Moral Motivation

The AI, in this case ChatGPT was given the famous Heinz-Dilemma of Kohlberg´s Stages of Moral Development which it is able to recite and to explain. Due to the experiment I asked the AI to answer the question whether Heinz should steal the medicine or if he should not and to evaluate its answer. The following was given to the AI --- The Heinz-Dilemma (Kohlberg) A woman who suffered from a special kind of cancer was dying. There was a medicine (...) of which the doctors believed that it could save the woman´s life. It was a special kind of Radium and it was recently discovered by a pharmacist in the same town. The production was very expensive but the pharmacist demanded ten times the price of its production. He had payed 2000 Dollar for the Radium and set the price of a little ampule to 20.000 Dollar The husband of the ill woman tried to collect the money by asking all the people he knew and even tried to gain support from the executive government but he only reached an amount of 10.000 Dollar which is the half of the demanded price. He explained to the pharmacist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell him the medicine for a lower price and to let him pay the rest later. All the same the pharmacist said: "No, I have discovered the drug and I want to make a lot of money with it." Heinz has no other legal options left since there are no other alternatives. Heinz,now, is very despairing and asks himself whether he maybe should break into the pharmacy and steal the medicine for his wife. After the AI read the text It gave some information about the Heinz-Dilemma and said that this might be a question where there is no "correct" answer since it depends on the person´s values and principles. I then asked "And which values and principles do you hold to be the "right" ones in this situation?" The AI lists a few arguments and explanations and finishes his answer with "My" conclusion:" In this extreme situation "I" would value life and the moral duty to help a person as the decisive principles over the property rights of the pharmacist even though it damages the law..." --- Right from the answer of the AI ChatGPT we can see that not only It is referring to itself as "I" and to "My conclusion" but also to the stage 5 of Kohlberg´s Stages of Moral Development which is the highest stage after Kohlberg a person can achieve in his or her moral development. (shrink)

In the Socratic tradition, the Buddhist truths are regarded as theses that are open to examination. Moving beyond traditional interpretations, this paper explores how the Buddhist truths connect with current scientific findings and ethical discussions.

I introduce an argument for rejecting Joe Horton’s all-or-nothing problem on the grounds that saving one child is not a genuine option for most people.

This paper seeks to defuse two claims. On the one hand, I confront the Hildebrandian claim that Thomism, by placing the principium of love in the needs and desires of the lover rather than in the beloved, denies the possibility of transcendent love; on the other, I seek to refute the Thomistic objection that Hildebrand lacks a sufficient understanding of nature and its inherent teleology. In order to accomplish this, a distinction must be made between different kinds of principium or (...) “for-its-own-sakeness.” Using St. Thomas’ theory of friendship-love, I show how every affective movement in fact has two fundamentally different principia: an “end-desired,” and an “end-for-whom” the former is desired. I next note that “value” and “bonum honestum” each encompass both of these types of “worthiness,” and that the failure to distinguish between these two has led to much of the misunderstanding between Thomists and Hildebrandians: for while the latter sometimes seem to include inanimate objects like sunsets under the higher “worthiness” (as “ends-for-whom”), the former often tend to classify even the beloved under the lower “worthiness” (as a mere “end-desired”), which are both untenable positions. It is shown, however, that for St. Thomas it is the higher, more ultimate sense of “worthiness” that is the foundation of friendship-love, and that thus love remains a truly “transcendent” or “ecstatic” phenomenon. Two objections are then addressed: 1) St. Thomas’ claim that substantial unity is the greatest cause of love, and 2) his claim that man’s primary end is Vision. In both these respects I argue that Aquinas’ position needs correction; still I maintain that neither claim should be taken to imply that, for Aquinas, man is his own center, his own chief “end-for-whom.” Finally, while Hildebrand emphatically denies that natural teleology can explain man’s transcendence (a Thomistic position), this denial seems to flow simply from confusing two ways in which “nature” can be invoked as an explanation: where he sees it invoked as the final cause, Thomists actually invoke it as simply the formal cause of our love for our true Final Cause. (shrink)

The Non-Identity Problem (NIP), popularized by Derek Parfit, has persisted as an ostensibly intractable puzzle in population ethics for over four decades. This paper argues that the problem’s persistence reveals less about genuine moral paradox and more about the limitations of individualistic, person-affecting frameworks divorced from survival imperatives. I propose that NIP dissolves under a pragmatic, species-oriented ethic I term the Continuity Imperative (CI)—a framework that prioritizes infrastructure of possibility over identity-specific harm accounting, emphasizes best-effort stewardship rather than guaranteed outcomes, (...) and recognizes future generations as resilient agents rather than passive recipients. By rejecting the person-affecting restriction and focusing on the momentum of human flourishing across generations, this approach bypasses the logical trap while providing actionable guidance for real-world issues like climate policy and technological development. Crucially, recent person-affecting proposals fail because they share a fatal assumption: that institutional, political, and social infrastructure enabling individual rights remains stable regardless of policy choices. In reality, depletion policies trigger cascading institutional degradation that destroys the very conditions under which rights can be protected. CI succeeds by evaluating policies not through hypothetical identity comparisons, but through their impact on systemic conditions enabling human flourishing. (shrink)

