ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most important source of the view that moral action must in the end be based on what people want is simply that moral action is, after all, action. Actions require intention: if I am to be said to have kicked someone, then I must have intended to have kicked them, or kicked them deliberately.1 To kick someone purely accidentally is not to have kicked them at all. But intention, while a necessary component of action, is not sufficient: if the intention is to be instantiated, and the action to occur, the agent concerned has to be motivated to act.2 And if to want to do something is indeed a necessary condition of being motivated to do it-and that is the standard story-then wanting has to be integral to moral action. For only wants can supply the ‘shove’, so to speak; thus wants are the only possible engine of motivation. That is clearly Hume’s view: ‘reason alone can never produce any action’.3 This, then, is the rather persuasive picture which I need to dissipate if I am to cast sufficient doubt on the role of wants in moral action: for as David Brink puts it, ‘we would be surprised by, and rightly suspicious of, any metaethical or normative theory according to which well informed, reasonable people might always be completely indifferent’.4 Morality without action is empty; and since action requires motivation, and motivation requires wants, then wants must be integral to morality.5
