In the Thick of Moral Motivation

Suppose you had a genuine moral belief about something, and all that abiding by it required was pushing a little blue button on your desk. It would literally cost you nothing to do it, other than lazily lifting up your arm and tapping it with your index finger. Most people would probably press the button. After all they believe that's the right thing to do. On the other hand, some people might not press the button. You can probably imagine all kinds of scenarios where you fail to do it even though you think it's right. Other concerns enter in. Maybe you get busy and forget all about it, or maybe someone offers you a winning lottery ticket to resist.

But here's the question: in either case, could you genuinely hold that moral belief about the button, and at the same time, have absolutely no motivation (I'm talking no tinge, no inkling, not a scintilla of motivation) to push it? Internalists say no. It’s just part of our concept of moral judgment that motivation (even if really weak or totally defeasible) accompanies it. Externalists say yes. Any connection between moral judgment and motivation is contingent. This is the debate about moral motivation.

The debate has persisted for decades and remains still undecided. Perhaps it's just too easy to feel the basic intuitive pull both for and against a necessary motivational component. We can see a sense in which the belief about the blue button implies some sort of motivation, and with minimal effort, can also begin to a see a sense in which it doesn't. As one observer notes, at this point philosophers attempt to produce "additional cases" and "probe our intuitions further in an effort to overcome what seems an impasse.” And, experimental philosophers have heard this call too, with influential experimental work supporting externalist intuitions and, lately, some to question it.   

In a new paper with John Turri we continue this trend. But rather than just collect intuitions about individual cases, our ultimate goal is to try and understand why there has been so much disagreement about moral motivation in the first place. In our paper we suggest that the division among philosophers actually derives from a fault line familiar to us from everyday life. Specifically, we present some evidence that the persistent disagreement between internalists and externalists can be sourced to a more general phenomenon with deep origins in the folk psychology of belief.

Our motivation for this thesis comes from recent empirical work on the folk psychological concept of belief. Specifically, researchers have discovered that there are two important categories within folk psychology that are expressed by the term ‘belief’. One of these categories — thin belief — is implicitly assumed in the contemporary professional literature on knowledge and belief. The other category — thick belief — enjoys wide, but not exclusive, currency throughout the history of philosophy.

Prior work has shown that attending to these concepts can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief) or in classifying the contents of delusional attitudes. We argue that these conceptions of belief can also be applied to explain crucial intuitions in the debate between motivational internalists and externalists. 

To demonstrate this we present several experiments showing that internalist intuitions are keyed to thick belief, while externalists intuitions are keyed to thin belief. Across several studies we find that when people are presented with thought experiments and probed in terms of thick belief, they are significantly less likely to ascribe moral belief to an unmotivated agent (e.g. that the agent does not thickly believe that he ought to be honest in light of lacking motivation to tell the truth), which fits perfectly with the internalist view. Conversely, when people are probed in terms of thin belief, they are much more likely to ascribe moral belief to an unmotivated agent (e.g. that the agent thinly believes that he ought to be honest while lacking motivation to tell the truth), which fits perfectly with the externalist view.

We observe this general pattern in cases inspired by Michael Stocker’s renowned case of the jaded politician (Stocker 1979), and we replicate this effect using completely different cover stories involving both moral and non-moral contexts. We take these data to reveal that some basic features of folk psychology – our ordinary theory of mind informing mental state attribution to other people – can help to explain why there is such fundamental intuitive disagreement between motivational internalists and externalists. The downside is that if internalists and externalists are appealing to two distinct kinds of psychological states, their disagreement all along is, at least in large part, merely verbal. The upshot is that empirical tools have helped reveal its source.

Comments

[Josh May]

Allow me to kick off the discussion by saying, this is a really great paper! That's all I really have to say.

[Gunnar Björnsson]

I have found your work on the relation between attributions of knowledge and belief really interesting. This looks interesting too, but I do have a few worries; let me mention two.