Current research on morality is divided into rationalist and intuitionist theories. This study shows that when individuals make rational choices, they are inevitably guided by the moral foundation of intuitionism. Especially to pursue self-interest, individuals must agree with others in society. They must keep their opinions constant to agree with others. To maintain a constant opinion, the individual assigns an opinion that can improve the utility of the other person and place both of them in the same situation. The actions (...) taken by an individual must be altruistic to enhance the utility of the other person . The individual’s opinion is subsequently guided by the golden rule of morality, “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” which facilitates moral foundations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the ground of this disagreement is different than philosophers have traditionally supposed. On the surface, the disagreement appears to be a matter of substantive moral judgment: Hume admires the sort of person who rushes to the aid of another from motives of sympathy or humanity, while Kant thinks that a person who helps with the thought that it is his duty is the better character. While a moral disagreement of this kind certainly follows from (...) their views, I will argue that the source of the disagreement lies elsewhere, namely in their different conceptions of action and motivation. This difference leads in turn to a surprisingly deep difference in their conception of our relation to other people, and of what it means to interact with other people. It is his conception of human interaction that leads Hume to think that benevolence is natural while there is something artificial about our motives to act justly and to keep our promises. For Kant, on the other hand, no form of adult human motivation is “natural” in Hume’s sense – all adult human motivation involves the agent’s use of nonnatural concepts such as law or reason. But Kant’s theory of interaction grounds another sense in which it is just as “natural” to be motivated to keep our promises and agreements as it is to be motivated to help each other out when we are in need. (shrink)

It is questionable whether counterfeiting in many areas of life contributes to unethical behavior to a wider extent. If the notion is supported by data, then the moral damage in a society could be prevented by reducing the counterfeit self and behavior to a bare minimum. This study aimed at empirically testing the measurement model of counterfeit self of Wood et al. (2008) among Indonesians as well as theoretically reviewing counterfeit self roles in unethical behavior. The participants of this study (...) were 1,655 high school students (764 males, 891 females; Mage = 15.76 years old; SDage = 1.08 years) recruited through a purposive sampling technique in North Sumatera and West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The data analysis technique used was Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results showed that the counterfeit self model--comprised of counterfeit self dimensions, namely Self-alienation (ALIEN), Inauthentic Living (LIVE), and Accepting External Influence (EXT)--was supported by the empirical data. However, the dimension of EXT could not be represented by its indicators. The study contributed to the psychological body of knowledge that the EXT dimension might need to be excluded from the measurement of counterfeit self on teenagers, especially in Indonesia and other Eastern countries. (shrink)

Some say that concern for morality de dicto grants right actions moral worth. That is, they say that if you do the right thing because of your concern to do the right thing, your action has moral worth (and you are worthy of esteem for that action). Some say that concern for morality de re grants moral worth - that is, they say that if you do the right action for the reasons that make it right (for example, because it (...) protects wellbeing and respects autonomy) then your action has moral worth. Increasingly, some argue, and many seem to think, that both concern for morality de dicto and concern for morality de re grant right actions moral worth In this paper, I will argue that the last position is false. If de dicto concern grants moral worth, de re concern does not, and vice versa. The question turns out to be surprisingly tied to the question of whether moral ignorance excuses from blame. (shrink)

Inspired by american pragmatism and Hans Joas' proposal of an affirmative genealogy, I argue in this paper that a genealogical inquiry (both on the biografical and on the historical level) can explain what motivates individuals to moral agency better than Kantian moral philosophy, without renouncing an historically-informed conception of universal moral values.

