Nagel’s pure ascription theory

Let us start with the Existence Criterion. Although at first it may appear to be uncontroversial, not everyone shares this opinion. Here is a famous passage from Thomas Nagel:

“The claim that a desire underlies every act is true […] only in the sense that whatever may be the motivation for someone’s intentional pursuit of a goal, it becomes in virtue of his pursuit ipso facto appropriate to ascribe to him a desire for that goal… It may be admitted as trivial that, for example, considerations about my future welfare or about the interests of others cannot motivate me to act without a desire being present at the time of action. That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future happiness. But nothing follows about the role of the desire as a condition contributing to the motivational efficacy of those considerations. It is a necessary condition of their efficacy to be sure, but only a logically necessary condition. It is not necessary either as a contributing influence, or as a causal condition. “ (Nagel 1970, 29-30)

Moral and prudential desires, Nagel claims, are only logically necessary conditions of action:

they aren’t necessary either causally or motivationally. And it is because they are necessary only in the sense that action is always accompanied by a desire to carry out that action. That is, it is appropriate to ascribe to the agent a desire for that goal no matter what in fact motivated him - even if no antecedent desire was present among the grounds of the action. In short, Nagel claims that in certain cases desires are mere logical consequences of the fact that one is motivated to act

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by one’s belief that some action is prudent. Such a desire is, to borrow Bond’s term, a ‘logical shadow’ that has no independent psychological existence. (Bond 1983, 12) The EC is refuted.

Nagel’s ‘pure ascription’ view (I borrow the label from Dancy 1993, Chapter 1) entails a hybrid theory of motivation. According to Nagel, we can have two kinds of scenario in explaining human motivation. One in which the desire is the motivator and another when the belief itself motivates with the desire being ascribed as a mere ‘logical shadow’. But hybridity has its price: Nagel must explain why these beliefs are special. Unfortunately, he says nothing about this, so we must act on our own. The natural candidate is reference to the content of these beliefs. However, it is unclear whether we can demarcate moral and prudential beliefs just by virtue of their content. And if we cannot, which seems clearly to be the case with prudential beliefs, we end up with the awkward claim that the motivational capacity of certain beliefs changes from situation to situation. (Dancy 1993, 21; 2000b, 93-4) But even if such a demarcation is possible, an appeal to content will still not offer the explanation Nagel needs. In the face of the teleological argument, reference to content just doesn’t seem relevant to the explanation of the motivating potential of moral and prudential beliefs. After all, other beliefs too have content, so we need an account of what it is that moral and prudential content have and, say, evaluative content lacks.

There are two other ways of completing the Nagelian enterprise. According to the first, the missing account of the peculiarity of moral and prudential beliefs can be found in the other beliefs that accompany them. The idea is that both beliefs exist in a nexus of beliefs that somehow endow them with motivating force.⁸² There are many problems with this suggestion. To begin with, the beliefs that accompany moral and prudential beliefs must be ordinary beliefs about the natural world; hence on Nagel’s hybrid view they are themselves motivationally inert.

82 I owe this suggestion to Edmund Henden.

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But then it is difficult to see, first, how their co-presence can explain the motivational capacity of moral and prudential beliefs and, second, why it is that their ‘ability’ is only activated with regard to moral and prudential beliefs and not to other, say, evaluative beliefs. An answer to these questions may be to invoke some sort of a special relationship among the beliefs concerned, for example, some kind of organic unity they form together. In fact, this may go as far as involving other beliefs in picture, such as evaluative ones, thereby broadening Nagel’s rather restricted view. Yet, we would even so be short of an explanation that gives an account of the special relationship referred to.

