ABSTRACT
There is no distinctive kind of motivation which leads people to act in ways that are not wrong, if we mean by that simply that their action does not violate any moral norms. I may on various occasions act from unthinking habit, or from calculated self-interest, or from affection for another, or ‘on the spur of the moment’ for no articulated reason - and in any of these cases it may be that there is nothing wrong in what I do. But it may also be that there is nothing distinctively moral in what I do. There is a way of thinking about morality which holds that to act morally in a positive sense is to act from a particular kind of motivation. It is this idea, that there is a distinctive moral motivation, that I want to explore in this chapter. I shall start by recognising that in recent times some critics have been sceptical about the value of morality itself. Part of any such radical case against morality must be that a distinctively moral motivation, if it exists at all, is unnecessary or undesirable; I shall argue here that, even though it may not be easy to make sense of this kind of motivation, it does exist and cannot readily be dispensed with.
