Divine Motivation Theory (2004)

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Divine Motivation theory
Widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in contemporary
philosophy of religion, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski has written a
new book that will be seen as a major contribution to ethical theory
and theological ethics.
At the core of the book lies a new form of virtue theory based on
the emotions. Distinct from deontological, consequentialist, and
teleological virtue theories, this one has a particular theological,
indeed Christian, foundation. The new theory helps to resolve
philosophical problems and puzzles of various kinds: the dispute
between cognitivism and noncognitivism in moral psychology;
the claims and counterclaims of realism and antirealism in the
metaphysics of value; and paradoxes of perfect goodness in nat-
ural theology, including the problem of evil.
A central feature of Zagzebski’s theory is the place given to
exemplars of goodness. This allows the theory to assume discrete
but overlapping forms in different cultures and religions.
As with Zagzebski’s previous Cambridge book, Virtues of the
Mind, this new book will be sought out eagerly by a broad range of
professionals and graduate students in philosophy and religious
studies.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is Kingfisher College Chair of the Phi-
losophy of Religion and Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Oklahoma.
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Divine Motivation
theory
linda trinkaus zagzebski
University of Oklahoma
iii
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK
First published in print format 
isbn-13 978-0-521-82880-2
isbn-13 978-0-521-53576-2
isbn-13 978-0-511-21170-6
© Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski 2004
2004
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521828802
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
isbn-10 0-511-21347-6
isbn-10 0-521-82880-5
isbn-10 0-521-53576-x
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
hardback
paperback
paperback
eBook (EBL)
eBook (EBL)
hardback
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For Ken
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I think he would need time to get adjusted before he could see things
in the world above; at first he would see shadows most easily, then
reflections of men and other things in water, then the things them-
selves. After this he would see objects in the sky and the sky itself
more easily at night, the light of the stars and the moon more easily
than the sun and the light of the sun during the day. – Of course.
Then at last he would be able to see the sun, not images of it in water
or in some alien place, but the sun itself in its own place, and be able
to contemplate it. – That must be so.
Plato, Republic 516a-b
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Contents
Preface page xi
Acknowledgments xv
Part I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
1. Constructing an ethical theory 3
I. Value concepts and the metaphysics of value 3
II. Three puzzles to solve 8
III. Some confusions I wish to avoid 18
IV. A taxonomy of ethical theories 29
V. Exemplarism 40
2. Making emotion primary 51
I. Starting with exemplars 51
II. What an emotion is 59
III. Emotion and value judgment 74
IV. The intrinsic value of emotion 82
V. Conclusion 95
3. Goods and virtues 96
I. The good of ends and outcomes 96
II. The good of pleasure 107
III. The good for human persons 110
IV. Virtues 118
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Contents
V. Defining the kinds of good 130
VI. Conclusion 133
4. Acts and obligation 137
I. Acts and the exemplar 137
II. Obligation 145
III. Defining the concepts of act evaluation 159
IV. Moral judgment 166
Conclusion to Part I 174
Part II. Divine Motivation theory
5. The virtues of God 187
I. A brief history of the imitatio Dei 187
II. The personhood of God 191
III. The emotions and virtues of God 203
IV. The motives of God and the Creation 213
V. The metaphysical source of value 223
6. The moral importance of the Incarnation 228
I. Must Christianity be an ethic of law? 228
II. The Incarnation as an ethical doctrine 231
III. The imitation of Christ and narrative ethics 247
IV. Divine Motivation theory and Divine
Command theory compared 258
7. The paradoxes of perfect goodness 271
I. Three puzzles of perfect goodness 272
II. The solution of Divine Command theory 278
III. The solution of Divine Motivation theory 282
IV. Does God have a will? 290
V. Is the ability to sin a power? 295
VI. Love and freedom 298
VII.Conclusion 301
8. The problem of evil 304
I. The intellectual problem of evil 304
II. Divine Motivation theory and theodicy 313
III. Objections and replies 318
IV. The problem of suffering 324
Conclusion to Part II 339
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Contents
Part III. Ethical pluralism
9. Ideal observers, ideal agents, and moral diversity 347
I. The problem of moral disagreement 347
II. Ideal observers 349
III. Ideal agents 359
IV. Rationality in the second person: Revising
the self 372
V. Religion and the task of developing a common
morality 382
Bibliography 389
Name index 405
Subject index 408
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Preface
There are two very different sensibilities out of which moral dis-
course and even entire moral theories arise. One is the idea that
morality attracts. The other is the idea that morality compels. The
former focuses on value, the latter on obligation. The former is op-
timistic enough to think that human beings are drawn to morality
by nature and by the good and bad features of the world. The
latter is pessimistic enough to think that only law – which is to
say, force – can be the source of morality. This is not a negligi-
ble difference; it grounds the difference between virtue theories
and duty theories. I have occasionally heard philosophers won-
der whether there is any significant difference between the two
kinds of theory and whether the difference matters. For many of
the purposes of morality, it is useful to ignore the differences or
to conceal them; the theory of this book is meant to reveal them.
