THE MOTIVATIONAL CONDITION

I. Kagan thinks that the most plausible way for the Moderate to flesh out the negative argument–which claims that Extremism does not even MINIMALLY reflect the nature of persons–is to claim that there is a motivational condition on moral requirements.

II. From there, the argument would claim that the Extremist’s theory that there is a general requirement that agents always act so as to maximally promote the good will CONFLICT with the following two claims

(1) we can only be required to do things that we can be motivated to do.

(2) because of the personal point of view, we cannot be motivated to always act so as to maximally promote the good.

III. Thus if we accept the motivational condition (internalism) on moral requirements, then it looks as though Extremism does not even minimally reflect the (selfish) nature of persons, since it requires something that cannot be required of (selfish) beings like us.

IV. Now this argument obviously depends on a number of key premises:

(1) The "meta-ethical (linking) principle that a moral theory must at least minimally reflect the nature of persons.

(2) The (internalist) motivational condition on requirements

(3) The claim that human beings like us really cannot be motivated to act so as to promote the good.

V. Now Kagan is granting (1) because he seems (as far as I can tell) to actually believe it. He is granting (2) for the sake of argument, with the proviso that it is an extremely controversial claim.

VI. We’ll turn our attention then to (3). Why might (3) seem true?

VII. One way to see how (3) might be true is to restate it in terms of the subjective (agent relative) personal point of view (PPV) on the one hand, and the objective (agent-neutral) impartial/impersonal point of view (IPV) on the other.

A. Persons, as we know, come equipped with a personal point of view "automatically." This point of view is natural for them.

B. The impartial point of view, on the other hand, is something that they must "take up" in the same way that we learn to take up any other alien point of view. It is not a natural part of our way of looking at things in the same way that the personal point of view is.

C. Furthermore, since the impartial point of view very often CONFLICTS with our personal point of view, and since our personal point of view is so natural for us, it is impossible for us to adopt the impartial point of view for more than a few moments at a time.

D. And since our motivations–our desires and wants–come from the personal point of view rather than the impartial point of view, it is impossible for us to be motivated to adopt the impartial point of view, especially when it conflicts with our personal point of view (which is most of the time).

E. It is probably worth noting that none of this is explicitly set down by Kagan in any single place. However, this is the account, I believe, that is implicit in Scheffler’s account of the personal point of view, and I believe it to be at least one way of stating what Kagan has in mind when he thinks that the moderate may think that (3) is true without much further argument beyond merely pointing out that the personal point of view differs from the impartial point of view.

VIII. So it may seem that if we grant premises (1) and (2) above, the moderate would have an open and shut case.

IX. But of course things are not so simple.

I. The next few moves are not set out as clearly as they could be. Here’s my reconstruction of what he is trying to do.

II. Kagan wants to show that it is not at all impossible for beings like us to be motivated to act from the impartial point of view and thus to at least try to promote the good.

III. A tall order, you might think. How’s he gonna pull it off?

IV. Well, he is going to spend some time looking at a kind of motivation that the moderate will accept as being possible: Prudence.

V. The idea here will be to see how the moderate explains how prudential motivation is possible, and then to use this to explain how utilitarian motivation is possible.

VI. Now this strategy assumes, of course, that the moderate is committed to the claim that prudential motivation is possible for us in whatever sense is required for there to be genuine prudential requirements.

A. That is, the moderate (again, if she is really to be the spokesperson of the commonsense approach to morality) must accept that there are prudential requirements to do things like brush one’s teeth, save for one’s retirement, etc.

B. Now of course we are not always motivated to do these things.

C. And so if the moderate wants to claim that there are genuine requirements of prudence, she must explain how prudential motivation is possible, even though it does not always turn out that we are motivated by prudence. (282)

VII. So assuming that we believe that prudence can give us requirements, then we need explain THE SOURCE OF THIS POTENTIAL MOTIVATION TO CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE.

VIII. That is, we need an account of the MOTIVATIONAL UNDERPINNINGS OF PRUDENCE. How is it, in other words, that people acquire a motive to become prudent? What is it that gives prudential considerations the POTENTIAL to motivate?

IX. If we have such an explanation, then we will be able to see how prudential considerations provide POTENTIAL MOTIVATIONS.

A. In effect, we will have a theory about potential motivations that will help us to understand and apply the claim that a person can only be required to do something if she has a potential motivation to do it.

B. Furthermore, we will have developed a theory of potential motivations that the moderate herself needs if she is to explain how there can be prudential requirements even though we are not always motivated to be prudent.

C. That is, she will need this very same theory of prudential potential motivation if she is to claim that persons can be required to be prudent in various ways because they CAN be motivated to act in these ways, even if they do not always actually act in these ways.

 

I. Now, Kagan believes that the EXPLANATION for the fact that we are sometimes but not always able to get motivated to worry about the future is that sometimes our beliefs about the future are vivid and sometimes they are pale.

II. So for instance, you might have only a pale belief that you are spending a lot of money on your credit card until the bill comes, and the belief then becomes vivid when you see that total by the "new purchases" line.

III. Or a smoker might not worry about lung cancer until he sees someone who is suffering from it. The pictures (or even plexiglass-encased examples) of lungs rotted by lung cancer that are often shown to school kids are PRECISELY an attempt to make vivid what most people already know--that smoking is bad for you. That is why Sally Struthers shows you starving children (rather than just telling you that children are starving) to get you to give money. And so on.

IV. Now, this bit of armchair psychology is Kagan's theory about motivation:

Pale beliefs tend not to be as motivating as vivid ones. This is surely true, or at least approximately true.