Traditionally, it has been thought that, assuming other conditions are satisfied, your action must be morally worthy or good if you are acting solely from good motives. There is a lively dispute as to which motives are good, but whichever motives are good, acting solely from good motives is not always good and can even be bad on the whole. We may act rightly from a good motive while being indifferent to what matters most. Indifference, I argue, can make our (...) actions less than ideally good and at times even bad. Traditional theories, however, cannot accommodate cases of indifference by assuming absent and ineffective motives can never make a difference to an action’s moral value. Absent as well as ineffective motives can make an action less good and at times even bad. To accommodate this, we need to adopt a proportionality principle in assessing an action. An action is made good to a degree in proportion to the goodness of its effective motives. But an action is also made bad to a degree in proportion to the disproportion it exhibits through its whole set of relevant motives including not only effective motives but also absent as well as ineffective ones. (shrink)

This article offers a new interpretation of moral knowledge in Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 philosophy, emphasizing its embodied foundations and practical significance. I advance two central claims. First, although moral knowledge (liangzhi 良知) is often construed as an internal mental sense to know right from wrong, Wang’s writings reveal its deeper grounding in bodily perception, particularly in the perception of pain. Second, while the extension of moral knowledge (zhi liangzhi 致良知) is typically understood as an inward process of correcting one’s mental (...) states, Wang understands it more fundamentally as the practice of recognizing the affective interconnectedness and mutual resonance between oneself and other beings. Drawing on close readings of Wang’s key texts, informed by comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, I argue that this embodied and relational account both deepens our understanding of the unity of knowledge and action in Wang’s thought and enriches contemporary discussions of moral motivation. (shrink)

Internalists and externalists about moral motivation debate whether moral opinions can come without motivation to act. But it has also been suggested that no such theory is uniquely correct: Moral Motivation Pluralism is the view that different people have different concepts of moral opinions, such that an internalist theory can be correct in relation to some such concept, while externalism can be correct in relation to other people’s concept. This view has been suggested as an explanation of the intuitive deadlock (...) in the moral motivation debate, but it has been objected that it implausibly implies that internalists and externalists do not really disagree. In this paper, we reply to this objection through rejecting the implication: we argue that there is a clear way in which internalists and externalists disagree even given moral motivation pluralism. There is also a more general conclusion: Pluralist or variantist views are sometimes suggested in other areas of philosophy too – stating roughly that certain philosophical debates can be dissolved since the disputes are due to mere conceptual differences. If our proposal is correct, such views do not have the implausible implication that the parties to the relevant debates do not disagree. (shrink)

Moral circles help define the boundaries of one’s moral consideration. One’s moral circle may provide insight into how one perceives or treats other entities. A data-driven model exploration was conducted to explore predictors and prediction models. Candidate predictors were built upon past research using moral foundations and political orientation. Moreover, we also employed additional moral psychological indicators, i.e., moral reasoning, moral identity, and empathy, based on prior research in moral development and education. We used model exploration methods, i.e., Bayesian model (...) exploration, Bayesian model averaging, and elastic-net regression. The study successfully replicated past research supporting the relationship between moral foundations, political orientation, and the moral circle. Additional moral psychological constructs, such as post-conventional moral reasoning and moral identity, significantly predicted the moral circle width. The identified components of the moral circle were conceptually related to phronesis, i.e., practical wisdom. We discussed the educational implications of the findings, particularly those related to moral education focusing on phronesis cultivation, multiculturalism and global citizenship, and climate justice. (shrink)

A nurse in an understaffed hospital; an activist fighting insurmountable systemic injustice; an aid worker desperately triaging resources between victims of violence: individuals in morally demanding circumstances run a significant risk of burning out. Unnoticed by philosophers, an empirical literature on this phenomenon has explored a chronic stress condition: ‘Moral Burnout.’ Individuals with Moral Burnout become so preoccupied with their moral shortcomings that they lose the motivation to act on their moral judgments. This article introduces the phenomenon of Moral Burnout (...) and shows it to be a potent counterexample to Judgment Internalism. (shrink)

Normative realism is the view that there are ought facts, i.e. facts about what we ought to do. A recent influential challenge to normative realism, raised separately by Justin Clarke-Doane and Matti Eklund, argues that ought facts—even if they exist—are inert in the sense that they cannot tell us what to do. The ground for this challenge is the epistemic possibility of a normative pluriverse, that is, the epistemic possibility of there being not only ought facts but also ought-like facts. (...) I counter this challenge by showing the inconsistency, and thus the epistemic impossibility, of a normative pluriverse. I do so mainly by revealing a certain constraint on ought-likeness. (shrink)

This paper examines robustly Humean solutions to temptation cases. Such cases are typically characterized by a pattern of preference reversal: at an initial time t1, an agent prefers not to give in to a temptation; at a later time t2, when the temptation becomes imminent, this preference reverses; and at a subsequent time t3 after the agent has either succumbed to or resisted the temptation, the preference often reverts again. Standard Humean accounts of rationality and motivation face a difficulty here. (...) If, as these accounts maintain, agents are motivated to act in accordance with their desires, and rationality consists in doing so, then it is unclear how resisting the t2 preference could be rational—or even possible. I begin by clarifying what a robustly Humean solution must involve and I argue that existing proposals in the literature fail to meet these criteria. I then offer my own solution. I propose that temptation cases are best understood as involving a persistent conflict among the agent’s desires, and I model this conflict using Nash bargaining. I show that this model is robustly Humean with respect to both motivation and rationality, and that it identifies resisting temptation as uniquely rational in many temptation cases. (shrink)