The theory is a strong form of virtue theory with a theologi-
cal foundation, although I will begin with a general framework
that can have a naturalistic form. There are many different ways in
which God can be related to morality, but the one that has received
the most attention in the history of ethics is Divine Command
theory. This is surprising, because quite apart from the famous
objections to it, Divine Command theory has rarely aspired to be
a complete moral theory. At best, it gives ethics a theoretical foun-
dation, but it is difficult to see
how we can move from a foundation
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Preface
of that kind to a theory with anything but the most meager nor-
mative content. However, my own reason for looking elsewhere
for the foundation of ethics has nothing to do with these short-
comings. Divine Command theory is an ethic of law, of obligation.
It is an ethic based on compulsion, not on the perception of value.
I want to investigate a theological virtue ethics in which morality
is driven by the attractiveness of the good.
The theories in which morality attracts are usually forms of
theories that we have inherited from ancient Greece. Theories in
which morality compels make up most of modern ethics. Natural
Law theory was a brilliant attempt to have it both ways. That is
how I read the ethics of Aquinas. Aquinas claimed that moral-
ity is law, but it is a law based on human nature, a nature that
contains an innate propensity toward the good. When sufficiently
developed, however, it turned out that there was nothing espe-
cially natural about natural law. That is not to say that Natural
Law theory should be dismissed. In fact, I believe that it is one
of the most viable of all the kinds of ethical theory, and one of
its most appealing aspects in its Thomistic form is that, unlike
Divine Command theory, it gives a theological foundation to a
full ethical theory. Nonetheless, it is not the kind of theory I will
pursue, because it also is fundamentally an ethic of obligation,
and my purpose is to see how far we can get with an ethic of the
good.
Another brilliant attempt to have it both ways is the Kantian
idea of morality as autonomy: Morality is a law I give to myself.
Presumably, if I give a law to myself, that mitigates the sense in
which morality is force. This is not an ethic of attraction, but at
least it does not subject us to the tyranny of external law. Kant’s
ethics is surely one of the most important ethical theories under
discussion today, but I have chosen not to pursue a version of this
theory, and again, my reason is that it is essentially an ethic of
obligation. In my view, Kantian ethics does not give a sufficiently
prominent place to the attractiveness of the good.
In Plato, the good attracts, and one of the most potent and en-
during Platonic images of the good is the sun. I find it revealing
that the sun not only attracts but also diffuses. The Earth does not
have to move toward the sun in order to reflect its light. Plato’s
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Preface
analogy suggests that the good is not exclusively something exter-
nal to us that draws us toward it. The good may also be something
we receive. It might even be in ourselves, diffusing itself through
our acts. We too may have the capacity to bestow good upon the
world. Hopefully, the obvious impertinence of this thought is mit-
igated by the further thought that we are not the original bestower
of value.
