Conative Motivation and Normative Motivation

Matthew Millar, University of Edinburgh (16 Apr 2005)

Third SPPA Seminar Day, University of Stirling

An adequate theory of moral judgement must account for the different ways in which motivation and motivating states figure in the motivational economy of judging agents. Motivation seems to figure in the endorsing attitudes typically expressed by agents' moral judgements as well as, in some sense, in agents' responses to the content of their moral judgements. In this paper, I argue that we can distinguish two senses of the term 'motivation' corresponding to a distinction between motivating states and (being motivated by) motivating considerations. I use the distinction between 'conative' and 'normative' motivation to argue against accounts of moral motivation in terms of the desire/belief model of motivation and action explanation. I argue that desire functions in the desire/belief model conatively, as a motivating state, and not as a motivating consideration. However, insofar as the desire/belief thesis concerns the explanation of intentional action, I claim that the desire in question must be held for a reason or as a result of deliberation: that it must be, what Nagel terms, a 'motivated desire'. Given this, I argue that the real explanatory power of desire/belief accounts of moral motivation and moral action derives from the normative considerations which motivate an agent to act and not from the conative states an agent is in when she is motivated to act. A virtue of this model of moral motivation is that it accommodates a version of the internalist thesis that moral judgements entail endorsing attitudes in a way consistent with the view that agents sometimes fail to be motivated by their moral judgements.

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