V. Or, to generalize, Kagan would offer something like the following THEORY OF POSSIBLE MOTIVATION that is meant to answer the question of what "counts" as a possibility of being motivated in the context of the motivational (internalist) condition on moral requirements:

A person has the possible motive to X if it is true that IF that person’s beliefs about X were vivid, THEN she would be motivated to X.

I. At this point (p 291), Kagan deploys this psychological claim in an attempt to argue that we CAN be motivated to act from the IMPARTIAL POINT OF VIEW.

II. In other words, he is going ot use the very same story about how there can be a potential (though not always actual) motivation to care about the future, and he is going to use that story to explain how there can be a potential (though not always actual) motivation to care about other persons.

III. He notes that in cases in which we DO make sacrifices for others, we typically know them well enough and identify and sympathize with them enough so that we will have vivid beliefs about their situations.

IV. So we can add to the armchair psych:

a person will tend to be motivated to make sacrifices for another if she has vivid beliefs about that person's situation (eg his suffering).

V. Or, to put the same thing a slightly different way,

IF a person WERE to have completely vivid beliefs about the suffering of others, she WOULD be motivated to care about them far more than she would otherwise. Call this the COUNTERFACTUAL THESIS.

VI. Kagan claims that it is something like this that explains why we do make sacrifices for those close to us but not to strangers.

VII. For strangers, Kagan writes, there sufferings are often "barely anything more than something I read about in a story book" (295)

VIII. This, of course, ties in to Hare's idea that the basic moral impulse is to put oneself in the other person's shoes and IMAGINE WHAT IT IS LIKE FROM HER PERSPECTIVE.

IX. So to summarize, it appears that:

(1) the reason we are often not motivated to help others is that we lack vivid enough beliefs about their suffering

(2) the more vivid our beliefs are, the more likely we are to be motivated to promote the good by helping others.

(3) we can, in fact, acquire more vivid beliefs.

X. This, then, is the idea behind what Kagan calls the COUNTERFACTUAL THESIS: if your beliefs were all vivid, you would be motivated to act according to the IMPARTIAL POINT OF VIEW.

I. The next step is to argue that we have a reason--and even more, a motive--to aquire such beliefs.

II. Kagan's position here is that as we come to see our lack of vivid beliefs as a COGNITIVE SHORTCOMING, a DEFECT, we will indeed become motivated to try to remedy it.

III. So the underlying psychology here is this:

We are biased toward ourselves and our nearest and dearest, and toward the present, because beliefs about the present and about our nearest and dearest are generally more vivid than our beliefs about the future or about strangers. But this is a DEFECT. And we should try to remedy it.

IV. The idea here is that it makes sense to be motivated by someone who knows more than you do, i.e. by someone whose beliefs are LESS DEFECTIVE than one’s own.

V. And indeed, we often are. We listen to coaches, personal trainers, tax consultants, profs, etc., and we are often motivated to act on their advice, even if we are not in a position to see the facts. So, we can sort of think of the impartial/impersonal point of view (IPV) as the point of view of the Moral Expert (sometimes called the Ideal Observer): if I can get motivated to lift less weight more slowly, or to diversify my investments, or to buy bonds when the market is overvalued, and so on.

VI. Now the advice of such "informed advisors" motivates INDIRECTLY: For I have a motive to act on expert advice simply because it IS more adequate than my own; it corrects for cognitive defects or biases that I might have.

VII. Now Kagan’s claim is that the impartial point of view is the point of view of a sort of moral expert (often called the IDEAL OBSERVER)

VIII. And if we can get motivated to follow the advice of other experts, then surely we can also get motivated to do what the Moral Expert--that is, the person who can see things from the IPV--would tell us to do.

IX. Hence, concludes Kagan, we really are capable of being motivated to act according to the IPV, just as E requires.

X. Now we can do this in either of two ways,

(1) we can try to make our beliefs about the suffering of others more vivid (299).

(2) we can simply realize that if our beliefs were maximally vivid--that is, if we had no cognitive shortcomings--we would in fact act out of the IPV.

A. For we would have eliminated the bias in favor of ourselves and our projects.

B. And not only that, Kagan has provided us with a psychlogoical theory about how such motivation can arise and indeed how it could be cultivated.

 

I. Now, the Moderate might object to the Counterfactual thesis: she might maintain that although a person with vivid beliefs might have sufficient motivation to be a whole lot more charitable than she is with only pale beliefs, that there is still a CORE OR RESIDUAL OF THE BIAS.

II. That is, that even with the most vivid beliefs about everyone's suffering, we'd still lack the motivation to be completely impartial, to completely give up the PPV.

III. Kagan's first reply is that this is not likely to get the moderate very much.

A. For even if fully vivid beliefs would not make us completely impartial, it would make us far more impartial than we already are.

B. And so if we tried to use the argument that we started with--that a reason cannot be decisive unless it can motivate--all we will get is something like the claim that we cannot have a reason to be 100% impartial, since we cannot be motivated to be 100% impartial even if we had perfectly vivid beliefs.

C. But maybe we could be 95% impartial, and that would be a heck of a lot more impartial than we are right now.

D. Such a theory may not be all that the extremist wanted to prove, but it would be way closer to the extreme end of the spectrum than to the moderate.

E. At any rate, since Kagan thinks that making our beliefs vivid could make us a hell of a lot more impartial than we are, at best, the claim that perfectly vivid beliefs would still leave a little bit of bias is still going to allow for a morality far more extreme than that of the Moderate.

There are a few more twists and turns, but I’ll leave them aside and move on to the positive argument.