My purpose in this book is to present an ethical theory driven
by the concept of the good. In what follows, I propose an idea for
the consideration of the community of philosophers. The full the-
ory as it appears here is proposed to the community of Christian
philosophers, but I have given a lot of attention to its naturalistic
version, which is a form of nonteleological virtue ethics. I hope to
engage Kantian, consequentialist, and neo-Aristotelian virtue the-
orists in a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this
kind of ethics, whether or not they are committed to any religious
beliefs.
Some ethicists find theory of any kind problematic. It must be
admitted that theory always sacrifices something – richness of
detail, a certain kind of subtlety, and sometimes clarity. But I am
convinced that there is a deep human need to theorize. What is
wonderful about theory is that it compensates for the finitude of
the human mind. It is our human misfortune that we are not ca-
pable of conscious awareness of very much at one time, and so
we try to streamline conscious reality so that as much as possible
can be packed into a single act of understanding. Theory extends
the scope of our understanding. At its best, it gives us the maxi-
mum possible scope consistent with maximum clarity. But theory
involves abstraction from particulars, and the act of abstraction
necessarily leaves something behind. What is left behind might
be important, and if so, that ought also to be the object of inves-
tigation. A good theory should be compatible with work on the
particulars of the subject matter, and it should give that work a
simple and natural structure. We want it to clarify and resolve the
muddles we get into when we focus on one particular at a time,
and above all, a theory should strengthen our grasp of the whole.
What we should scrupulously strive to avoid is a way of theoriz-
ing that leaves behind what is most important. Bernard Williams
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Preface
claims that that is what has happened with the most abstract ethi-
cal concepts – right, good, and duty, what he calls the “thin” ethical
concepts. But even if moral practice could survive the elimination
of these concepts, how could we understand such a morality? Ab-
straction gives us scope, and thinness is the price of scope and a
certain kind of understanding. Some philosophers would gladly
sacrifice scope for something else that they value – richness, thick-
ness, imaginative power. I suspect that this difference in values can
be largely explained by differences in philosophical temperament.
What is depth? Do we understand moral reality more deeply
when we concentrate on what theory leaves behind and try to
reveal that part of reality that resides in the most subtle detail?
Or does theory have its own kind of depth? The theory of this
book is designed to honor both theory and narrative detail by
explaining the importance of narrative in the structure of the the-
ory, but I will not tell many stories. I will attempt to situate the
idea of the paradigmatically good person within the metaphysics
of morals. The theory proposes that the most basic moral feature
of the universe is the way such a person perceives the world, a
kind of perception that is affective and that is expressed in “thick”
concepts. An affective perception of the world is what I believe
constitutes an emotion.
What follows is an ethical theory based on the emotions of a
perfect being.
Norman, Oklahoma
May 28, 2003
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Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated in a response I gave to a paper
by Bill Rowe on John Hick’s way of handling the problem of evil,
at a conference on Hick’s work at Claremont McKenna College,
April 7–8, 1989. At that time, I was writing a book on the dilemma
of freedom and foreknowledge, and I decided to leave for another
time the task of investigating whether the idea had any merit.
Since then, I have worked on parts of the theory in a number of
papers and have been influenced by the work of many philoso-
phers, sometimes without realizing it until I read their work a sec-
ond time. I know that this is true of the influence of Bob Adams
and Bill Alston. It is no doubt true of many other people whom I
cannot name. I especially want to thank Tom Carson, whom I have
never met. He read and commented on the entire manuscript, and
during the course of e-mail correspondence we discovered many
mutual interests and ideas.
I wrote a first draft of the book during the academic year 1998–
99, while I was on leave from Loyola Marymount University as Se-
nior Fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University.
