13 - Motivation by Ideal

Summary

When philosophersdiscuss our motive for acting morally, they tend to assume that it serves as one contributor to the broad conflux of motives that jointly determine most of our behavior. Although philosophers recognize the possibility of our being divided into mutually isolated motivational currents of the sort posited, at the extreme, to explain phenomena such as multiple personality, they assume that our moral motive must not be thus divided from our other motives, lest its manifestations in our behavior turn out to be irrational and, at the extreme, insane. Their assumption is that the actions flowing from our moral motive must in fact flow from a unified stream of all our motives, augmented by a moral tributary.

This assumption influences which questions are asked about moral motivation and which answers are considered plausible. The assumption encourages philosophers to ask, for example, how to identify our moral motive among the impulses that pass under the eye of ordinary deliberative reflection, and how that motive can possibly prevail against the impulses that so conspicuously favor immorality.

I am going to argue that the motive behind moral actions can become isolated from our other motives, generating behavior that is irrational in some respects though rational in others. In my view, moral action performed from moral motives can be less than fully rational precisely because of the division in its motivation.