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Show Chapter VI. The Problem of Moral Motivation 258 moved to satisfy her own parents' desires for grandchildren, and to affirm to them her gratitude for their parenting of her, by becoming a wife and mother herself. She may also believe that she brings special talents to these roles and would fulfill them with outstanding success. In conjunction with her deeply internalized dispositions to view herself as a future wife and mother, these reflective beliefs may motivate her to become one, even though her desires speak against it. Having taken on these roles, she may find them pleasurable and satisfying. But these feelings need not represent the satisfaction of her desire to become a wife and a mother. For there may well have been no such desire. 5.3. Psychological Egoism Again Unsophisticated Humeans are sometimes inclined to try to explain away counterexamples such as that of the whistleblower, the Amnesty International contributor, or the altruistic wife and mother on grounds of self-deception or unconscious repression: One may think one is acting disinterestedly, they contend; but in fact one is always satisfying some desire or other: for approval, perhaps, or martyrdom, or for that truly sublime sensation of selfrighteousness. This response trivializes and debases all cases of altruism or principled self-sacrifice, such as that shown by Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, by depicting the best of us as no better than our worst motives. It also misrepresents as symptoms of false consciousness actions that could be understood equally well as unique and authentic expressions of our widely underdeveloped capacity for genuinely transpersonal rationality. Third, this response thereby begs the question. It commits the elementary mistake of turning what was supposed to be a matter of contingent psychological fact into a vacuous conceptual truth (we have already seen in Chapters II and III that there are deep reasons for this). An agent who is motivated by political conviction to devote his life to the eventual liberation of his country, which he fully understands will not occur in his lifetime, can always be interpreted as acting, rather, to satisfy some temporally proximate desire or other. But then either there is a fact of the matter about whether desire or conviction is doing the actual motivational work, or else the concept of desire is being applied so broadly that the distinction between desire and other kinds of motivation is lost. More sophisticated Humeans may wonder why, if not all desiresatisfaction causes pleasure, so that desires may involve satisfaction without pleasure, altruistic actions should not be explained in terms of them. They may then wonder what, if other-directed benevolent desires can exist, remains to be explained. But as we have just seen in most whistleblower cases, not all actions need involve even satisfaction, even of the most minimal kind, to the agent who performs them. An act may be fully intentional, deliberate, and other-directed without providing the agent any satisfaction or pleasure © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