I am grateful to Loyola Marymount and to the Lilly Foundation
for support during that
year. In the fall of 1999, I began teach-
ing at the University of Oklahoma and taught a graduate seminar
on the manuscript. I thank the students in that seminar for their
many probing questions and objections. On April 19–20, 2001, the
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Philosophy Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at
OU hosted a conference on my work to inaugurate my chair. Bill
Alston gave a paper at that conference critiquing Divine Motiva-
tion theory, which was invaluable in getting me to introduce the
theory in a different way.
I spent May 2000 as a guest of the Theology Department
at the University of Uppsala. Some of the work of this project
was presented there, and I thank my hosts, Eberhard Hermann
and Mikael Stenmark, and the Swedish government for bringing
me there for a month of interesting conversation in a beautiful
place.
I also thank John Hare and Calvin College’s Center for Christian
Scholarship for bringing me to Calvin for a week of philosophical
conversation in August of 2000. John Hare, Bob Roberts, and I
read large portions of each other’s related book manuscripts and
enjoyed a lively week of discussion and debate.
In the spring of 2002, I had teaching leave from OU to work
on the manuscript, and I thank the Philosophy Department for its
support. I also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities
for a Summer Stipend for the summer of 2002, during which time
I wrote a completely new draft of the first eight chapters.
Baylor University graciously invited me to spend several days
there in talks and private discussions with members of the Philos-
ophy Department in March 2003. I am especially grateful to Bob
Roberts, Jay Wood, and Steve Evans for their comments on several
chapters of the book.
Finally, I want to thank my research assistants, Kyle Johnson
and Tony Flood, who provided me valuable bibliographic assis-
tance and help with preparing the final version of the manuscript.
Ideas from a number of my previously published papers are
used in various chapters of the book:
Portions of “Emotion and Moral Judgment,” Philosophy and Phe-
nomenological 66:1 (January 2003), pp. 104–124, appear in Chap-
ters 2 and 3.
Ideas from “The Virtues of God and the Foundations of Ethics,”
Faith and Philosophy 15:4 (October 1998), pp. 538–552, appear in
Chapter 5.
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Acknowledgments
Portions of “The Incarnation and Virtue Ethics,” in The Incar-
nation, edited by Daniel J. Kendall and Gerald O’ Collins (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), appear in Chapter 6.
Some of the ideas in “Perfect Goodness and Divine Motivation
Theory,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 21 (1997) (Philosophy of
Religion), pp. 296–310, are used in Chapter 7.
Fragments from “An Agent-Based Approach to the Problem of
Evil,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 39 (June 1996),
pp. 127–139, appear in Chapter 8.
Some of the principles of rationality proposed in Chapter 9
come from “Religious Diversity and Social Responsibility,” Logos
4:1 (Winter 2001), pp. 135–155; published in Spanish in Comprender
la religion, edited by Javier Aranguren, Jon Borobia, and Miguel
Lluch, Eunsa (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra,
2001), pp. 69–85.
Some discussion of the Divine Command theory of Bob Adams
in Chapter 6 is taken from “Obligation, Good Motives, and the
Good” (symposium paper on Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite
Goods), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64:2 (March 2002),
pp. 453–458.
I thank all those from whom I benefited in writing these papers
as well. Many people have encouraged the development of my
ideas; some keep me within the bounds of critical normalcy; most
do both. I am very grateful for all of these friendships.
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Part I
Motivation-based virtue ethics
This book exhibits a way to structure a virtue ethics with a theo-
logical foundation. Since the foundation is an extension of virtue
discourse to the moral properties of God, the theory might be
called a divine virtue theory. In Part I, I give the framework for
a distinctive kind of virtue ethics I call motivation-based. This
type of theory makes the moral properties of persons, acts, and
the outcomes of acts derivative from a good motive, the most ba-
sic component of a virtue, where what I mean by a motive is an
emotion that initiates and directs action. Chapter 1 raises the cen-
tral problems involved in providing an adequate metaphysics of
value for virtue theory and proposes the methodology of exem-
plarism. Chapter 2 gives an account of emotion and its intrinsic
value. Chapter 3 defines a good end, a good outcome, the good for
a human being, and virtue in terms of a good emotion. Chapter 4
shows how the moral properties of acts can be defined in terms
of a good emotion. In Part II, I will propose a Christian form of
the theory according to which the motivations of a perfect Deity
are the ultimate foundation of all value. I call the enhanced theory
Divine Motivation theory.
