The CTM and previous objections

The three steps just outlined and defended add up to what we may call the Cognitivist Theory of Motivation (CTM). In the remainder of this chapter I will first show the advantages of the CTM over other accounts. Then I will defend it against objections that haven’t been considered so far.

The CTM is able to handle all the objections other theories have stumbled upon. It can admit that whenever action occurs there is a desire present that has full psychological reality: the EC is met. Further, by allowing no role for desire in the constitution of the agent’s motivating reason, it also avoids the charge of hybridity. Since desire never pulls its weight in the explanation of action (besides being what is to be explained), it follows that beliefs never need the help of desire to explain action. Therefore the pressure that led to the charge of hybridity - that if one allows that the HTM is true of certain areas of human motivation, but claims that it does not hold for others, one must explain why these beliefs are special - evaporates.

Furthermore, the CTM can be applied to normativity as a whole, while making use of only belief and desire. Nor does it come, or at least it need not come with heavily loaded epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions. Its emphasis on the pair of beliefs that are responsible for human motivation is compatible with a wide range of meta-ethical theories of morality or of practical reason.

Also, the CTM has no trouble with tackling the teleological argument. The agent’s motivating reason is constituted by a pair of beliefs: they rationally explain the agent’s desire.

The teleological argument only shows that desire must be present in intentional action as the sign that the agent is motivated, i.e. that the EC is true. We can simply reverse Smith’s ‘new’

teleological argument in favour of a cognitivist reading. (Dancy 1993, 29-30; 2000b, 91) It goes like this. Smith’s premises establish the following conclusion: to have a motivating reason is to

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 175

have a desire. But what he needs is more than that; it is this: motivating reasons are (or, at least, include) desires. The difference between the two conclusions is crucial for Smith. For the former but not the latter is consistent with the claim that desires are states of being motivated, which derive their motivational force from beliefs. To see this we just have to rephrase the first conclusion to claim: to have a desire is to be motivated by a belief about how things are and a belief that these things give reasons to act. Since Smith provides no further backing for why we should accept the second conclusion instead of the first, his argument fails.

Finally, the problem of listlessness that pulls us towards moderate judgement internalism can receive two responses. First, it can be argued that the listless agent lacks the relevant normative belief. (Garrard and McNaughton 1998, 52) There are two ways to do this. One is to deny that the concepts the listless agent uses are translatable to the concept of reason. This is an option with moral beliefs since here we need rationalism to establish the connection. But it need not be the case with evaluative concepts: here the connection is often presupposed. Therefore, we should rather take the other route and claim that as a matter of psychological fact listless people, though they make moral or evaluative judgments, don’t have normative beliefs. This is not implausible. Seriously depressed people often cannot see that some action, in fact, that anything matters; and it is a reasonable interpretation to say that this is because they see no reason to act.⁹⁹ By construction, however, this is a rather contingent response. It is hard to come up with a general psychological law stating that listless people always lack the requisite normative belief.

99 Dancy says something similar: “People who suffer from accidie are those who just don’t care for a while about things which would normally seem to them to be perfectly good reasons for action; this is so whether the reasons are moral reasons or more ordinary ones. Depression can be a cause of accidie. The depressive is not deprived of the relevant beliefs by his depression; they just leave him indifferent. He knows that if he doesn’t act now he will lose the opportunity he has been working for for two years, but he can’t see that this matters.” See Dancy (1993), pp. 5, Italics is mine. It is not clear, however, if by ‘relevant’ Dancy means moral, prudential and other beliefs or he means normative beliefs. On the first reading my interpretation in the text stands; on the second it does not. Garrard and McNaughton (1998), pp. 52 gives the first interpretation, while Dancy’s later writings seem to suggest that he has the second version in mind.

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 176

Perhaps for this reason Dancy favours another kind of response. (Dancy 1993, 24-5) The idea is to show that the CTM is compatible with a moderate version of normative belief internalism. It goes like this. Since belief and desire are taken to have separate existence, we can say that though beliefs are what motivate they do not always do so. Beliefs are intrinsically motivating: they motivate in their own right but do so only contingently. And we can explain why this is so by pointing to the motivational defects Stocker and others cite: it is these factors that block the otherwise enduring connection between beliefs and desire/motivation. Again, listlessness comes out as harmless from the point of view of the CTM.

Although this response is more elegant than the first one, it should be noted that it assumes the truth of two theses.¹⁰⁰ First, the motivational defects appealed to in the explanation are only causes of the agent’s behavior and are not themselves motivating reasons. Second, in the corollary case when the agent is motivated to act, the absence of motivational defects is not among the agent’s motivating reason(s) to act. (Dancy ibid. 25-6) The first thesis I take to be uncontroversial since not even advocates of the HTM regard carelessness, inattention, despair, drunkenness or neurophysiological disorders as motivating reasons (e.g. Smith 1994, Chapter 5).

The second thesis is more controversial and it cannot be defended here properly (though, we should note, its rejection would not lead us straightaway to the HTM). The issue here is how we picture the explanation of action: whether we think that all factors that are necessary for the success of the explanation are part of the explanation, or we think that these factors play different roles and need not be included in the explanation itself. The latter is clearly the position we need (this is parallel to the normative case in Chapter I, note 7). Certain factors - such as the absence of certain disorders serve as background conditions to the explanation of action - enable the

100 We could have considered these claims earlier when dealing with the besire/desire-entailing belief position since there too the truth of both theses is implicitly assumed. Hence what I say here also has an effect on the fate of that position.

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 177

explanation so to speak (i.e. the explanation wouldn’t take place without them), without themselves being part of that explanation.¹⁰¹ (Dancy 2004, 46-7)