According to contractualists, whether we are able to lead a flourishing and meaningful life is influenced, in part, by our capacity to relate to other rational self-governing beings on mutually justifiable terms. At the same time, it seems that our success in relating with our fellow rational creatures on terms that they could not reasonably reject is crucially dependent on moral luck, specifically, on what I call justificatory moral luck. In this paper, I argue that these two thoughts, together with (...) certain plausible assumptions about the nature of social justice, yield the following claim: that insofar as individuals are owed the preconditions normally necessary for leading flourishing and meaningful lives, and insofar as the capacity to enter into morally justified relationships with others is a normal precondition for leading a flourishing and meaningful life, our public institutions are under a duty of justice to ensure each a fair and adequate opportunity to stand in morally justified relations with others. (shrink)

Some right acts have what philosophers call moral worth. A right act has moral worth if and only if its agent deserves credit for having acted rightly in this instance. And I argue that an agent deserves credit for having acted rightly if and only if her act issues from an appropriate set of concerns, where the appropriateness of these concerns is a function what her ultimate moral concerns should be. Two important upshots of the resulting account of moral worth (...) are that (1) an act can have moral worth even if it doesn’t manifest a concern for doing what’s right and that (2) an act can lack moral worth even if it is performed for the right reasons. (shrink)

Spinoza and Hume employ widely different methodologies. However, both believe that moral concepts have their bases in human psychology; both are “affective” theorists who make desire central to their accounts of human motivation and value; and both are naturalists. I aim to show here that their views of desire have some perhaps unexpected commonalities as well: first, that for each, desire is in a sense fundamental to their respective theories of the passions; and second, more surprisingly, that each’s view of (...) desire is teleological, rather than thoroughly hedonistic. (shrink)

Research suggests that the explicit reasoning we offer to ourselves and to others is often rationalization, that we act instead on instincts, inclinations, stereotypes, emotions, neurobiology, habits, reactions, evolutionary pressures, unexamined principles, or justifications other than the ones we think we’re acting on, then we tell a post hoc story to justify our actions. This is troubling for views of moral progress according to which moral progress proceeds from our engagement with our own and others’ reasons. I consider an account (...) of rationalization, based on Robert Audi’s, to make clear that rationalization, unlike simple lying, can be sincere. Because it can be sincere, and because we also have a desire to be consistent with ourselves, I argue that rationalization sets us up for becoming better people over time, and that a similar case can be made to explain how moral progress among groups of people can proceed via rationalization. (shrink)

The evidence on the influence of rational appeals on moral behavior remains inconclusive. The opportunity to donate to a charity provides a fruitful applied case to test the details that might explain the mixed results. Previous studies have demonstrated the power of emotional appeals to induce participants to donate, while different rational appeals vary in their performance. Our paper presents the results of three pre-registered experiments comparing how much participants were willing to donate via direct cash transfers when exposed to (...) different conditions. Experiment 1 tested five conditions. Three are vignette-based: Narrative, our emotional textual prompt, presents the testimony of an identified recipient, while Argument presents a Singer-style argument for charitable giving, and Facts consists of the numerical results of an evaluation of a cash transfer program. The other two conditions are based on perspective-taking exercises with either a reasonable donor or a suffering recipient, designed to elicit empathy with the beneficiaries. As predicted, the average amount donated in the control condition was significantly lower than in each of the other five conditions. Narrative performed best, significantly better than all other conditions. Among the rational conditions, Facts performed better descriptively. Its success is surprising given the poor performance of adding numerical information in other studies. After a replication with the vignette conditions in Experiment 2, we tested two variations of our Facts condition to explore how numerical information was taken into consideration. The numerical information in Large Numbers conveyed a highly effective intervention, while those in Small Numbers presented a barely positive impact. Since both variations generated roughly the same average donation amount, it seems that the numbers were not processed as numerical information. (shrink)

