Session 7: Why We Do What We Do

3rd Global Conference

Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Breaking the Bond Between Evaluation and Motivation: Some Considerations Against the Impossibility of Desiring the Bad
Maria Lucia Rivera Sanin
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

This paper aims at providing a perspective against the dominating idea within traditional moral philosophy and moral psychology, according to which there is a tight and direct bond between evaluative and motivational states, such that holding a belief that something is good implies having a desire for pursuing it. This idea, founded in Socratic moral intellectualism, and frequently regarded as the sub specie boni scheme of explanation of agency, states that any action can be explained with reference to an ultimate ‘believed good’, for the sake of which all relative means and ends are desired, even if these appear to be, at first glance, desires for something that the agent does not conceive as being good. In this sense, what is valuated as good, and only this, can be motivationally efficient. Such an explanation scheme renders phenomena as incontinence, self-harm, choosing the less beneficial of two alternatives, or in general ‘desiring the bad’, as misconstruals of explanations, or mere false appearances, hence denying the possibility of what seem to be common cases of human wickedness or moral deficiency. Against this idea, then, the paper explores the sufficiency and adequacy of the supposed straightforward bond between evaluative and motivational states, by introducing some considerations, stemming from Michael Stocker’s work, that moods, emotional states, energy, interest, preoccupation and similar psychological factors are what serve as bridges between mentioned states in the production of actions. The idea is that by making the relation between evaluation and motivation more complex by way of this introduction, it will make possible not only to give satisfactory explanations of those cases that the sub specie boni scheme adequately accounted for, but also to make way for explanations of common phenomena that under such scheme resulted in the contradiction of many of our intuitions regarding agency. What this serves, in the end, is the purpose of making way for a better moral psychology.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Evil’s Role in Kayomart’s Life and Death
Maryam Dara
Olumo Tahghighat Azad University of Tehran-Iran