ABSTRACT

A widely held (Humean) view claims that when looking for a motive for an action, we must look for some desire to explain it. It seems to many, however, that, when it comes to moral motivation, thoughts about morality directly impact our motivations. The view, known as ‘motivational’ or ‘judgment’ internalism, holds that moral judgments or beliefs are inherently motivational. The externalists point out that this view is undermined by the commonplace cases of motivational failure involving agents suffering from, say, depression, weakness of will, confusion, and the like. In response, the internalists have sought to either limit the scope of their thesis or to simply deny that some such cases are possible. This chapter defends an unrestricted version of motivational internalism by arguing that the reason why the standard accounts of motivational internalism are vulnerable to such objections is that they take the link between moral judgments and motivation to have a linear structure. In opposition, it will be argued that the link is best understood as emerging from within the dispositional structure of (possessed) motivating reasons and that, thus understood, the externalist counterexamples can be easily accommodated as falling naturally from the ways dispositions, in general, behave.