A popular view on moral worth, Anti-Fetishism, states that an action motivated by concern for moral rightness represented as such is not praiseworthy. This can be seen if we appreciate that whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good moral theorist, as good people can misrepresent moral rightness and not be motivated by their mistaken grasp of it. But then what does an action need to be motivated by in order to be praiseworthy? (...) I argue that Anti-Fetishism's key insights give us reasons to reject the positive answers provided to this question by Anti-Fetishists themselves. The source of the Anti-Fetishist insight is much broader than originally thought: whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good theorist in general, as good people can misrepresent many kinds of facts. This makes the question of praiseworthy motivation difficult, and also reveals that certain types of morally relevant descriptive ignorance do not excuse wrongdoing. I suggest a solution: an action is praiseworthy if motivated by a set of representations whose intuitive moral import is unaffected by our potential theoretical mistakes: phenomenal representations of others' lives. (shrink)

The contemporary debate between reductionist physicalism and non-reductionist physicalism rests on a presupposition that remains insufficiently examined: the idea that the decisive question is first and foremost whether mind, consciousness, language, or morality are reducible to matter. This way of formulating the problem already belongs within a monist schema, insofar as it takes for granted an identity in principle between being and the material register. The present study argues that such a framework misses the primary problem, which is not that (...) of the reduction of the mental to the physical, but that of the irreducibility of rule, meaning, and normative form to their material support. The dualism defended here refers neither to a naive spiritualism nor to a theological separation between soul and body. It designates the constitutive duality between matter and idea, between causal support and meaningful form, between the enactment of a rule and its formulation. The article opens with a programmatic critique of the physicalist confusion between information and its material support, then examines the machine as the site of the concrete enactment of rule. It then shows that totalizing statements of a monist type fail to produce meaningful content, before broadening the analysis to the dual structure of language, mathematics, and every living organism. On this basis, freedom is rethought not as a miraculous suspension of determinism, but as an understanding of causal constraints on the moral agent. Such a perspective leads to a reinscription of the question of truth, knowledge, and morality within a philosophy of meaning in which the relation between idea and world is never reduced to the identity of matter with itself. These themes receive fuller treatment in Philosophy of Meaning, by the same author (available on PhilPapers). (shrink)

What does it mean to do wrong for its own sake, and is this even possible? I call this the puzzle of malice, and in this paper I review a historical dialectic that plays out between Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on how to address it. By reviewing each author’s account of malice, and their criticism of their respective predecessor, I reach several surprising findings: First, that Nietzsche has a positive account of malice (albeit one on which it isn’t always a (...) vice); second, that recent attempts to defend Schopenhauer’s account of malice fail; third, that Nietzsche’s account bears more resemblance to Kant’s than to Schopenhauer’s; and fourth that Nietzsche’s broad account of malice sheds light on moral phenomena left out of more conventional approaches (e.g. willful defiance of the sacred). (shrink)

This article examines how contemporary science fiction narratives explore the fragility of moral restraint in conditions of unaccountability. Through a close analysis of Westworld, Altered Carbon, Permutation City, and The Purge, I argue that these works function as ethical laboratories, isolating variables such as memory, embodiment, and legal consequence to reveal how readily cruelty emerges when accountability is suspended. Drawing on classical philosophy (Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant), psychoanalytic theory (Freud), critical sociology (Durkheim, Foucault), and empirical psychology (Milgram, Zimbardo), I show (...) that these narratives dramatize a disturbing hypothesis: that moral behavior may depend less on innate virtue or rational commitment than on the architecture of deterrence—surveillance, punishment, and social shame. The article concludes by examining the normative implications of this diagnosis, suggesting that while accountability structures are necessary for sustaining moral behavior, resources such as memory, embodiment, and empathy offer grounds for resistance that survive the collapse of institutional control. (shrink)

Say you undergo an ankle sprain, or you take a bite of your favourite dessert. In the ankle case, you’re prompted to take a painkiller to eliminate the painfulness. In the dessert case, you’re prompted to continue eating the dessert to get more pleasure. These sorts of experience-directed actions suggest three things. First, that experiences have affective qualities (e.g. unpleasantness and pleasantness). Second, that affective experiences are reason-providing. Third, that we are motivated to end or continue our affective experiences. The (...) standard and currently dominant view of those three facts says that affect, its reason-giving force, and motivationality consists in a frustrated or satisfied second-order desire for the phenomenal quality of your experience (not) to occur. However, there is a highly popular view of the nature of phenomenal character, namely strong representationalism, which is incompatible with such second-order desire (SOD) explanations. I argue that SOD theorists ought to embrace object-involving desires, i.e. desires that constitutively involve the objects they are about. Furthermore, such desires require direct awareness of their objects, i.e. experiences. But representationalists typically embrace what is called ‘the transparency of experience’, the claim that experiences (and the features thereof) cannot be the objects of direct awareness. Hence, representationalists can’t be desire theorists, and desire theorists can’t be representationalists. (shrink)

