meat. According to externalists, good and strong-willed people must have as their primary source of moral motivation a desire to do the right thing. So externalists would attribute to John the non-derivative desire to do what he believes to be right, and it is precisely from this non-derivative desire and the moral belief that it is right to refrain from eating meat that John acquires his motivation to refrain from eating meat. On the externalist view, an agent’s motivation to act in accordance with her moral judgments is derived both from that agent’s belief that something is morally right and her non-derivative desire to do what she believes to be right. An agent’s moral motivation is thus essentially derivative; it does not follow directly from the content of her moral judgments, as internalists maintain.

4. Pain asymbolia is often regarded as “the only clear-cut case in which severe pain is not experienced as unpleasant, and in which there are no traces of any other aversive attitude toward it” (Grahek, 2007, p. 3; see also Klein, 2015). This claim is supported by the fact that patients with this syndrome display striking behavioral reactions to pain stimulation. Pain asymbolics fail to respond with appropriate motor and emotional reactions to painful stimuli applied anywhere on their bodies. In addition, they typically show significantly greater values for pain tolerance and pain endurance (Berthier, Starkstein, & Leiguarda, 1988, p. 47). Finally, asymbolics not only fail to display normal reactions to painful stimuli, but actually behave in the exact opposite way: they typically smile or laugh during the pain testing procedure (Ramachandran, 1998, p. 1857).

5. There has been some recent debate about whether this description captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will (see, e.g. Holton, 1999, 2009; Holton & May, 2012; Mele, 2010). This debate, however, is irrelevant to the thesis I intend to defend in this paper, for I will primarily focus on a specific kind of weakness of will – weakness of will with respect to motivation.

6. WWM is essentially the same as the phenomenon that moral philosophers more popularly call “amoralism.” Amoralists are typically conceived of as agents who are competent speakers with regard to moral concepts and sincerely make moral judgments, but are completely unmoved to act in accordance with their own moral judgments (see, e.g. Brink, 1989, p. 27; Shafer-Landau, 2003, p. 146). Although in this paper I will refer to this phenomenon as WWM, in order to preserve its terminological connection to weakness of will with respect to action, it should be clear that everything that will be said about WWM also holds for amoralism.

7. Note that it is particularly difficult to establish a complete absence of motivation to perform a certain action. It is possible to assess motivation by relying on people’s self-reports, but such a procedure would be seriously limited by their inadequate conscious understanding of their own psychological states. In addition, such self-reports could be biased by the fact that the possession or absence of some moral motivations is socially undesirable – for example, the possession of motivation to torture or kill someone for the sake of pure pleasure, the possession of motivation to discriminate against someone on the basis of their race, gender, and so on. Thus, although it is tempting to think of self-reports as the most reliable method for assessing motivation, in the light of these two difficulties they come out as highly problematic. In order to avoid these and similar difficulties, researchers in experimental social psychology typically assess motivation in terms of the speed, strength, and perseverance with which people perform actions (Touré-Tillery & Fishbach, 2011, 2014). Yet, since all of these methods essentially rely on an agent committing an action, it is improbable that they could be of any use in conclusively determining the complete absence of her motivation.

8. It is worth noting that this result negatively affects not only the externalist case against unconditional MI. For the same reasons that make the externalist case against unconditional MI unsuccessful, the move from unconditional to conditional MI or, for that matter, to any other type of MI, becomes simply a maneuver to immunize the internalist point of view from counterexamples that do not even succeed in posing a legitimate threat to this position. The current proliferation of various versions of internalism thus seems to be completely uncalled for.