THE NATURE OF MOTIVATION (AND WHY IT MATTERS LESS TO ETHICS THAN ONE MIGHT THINK) Philosophical Studies, July, 1998. Cognitivists with regard to motivation (often called Anti-Humeans) claim that beliefs alone can produce motivation and that no non-cognitive mental item is necessary. Conativists with regard to motivation (often called Humeans) claim that beliefs alone cannot produce motivation, that no story containing only facts about beliefs can explain the existence of any motivational states. I examine this debate and suggest that it has reached an impasse. I claim that any plausible theory of motivation must account for the means-end structure of motives and the fact that sometimes our motivation is subjectively irrational. I argue that given these plausibility constraints, plausible versions of conativism and cognitivism are merely notational variants of each other. If this is right, then it has implications for the moral realism debate, for it means that arguments against internalist moral realism cannot rest on the claim that no state can be both cognitive (and thus have truth values) and motivational at the same time.