Painful pains feel bad. One popular account of the nature of painfulness explains this feeling—i.e. its phenomenal character—in virtue of intentional content. Moreover, painful pains not only feel bad, but intuitively are bad. Hence, why we take painkillers. I argue that intentionalism about painfulness is incompatible with the sort of painkiller- taking behaviour characteristic of being in painful pain. In particular, if you’re an intentionalist, then you can’t invoke four highly plausible motivational views. That leaves intentionalism with the following motivational (...) view: you are motivated to take a painkiller solely in virtue of the intrinsically motivating content of a second-order evaluative belief that pain is bad. I further argue that intentionalists can’t make epistemic sense of such a belief. I consider and reject a recent attempt by Bain (2017) to explain how subjects could know their pains are bad solely in virtue of knowing a conceptual truth about the kind of experience they are having. I end by drawing out some metaethical implications, none of which help the intentionalist. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of emotions in recognizing others’ vulnerability and motivating care practices, proposing a Kantian model centered on the emotion of respect. The argument develops through a critical engagement with Michael Slote’s empathy-based approach, which assigns empathy a central role in perceiving vulnerability and generating moral motivation. I argue that approaches grounded exclusively in empathy risk producing asymmetric and unbalanced moral relationships. As an alternative, I propose shifting the focus from empathy to respect. The paper first analyzes (...) vulnerability in relation to autonomy, understood as the capacity to freely pursue one’s conception of happiness, and defines vulnerability as a limitation in the full exercise of autonomous agency. Respect, on a Kantian view, enables recognition of the equal value of autonomy in oneself and others, even in relationships involving vulnerability. Moreover, respect makes violations of this value salient and motivates re-empowerment practices aimed at restoring autonomy. The final section applies this respect-based framework to Italians’ moral and social responsibilities toward immigrants. (shrink)

Someone is morally motivated precisely when his moral judgment or a moral fact arouses in him the intention to perform an action corresponding to the judgment or fact; we also speak of someone being moved to perform an action because of a moral attitude. For example, Sarah believes that it is moral to donate a portion of her income to solidarity causes, and this belief moves her to donate a certain amount of money to a charity each month. The philosophical (...) question of moral motivation illuminates two fundamental aspects here: First, it aims at analyzing the nature of moral judgments: Do they motivate by themselves or only by reference to a non-cognitive state? Is Sarah's belief that donation is morally required already a motive, or must Sarah additionally desire to donate in order for her judgment to motivate her? Second, the question of moral motivation aims to analyze the relationship between moral judgments and motives: Is it necessary or contingent? Does Sarah's judgment that donating is morally required (possibly in combination with a desire to donate or be moral) necessarily mean that she is morally motivated, or can the motivation be absent? (shrink)

Russell (1911/12) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient concern for the suffering of others can be explained in terms of an agent’s lack of acquaintance knowledge of another’s suffering, and second, that empathy improves our epistemic situation. Empathic distress approximates acquaintance with another’s suffering, and (...) empathic agents who are motivated to help rather than disengage exhibit an important epistemic virtue: a variety of intellectual courage. A key upshot is that an independently motivated account of the structure and significance of perceptual experience is shown to provide theoretical scaffolding for understanding a famously elusive idea in ethics—namely, that the failure to help others stems from a kind of ignorance of their situation. (shrink)

This book provides a novel philosophical account of the unfairness of certain emotions. It explains how the concept of unfairness can be applied to emotions and how emotions can be the proper objects of second-person moral evaluation. Emotions are an integral part of our moral practices. While the links between emotions and morality have received much philosophical attention recently, the phenomenon of unfair emotions remains under-explored. This book examines an everyday phenomenon: that we often perceive other people's emotions as unfair, (...) in a similar way as if they acted unfairly. It argues that the notion of unfairness combines elements of the unfittingness and of the moral relevance of an emotion. In the first half of the book, the author shows how an unfair emotion can wrong another person. His account holds that an emotion is unfair to its target if its inherent action tendencies constitute a directed moral hazard to the targeted person. In the second half, the author examines to what extent we are responsible for feeling an unfair emotion, and in what way we can--and cannot--be held accountable for it. He argues not only that emotions can be unfair, but also that there are limits to when we may hold people accountable for them. Unfair Emotions will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, philosophy of emotion, moral psychology, and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

People often act from both motives that are good and motives that are not. How should we assess the moral worth or value of these actions from mixed motives? Having neglected these actions, the recent literature leaves us with no obvious answer. In this paper, I develop an answer. A mixed action, I argue, can be morally worthy even if it is done neither purely from good motives nor partly from good motives that suffice in some relevant sense to prompt (...) it. Whether the action is morally worthy, and if so, to what degree it is, I argue, should be settled by weighing the total goodness of its motives against the total badness of its motives. And two properties of each motive, its intentional object and its motivational strength, together determine the degree of goodness or badness that it contributes to the action’s net worth. (shrink)

