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Show Chapter VI. The Problem of Moral Motivation 244 it runs counter to attempts to limit the kinds of motives people may have. Once we grant - what seems plainly true - that there exist principledependent and conception-dependent desires, along with desires to realize various political and moral ideals, then the class of possible motives is wide open. … How is one to fix limits on what people might be moved by in thought and deliberation and hence may act from? (8485) How, indeed? Precisely the problem we repeatedly encounter with the Humean belief-desire model of motivation is that it fixes no limits whatsoever on what can count as a desire, and therefore no limits that might enable us to distinguish meaningfully between desire and any other type of motive. And so one answer to Rawls's rhetorical question here might be simply to allow people to be moved by thought and deliberation themselves, while limiting the conceptual reach of desire to the nonvacuous. I develop this answer in Volume II. Rawls thus implicitly accepts the Humean conception of the self as authoritative, despite his protestations; and with it the Humean model of motivation that stipulates desire as the sole explanatory variable. Rawls contents himself with offering subtle distinctions in the types of desire on offer. These distinctions are useful. There certainly is a difference between wanting a thing or state of affairs, wanting to conform one's actions to a principle, and wanting to conform one's actions to principles that define an idealized self-conception or social conception. Nevertheless it is true of all of these different types of desire that they are, at the end of the day, desires; i.e. wants - represented lacks that the agent acts to replenish. Since Kant's ideal of the perfectly good will already does, always and necessarily, act in spontaneous harmony with principles of reason, it is in theory and by definition impossible for the perfectly good will to be motivated by any such want. So Rawls's account of moral motivation does not escape the problem of moral motivation that besets all Humean accounts, because he is irrevocably committed to desire as the sole motivation of action. His three-fold distinction among object-dependent, principle-dependent, and conception-dependent desires does not alter this commitment. And so it is true of all such desires, as for all the others, that if I happen to lack such a desire in the non-ideal case, I "Humean;" and make it even clearer in my "Two Conceptions of the Self," (Philosophical Studies 48, 2 (September l985), 173-197; reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual VIII (1985), 222-246), drawn from the dissertation I wrote under Rawls' supervision. Rawls' treatment of desire in all of his works, starting with A Theory of Justice, squares nicely with this definition. If Rawls really means to "dissolve the line between [Williams'] allegedly Humean view of motivation and Kant's view, or ones related to it" (85, fn. 33) as he claims, then he should have no objection to being called either a Humean or a Kantian indifferently. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