The third suggestion makes use of the phenomenology of our motivational experience. It points out that before theorizing about motivation most of us would find it plausible that certain beliefs can move us all by themselves without the help of any desire. And these beliefs are typically those Nagel mentions: prudential, moral and perhaps evaluative beliefs. Examples abound. When someone has a duty or responsibility to do something, or when it is prudent to do something one often acts without wanting to act – or, at least, this is what, upon inquiry, the agent reports about his state of mind. If there is a desire present in such situations, it is normally a desire that pulls the person in the opposite direction, appearing more as a temptation than an attractive prospect. (Schueler 1995, 30; Shafer-Landau 2003, 123) Other examples can also be cited. When we make inferences on the basis of some evidence, it is unlikely, though, of course, not unimaginable that we do so because we have a desire to make correct inferences. (Scanlon 1998, 35-6) Finally, there are well-known cases when someone is mistaken about her desires. In Shafer-Landau’s example the agent goes to law school because this is what his father and grandfather did and because this is what everyone expects him to do. But in school he is bored, does desultory work, the library enervates him and so on. One summer he then takes a job as a carpenter, loves it, quits law school and becomes a professional carpenter. (Ibid. 125) It seems

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plausible to suppose that the agent went to school and stayed there for a while out of respect for his family, or to meet social expectations or just because he thought he had a desire to become a lawyer. No desire is needed to explain his action, and indeed there was none present.

There are two issues here. One is whether there can be desires present in these cases, the other is whether their presence is plausible and/or needed. The answer to the first claim is clearly affirmative. Unless we endorse the phenomenological account of desire – the view that to desire is to have a feeling or sensation of some sort (Stroud 1977 Chapter 6; Platts 1979 Chapter 10;

1981) – we should find no trouble in attributing a desire to the agent, even though it is not one he can discover by introspection. And those who like Smith accept the functionalist theory of desire, are uniform in their rejection of the phenomenological view (for Smith’s argument see Smith 1994, 104-11) This, of course, is a substantial debate, which is far from over. Yet, it is charitable to advocates of the HTM if we suppose that the phenomenological view is defeated, since this allows them to go on.⁸³ This then takes us to the second claim: that it is just not plausible and/or superfluous to attribute a desire to the agent. As Shafer-Landau rightly points out, the explanation that invokes no desire is more natural and simple in the above cases. (Ibid. 123-6, 140) Hence the burden of proof is on advocates of the HTM: they must show that their position is right, i.e. that there must be a desire with real psychological existence present whenever intentional action takes place. (Ibid. 124)

Shafer-Landau’s insistence, however, seems idle. For we have the teleological argument at hand, which claims to support just the above conclusion. Now, as noted, the argument’s premises are controversial and Shafer-Landau also goes some way to argue against the teleological view of action. (Ibid. 135-6) But he admits that there can be arguments that show the

83 Thanks to Daniel Friedrich who pushed me hard to admit that there is much to be going in favour of the phenomenological reading. My concession in the text is largely due to his efforts.

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view to be the right position; in any case, discussion of these issues would take us beyond the theory of motivation. Shafer-Landau, moreover, accepts the rest of the argument, so the question arises what he takes to save Nagel’s position. His solution is to invoke a distinction by Fred Schueler between ‘desire proper’ and ‘pro attitude’. (Schueler 1995, 29-31, 34-5) The former refers to mental states that are real with the only thing common to them is that they are intrinsically motivating; otherwise, they can be states with a strong phenomenological presence but can also be ‘calm passions’ that have no such presence. ‘Pro attitudes’, on the other hand, only denote the fact that the agent was motivated. It is a placeholder sense of desire that is inspired by Nagel’s point (Schueler makes this explicit): it refers to anything that motivated the agent including desires proper but also beliefs, convictions and the like.

Shafer-Landau thinks that by using the distinction we can neutralize the force of the teleological argument. We can admit that whenever an agent acts intentionally, she wanted to act because the ‘want’ referred to here is the pro attitude sense of desire and is thus compatible with the pure ascription view. (Ibid. 138-140) I don’t share this optimism. Smith puts the argument in terms of mental states that invariably accompany intentional action and shows that, if we are willing to follow his logic, these mental states must be desires. It is hard to see how we get from this position, which uses states, hence real existences - what else can have a direction of fit? (cf.

also Smith’s understanding of pro attitude in Smith 1994, 117) - to the view that there is nothing psychologically real and desire-like present in some instances of intentional action. I certainly don’t see how Schueler’s distinction, which merely conceptualizes Nagel’s point, can muster such a shift in focus. No doubt, in Shafer-Landau’s own dialectic the distinction is helpful since up to that point he was only considering the support motivational phenomenology can give to the idea that motivation does not need the presence of desire. The distinction gives a framework to

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his position; but I don’t see how it advances our discussion, which has started out from Nagel’s observation.⁸⁴