First, and perhaps most importantly, I don’t yet quite see how this is testing for internalist intuitions. Most people in the internalist debate – internalists and externalists alike – think that people in general have strong default expectations that belief that one (morally, rationally) ought to do something will come with some motivation. Suppose that this is right. Then if A is told that B lacks all motivation to do a certain thing, we should expect A not to attribute to B the belief that B ought to do it unless A has strong positive evidence that B has the belief in question. This, I think, is common ground between internalists and externalists. But now I am a little bit unsure why anything more than this is needed to explain subjects’ reluctance to attribute ‘thick’ moral belief to agents without motivation.

It seems to me that for subjects’ reluctance to attribute moral belief to reveal internalist inclinations, the cases in question would have to be ones where motivation is clearly absent but all other evidence would have suggested that the agent in question has the belief. Such cases should thus strongly indicate that the agent has the relevant purely cognitive (non-motivational) dispositions associated with moral belief (in particular the disposition to make an explicit judgment naturally expressed as “I ought to do such-and-such"). But I don’t see anything in your vignettes that does this. Am I missing something? (My colleagues John Eriksson, Caj Strandberg, Ragnar Francén Olinder, Fredrik Björklund and I try one way of avoiding this problem in a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, “Motivational Internalism and Folk Intuitions, https://www.academia.edu/5823340/Motivational_Internalism_and_Folk_Intuitions.)

If subjects withhold attributions of thick belief because they operate with a default expectation that moral belief comes with motivation, then this withholding provides no evidence that they are intuitive INTERNALISTS about THICK moral belief. A second worry concerns attributions of thin belief. Here, I am not so sure that subjects’ willingness to say that the agents in question “think at least on some level that they ought to this-or-that” provides evidence that subjects are intuitive EXTERNALISTS about THIN moral belief. Here I worry that this sort of question isn’t tracking attributions of thin belief in the sense talked about by Dretske, i.e. as a mere holding true. For example, subjects might be attributing “thoughts that this-or-that on at least some level” because agents in these scenarios used to have the beliefs in question and so might still be able to take their old point of view and think their old thoughts (on a nostalgic level, as it were). But agents can do this without therefore actually and presently holding their old thoughts to be true. So the question is why we should think that the question here actually tracks thin belief (in the Dretske sense)?

[Wesley Buckwalter]

Hey Josh,

Thanks for the positive review!

Hey Gunnar,

Thanks for sharing these worries about the way the paper goes about testing support for internalism and externalism.

For those who haven't read it, the basic idea of the paper is that if we present people with some cases that have been central to the debate about moral motivation, like Michael Stocker’s “Jaded Politician”, but change the way we question them about that case slightly, we see big differences in their intuitions about that character's beliefs. So for instance, one adaption involved a case concerning lying. Specifically, it featured an employee of a sandwich shop who is an extremely conscientious and honest worker, but who slowly became jaded after many years of service. At the end of the story, it’s made clear that he has no motivation to tell the truth, and in fact, doesn't tell the truth, even though other evidence suggests he should (for instance, “He remembers his past and all the reasons why he should be honest.”)

In this case participants agree that he has no motivation to tell the truth. But then, they differ with respect to his moral beliefs. When they are asked in terms of thin belief (or whether he ‘thinks” he should tell the truth) they say “Yes”. Then when they are asked in terms of thick belief (or whether he “believes” he should tell the truth) they say “No”. We take the former as an intuition against motivational internalism (since it's exactly what’s supposed to be an impossible situation if many versions of motivational internalism are correct). We take the latter as an intuition supporting motivational internalism, (since switching to the thick belief probing completely reverses views from the thin belief case, with the majority now withholding belief).

In other words, it looks like you can flip the intuitions predicted by either view, we argue, by cuing one of these two different conceptions of belief.

I should also mention that while we saw this effect in a number of different contexts, we also saw some variation in belief judgments depending on the type of belief featured. For instance, people were more likely to lean externalist in cases involving charity than lying. We speculate about why this might be in the paper. But overall I think it really emphasizes the need to use a variety of judgments when testing intuitive support for these views. Our point is that over a variety of contexts, the question of intuitive support might really come down to a question about conceptions of belief.