Moral self-determination: The nature, existence, and formation of moral motivation

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses three basic questions about moral motivation. Concerning the nature of moral motivation, it argues that it involves responsiveness to both reasons of morality and the value of persons and everything else of value. Moral motivation is thus identified as reason-responsive appropriate valuing. Regarding whether it is possible for people to be morally motivated, the paper relies on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to show how moral motivation is a likely product of education that is need-supportive in modeling appropriate valuing and engaging students in the kinds of reasoning that are essential to moral motivation. Virtuous motivation that inclines people to engage in morally motivated acts is equated with being morally self-determining or achieving the right kind of integrated motivation. SDT shows how people come to be morally motivated, and the paper concludes that an identified aspiration to be virtuous may play a significant role.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral motivation
• virtue
• self-determination theory
• internalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Virtuous motivation can be understood to include appropriate valuing of non-moral goods, but we will use the term virtuous motivation in this paper to refer to the motivational characteristics of a virtuous state of character that prepares and inclines a person to act in ways that are morally well motivated or exhibit moral motivation.

2. Aristotle’s theory of virtue thereby deviates from orthodox virtue ethics. (See Curren, 2015, 2019, 2021).

3. It is important to note that the soldier’s defense of his own compatriots and city cannot be morally appropriate all-things-considered, unless everything else of value is duly weighed ‘according to the merits of the case and in whatever way reason directs.’ All of the conditions necessary to acts of war being just would need to be met. If there are no conditions in which any acts of war can be just, then courage is not a virtue that can be displayed in acts of war.

4. This is consistent with Karen Stohr’s suggestion that a virtuously generous person ‘is motivated by her recognition that people are in need, but … she must also know that helping is the virtuous thing to do here, and it must be true of her that she would refrain from acting if it weren’t’ (Stohr, 2018, p. 465).

5. Cf., Korsgaard (1996, p. 222), on Kant’s conception of compliance with a duty of beneficence yielding genuine love of mankind through a process of habituation.

6. This is obvious because it is a consequence of the defining conditions for moral motivation we have identified, and those defining conditions rely on a conception of the giving and weighing of considerations that are genuinely moral or admissible in a system of norms that is itself genuinely moral, as moralities were defined at the beginning of this paper (Baier, 1958) or in a way that is relevantly similar with respect to requiring fairness, impartiality, or justifiability to one other. All such conceptions of morality are more or less explicit in limiting the scope of relevant principles to ones that require mutual respect, manifest sympathy, protect vital interests, facilitate human flourishing, or something of the sort.

7. For an overview of research on the neurological dimensions of the integrative processing through which reasoned reflection alters motivation, see Ryan & Deci (2017, p. 627). See also Di Domenico et al. (2013, 2016).

8. Tim Scanlon assumed in What We Owe to Each Other that people are motivated by self-interest, but he grounded his theory of morality in the claim that people are also motivated by a desire to justify themselves to one another. He argued that genuinely moral principles are ones that we can justify to each other, and our desire to be able to justify ourselves to each other gives us a reason to honor those principles (Scanlon, 1998). Given what is known about the role of basic psychological needs in well-being, one could argue, as we essentially have, that what we could justify to each other and what we could justify to ourselves would coincide. Further, if what we can justify to ourselves and what we can justify to others coincide and entail moral justifiability, then one could argue that the need for autonomy—to act in ways we can endorse as consistent with a coherent set of values and regulative principles we identify as our own—entails a derived need to be moral. The latter need is only satisfied when the former need is satisfied. Evidence shows that the satisfaction and benefits of ‘doing good’ obtain primarily only when acting with autonomy (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Being pressured to do good does not yield basic need satisfactions.

9. Lorraine Besser-Jones rightly contests Julia Annas’s attempt to vindicate this Aristotelian idea by arguing that virtuous activity, being comparable to the exercise of skills, is intrinsically pleasant in the way that experiences of ‘flow’ are (Annas, 2008, 2011; Besser-Jones, 2012, 2014, pp. 128–135). Virtuous acts often do not have the structure of activities whose intrinsic rewards are enough to sustain the activity, and Besser-Jones (2014) is clearly right in arguing that ‘intrinsic motivation cannot be the defining characteristic of the virtuous person’ (p. 135).

10. Besser-Jones (2014) comes to very much the same conclusion, writing that, integrated motivation ‘nicely captures this image of the virtuous person [as someone who understands the goals of morality and the reasons why it is important for her to act well, and acts from values and goals integral to a state of character she values in herself]’ (pp. 136–137). The argument by which she reaches this conclusion is very different from our own, however, because it is grounded in her conception of virtue as instrumental to acting well, in the sense of acting in a way that reliably advances the agent’s own well-being. The crux of her argument is that, ‘studies consistently find those autonomously motivated are more successful in obtaining their goals than those who experience controlled motivation’ and securing one’s own well-being requires treating other people well (pp. 136–137). We agree that the studies show this, but our focus here is on virtue that involves the kind of moral motivation we have identified.

11. Publications that do directly address the significance of these various settings for moral development and functioning include (Arvanitis, 2017; Assor, 2011; Brambilla et al., 2015; Curren, 2014, 2017, 2020a, 2020b; Kasser et al., 2012; Legault et al., 2011; Moller & Deci, 2010; Ryan et al., 1993; Walker et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2015).

12. There are reasons detailed in Curren (2014), for why a general aspiration to be virtuous is most consistent with actually becoming virtuous.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Randall Curren

Randall Curren is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham (UK). He was the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, for 2012-2013, and held concurrent research professorships at the Jubilee Centre and the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London) in 2013-2015.

Richard M. Ryan

Richard M. Ryan is a clinical psychologist, Research Professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at Australian Catholic University, and was for many years Professor of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology at the University of Rochester. Dr. Ryan’s many honors include distinguished career awards from the International Society for Self and Identity and the International Network on Personal Meaning, and a Shavelson Distinguished Researcher Award.