Abstract
This chapter argues in favour of the Humean theory of motivation as the best account of moral motivation. Humeanism is often called the ‘belief–desire model’ of action because it explains all intentional behaviour – including moral behaviour – by citing a combination of a desire for some end, and a belief that an action is a means to achieve that end. I offer three arguments in favour of Humeanism. First, I suggest that Humeanism meets a criterion of theory choice better than its theoretical competitors: the continuity constraint. Humeanism is consistent with an evolutionary etiology which explains how the moral motivations of modern humans could have evolved from simpler precursors resembling the psychological traits of nonhuman primates. Secondly, to ward off the objection that nonhuman primates are too different from humans to provide any insight into moral motivation, I draw on another criterion of theory choice called Morgan’s Canon – a standard of theoretical parsimony according to which a psychological mechanism should be attributed to an organism only if it is the sole mechanism which can explain some behaviour. I contend that Humeanism meets this criterion more successfully than rival accounts of moral motivation, on the grounds that the Humean belief–desire model can successfully explain both moral and non-moral action. Finally, a third argument appeals to the success of the Humean model of utility-maximization in predicting moral action and its neural correlates.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘besire’ was coined by J.E.J. Altham (1986).
- 2.
Evolutionary change does not only proceed from the simple to the complex. As Elliot Sober notes, ‘the history of life is peppered with cases of evolutionary simplification. For example, the evolution of parasites typically involves a transition from complex to simple, as the parasite loses features of its free-living ancestor’ (Sober 1998, p. 225). When it comes to understanding the evolutionary origins of human psychological features, though, we obviously seek an explanation for how something as complex as the human mind arose from simpler precursors.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to David Wong, an anonymous referee, and the participants of the “What Makes Us Moral?” Conference, VU University Amsterdam, for their helpful feedback on this essay.
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Luco, A. (2013). Humean Moral Motivation. In: Musschenga, B., van Harskamp, A. (eds) What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6343-2_8
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