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Show Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action 196 considerably less concern to us (as those who have experienced the peculiar effects of laughing gas at the dentist's, or of minor surgery under local anaesthetic may agree). On this view, then, literal self-preservation, and the avoidance of self-disintegration, are biologically and psychologically more fundamental than physical self-preservation and the avoidance of pain as such. That is why physical self-preservation can be the object of a desire or preference whereas literal self-preservation cannot. 3. Baron on Secondary Motives That literal self-preservation cannot be the object of a desire or preference differentiates it from what Marcia Baron calls a secondary motive. Baron's concern is to explicate what Kant plausibly might have meant by saying that an agent with a good will is motivated to act from duty rather than inclination. She aims to show that Kant's stipulation is satisfied in case duty is a secondary rather than a primary motive for such an agent. Adapting a distinction made by Barbara Herman,3 Baron proposes that duty operates as a primary motive "if it is the main impetus, the thing that moves me to act."4 I explore Baron's conception of a primary motive further in Section 4.2 below. But Baron wants to show that the most important and illuminating account of moral motivation is to be found in the notion of a secondary motive. A secondary motive has three defining features on Baron's view. First, it acts as a limiting side-constraint when other motives actually prompt one to act (113, 129). In this capacity it is not only possible but necessary that other motives provide the sufficient condition of action; the secondary motive merely endorses one's plan (130-131), and filters out impermissible maxims of action (144). These passages clearly differentiate such constraints provided by duty as a secondary motive from the primary motives thus endorsed or rejected. This first feature of a secondary motive is similar to my account of reason as a necessary condition of coherent agency, i.e. literal self-preservation, in two respects. First, my account specifies certain consistency criteria that any rationally intelligible motive - indeed, any rationally intelligible experience more generally - must meet. These criteria thereby function as limiting sideconstraints on experience that implicitly endorse some as rationally intelligible and exclude others as unintelligible. Second, these consistency criteria themselves cannot be regarded causally efficacious events, or "thing[s] that move me to act." These consistency criteria are abstract propositional See Barbara Herman, "On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty," Philosophical Review 66 (1981): 359-382; reprinted in her Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 4 Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 113. Henceforth all references to this work are paginated in the text. 3 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