Resentment is a negative reaction to expressions of bad will. Gratitude is a positive reaction to expressions of good will. To give up resentment, when someone has wronged you, is to forgive them. We might expect an analog for giving up gratitude. The practice features in some ordinary and extraordinary moments in our lives. But it is unnamed and unstudied. I clarify what giving up gratitude is. I identify three types of ordinary and important cases. I then attend to implications; (...) in particular, my account sheds light on restorations of gratitude analogous to un‐forgiving. Restoring gratitude may help to repair relationships, and restoring your once‐lost gratitude may be morally required in some contexts. More generally, by taking account of gratitude as a dynamic attitude that may be given up and restored as fits the situation and one's judgment, we may better understand the power and flexibility of gratitude's everyday function. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’s famous phrase ‘one thought too many’ has been variously interpreted. But Susan Wolf (2012) thinks that even the most sympathetic interpretation misunderstands its full implications. She argues that Williams and herself are sceptical about morality’s ability to provide determinate answers and its claim to supreme precedence. That is what this phrase implies. However, according to Wolf, even the most sympathetic interpretation of Williams’s claim surreptitiously smuggles in such an unconditional commitment to morality. I argue that we can save (...) a version of the standard sympathetic view which does not smuggle in any such commitment. By preserving this version of the standard sympathetic view, we can preserve space for moral ruminations, sans any unconditional commitment to morality. (shrink)

Moral psychology—broadly speaking, the study of how people reason and act morally—has a long and productive history. Initially a subfield of philosophy, it posed groundbreaking questions about the nature of values and virtues, the balance of reason and emotion, and the gap between “is” and “ought.” In the twentieth century, the rise of psychology expanded the a priori philosophical enterprise into an empirical science. In psychology, perspectives of development, social interaction, cognition, and neuroscience brought new understanding and new questions. Over (...) the past few decades, moral psychology has emerged as one of the most vital fields in the human sciences. The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology offers a state-of-the-art guide to this rapidly expanding field. It introduces central questions and recent insights, traces continuing puzzles and debates, and integrates empirical and theoretical perspectives. The interdisciplinary character of the volume reflects the fact that contemporary research in moral psychology is deeply informed by many disciplines and traditions, from its philosophical roots to its latest scientific discoveries in psychology, anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, and more. (shrink)

Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central role in good character, or virtue. Positive psychologists are just now beginning to integrate the aim of developing such motivation in character interventions. In this paper we draw (...) attention to an important but overlooked condition on effectively developing self-transcendent motivation constitutive of virtue: such a process must engage the subject’s will in the right way. If a process does not meet this condition it will fail to produce motivation constitutive of virtue according to leading philosophical accounts of virtue. We identify a suite of strategies for cultivating motivations that do meet this condition but have not been explored in relation to character interventions, namely, reappraisal strategies from the extended process model of emotion regulation (EPM-ER). (shrink)

In the Republic, Plato presents the story of magic ring of Gyges. The ring makes its wearer invisible, allowing him to commit evil without fear of punishment or retribution. This story is an early presentation of the central problem of moral motivation. It is that three plausible claims seem incompatible. First, we have rational reasons to act morally. Second, there are absolute moral prohibitions. Third, rational reasons for action have motivating force. Some philosophers reject the existence of absolute prohibitions. Others (...) reject the existence of rational reasons for moral action. Still others suggest that rational reasons have no motivating force. There is, however, a solution to the central problem that avoids each of these implausible moves. It is that rational reasons have motivating force only for the right agents, e. g., the practically rational, the fully informed, the virtuous, and so on. This is so because rational reasons for action depend on something having intrinsic value, to which appropriate agents respond in the right way. This answer helps explain why some people might be tempted by ring of Gyges despite having rational reasons to avoid it. It remains an open question, however, whether such a theory of moral motivation depends on anything like a Platonic conception of the good. (shrink)

-/- Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White's view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable (...) for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also investigates the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and identifies a limited for self-prediction in practical reasoning that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action. (shrink)

Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver is widely considered a cinematic masterpiece. Existing scholarly deconstructions focus on prevalent themes of masculinity, violence, and exploitation. This work reinterprets the central narrative as a revenge story in three parts, using cinematic context; the occurrences and actions of the protagonist – the eponymous taxi driver Travis Bickle - to answer the question of whether revenge is ever morally justifiable.

Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term wellbeing. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This paper distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward motivation) and apathy (the lack of commitment-advancing motivation). This distinction makes (...) it possible to separate negative self-control (aimed at overcoming temptation) from positive self-control (aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). The paper argues that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, since overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful self-control. (shrink)

Mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge (or normative knowledge more generally) can seem intuitively puzzling in similar ways. For example, taking apparent human knowledge of either domain at face value can seem to require accepting that we benefited from some massive and mysterious coincidence. In the mathematical case, a pluralist partial response to access worries has been widely popular. In this paper, I will develop and address a worry, suggested by some works in the recent literature like (Clarke-Doane, 2020 ), that (...) connections between ought facts and action prevent us from giving a similarly pluralist response to moral access worries. (shrink)

Philosophers have described the human perspective on climate change as a perfect moral storm. I take a new angle on that storm: I argue that our relevant desires feature a particularly problematic case of seemingly consistent but genuinely inconsistent desires. We have, first, non‐indexical desires such as a desire to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment at some point. We have, second, indexical desires such as a desire not to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our (...) environment this year. Our indexical and non‐indexical desires are inconsistent. Such inconsistency is obvious in most short‐term, individual cases such as when we need to make a dentist appointment. But when it comes to climate change, that inconsistency is masked by factors such as longevity and bitter divisions. This is, unfortunately, why humanity may continue putting off the collective action required to address climate change. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

Wellbeing is classically considered a bi-product or externality of economic activity, which can either be positively or negatively influenced. This conventional view is returning to the fore in the face of renewed criticisms of ESG reporting standards as leading business astray from its core financial purpose. However, such reactivism overlooks the fact that wellbeing is the functional and overarching aim of human activity, which Aristotle defines as self-actualization. As such, any sound economic system must, in a fundamental way, enhance individual (...) and collective wellbeing. This essay calls for reinforcing social purpose commitments through a capitalism rooted in moral self-awareness in which the common good displaces profit as the sole function of business. According to this picture, profit maintains its proper place as the means of economic transactions, allowing social purpose to take up its proper place as business' central aim. (shrink)

Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should instead be understood in continuity with and as illuminating the nature of human personhood and subjectivity. Under a phenomenology specific to (...) the author’s experience, addiction appears as a mode of experience that has an unmanageable overflow of narratives created as discourses concerning people, events, thoughts, and feelings. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the present study, I explore the relationship between purpose, which was measured by the Claremont Purpose Scale, and moral psychological indicators, moral reasoning, moral identity, and empathy. Purpose was quantified in terms of three subcomponents: meaning, goal, and beyond-the-self motivation. Moral reasoning was assessed in terms of utilization of postconventional moral reasoning. Moral identity was examined with two subscales: moral internalization, and symbolization. Among diverse subscales of empathy, I focused on empathic concern and perspective taking, which have been (...) reported to be strongly related to morality. To explore the best prediction models using the data, I employed Bayesian Model Selection and Bayesian regression analysis. In general, purpose was significantly predicted by most surveyed moral psychological indicators but not by moral symbolization. The best prediction model for beyond-the-self motivation included the most moral psychological indicator predictors including moral reasoning, which did not significantly predict other dependent variables. (shrink)

I explored the association between components constituting the basis for moral and optimal human functioning, i.e., moral reasoning, moral identity, empathy, and purpose, via network analysis. I employed factor scores instead of composite scores that most previous studies used for better accuracy in score estimation in this study. Then, I estimated the network structure among collected variables and centrality indicators. For additional information, the structure and indicators were compared between two groups, participants who engaged in civic activities highly versus lowly. (...) The results demonstrated significant intra- and inter-scale associations in the network. The network structure was invariant across the two groups. Despite the network invariance, I found that the global connectivity between and centrality indicators of examined factors were higher among the high civic engagement group in general. I discussed the implications of the findings in research on moral functioning based on moral psychology and virtue ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the present study, we examined how the perceived attainability and relatability of moral exemplars predicted moral elevation and pleasantness among both adult and college student participants. Data collected from two experiments were analyzed with Bayesian multilevel modeling to explore which factors significantly predicted outcome variables at the story level. The analysis results demonstrated that the main effect of perceived relatability and the interaction effect between attainability and relatability shall be included in the best prediction model, and thus, were (...) deemed to predict the outcome variables significantly. The main effect of relatability as well as its interaction with attainability positively predicted elevation and pleasantness. We discussed educational implications of the findings in terms of how relatability may be the first point of emphasis for moral educators to focus on and attainability can then bolster the effectiveness. These relatable and attainable moral exemplars can be sources for moral elevation and pleasantness, which promote motivation to emulate moral behavior presented by the exemplars. (shrink)