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Chapter 1
Constructing an ethical theory
The virtuous person is a sort of measure and rule for human
acts.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.5
i value concepts and the metaphysics of value
Let us begin with good and bad. One of the things I will argue in
this book is that the ways of having value are not all forms of good
and bad, but because good and bad are as close to basic as we are
going to get, I begin with them for simplicity. One of the most
obvious but also most troublesome features of good and bad is
that they apply to things in a variety of metaphysical categories:
objects of many kinds, persons and their states and traits, acts,
and the outcomes of acts. We also call states of affairs good or
bad apart from their status as act outcomes, and we call certain
things designated by abstract names good – life, nature, knowl-
edge, art, philosophy, and many others. Some of the things in this
last category belong in one of the other categories, but perhaps
not all do.
Do the items in these different categories have anything non-
trivial in common? One plausible answer is that they are all related
to persons. That answer applies to states of persons such as plea-
sure or happiness, character traits, motives, intentions, acts and
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
their outcomes, and states of affairs that are valuable to persons in
some way, whether or not they are produced by human acts. But
even if human persons did not exist, some of the items of value
just mentioned would still exist and would still be valuable – for
example, life and nature – so the suggestion that everything good
or bad is related to persons is too limiting. But in another way, it
may not be limiting enough, since ultimately everything is proba-
bly of some concern to persons. Traditional ethics has been much
more restrictive. It focuses on the human act and that to which
an act is causally connected, either forward or backward.1 For the
most part, I will follow common practice in limiting my subject
matter in this way, although I am not convinced that there are es-
pecially good reasons for doing so. My focus will be mostly on the
states of affairs to which human agents respond when they act, the
psychic states and dispositions that produce acts, acts themselves,
and the outcomes of acts. Moral philosophers have generally re-
garded these objects
of evaluation as particularly important. They
are also thought to be intimately related. It is hardly controversial
that a good person generally acts from good motives and forms
good intentions to do good acts and, with a bit of luck, produces
good outcomes. What is at issue is not the fact that such relations
obtain, but the order of priority in these relations.
The question of priority arises in more than one way. One is
conceptual: Is there a relation of dependency among the concepts
of good person, good motive, good act, and good outcome? If so,
what is the shape of that dependency? Is one of these concepts
basic and the rest derivative from it? Notice that this is a question
not of conceptual analysis but of theory construction. Theories do
not describe so much as they create conceptual relations. The the-
orist is concerned with whether a good person should be defined
as a person who acts from good motives, or as one who produces
good outcomes, or as one who does good acts. Should a good
act be understood as an act done by a good person, or as an act
1 The new field of environmental ethics may indicate that contemporary
ethics is moving away from a focus on human beings, but even that is
unclear, because environmental ethics usually emphasizes the ways the
environment is impacted by human acts.
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Constructing an ethical theory
done from a good motive, or as an act that produces good states of
affairs? Is a virtue a quality that leads to the performance of good
(alternatively, right) acts, or one that leads to good outcomes, or
is a virtue more basic than either acts or outcomes? Of course,
these are not the only options for the relationships among these
concepts, but they are among the simplest.
A related but distinct question is this: Is there a relationship
of metaphysical dependency among the different categories of
things with value? Are some bearers of value or some moral
properties more basic than others? If so, which is the most ba-
sic, and how do the things in other categories derive their value
from the more basic ones? According to consequentialism, an act
gets its moral value (generally called rightness rather than good-
ness) from the goodness of its outcome or the outcome of acts of
the same type. Consequentialism may be intended as an answer
to the first question and hence as a conceptual thesis, but it can
also be intended as a thesis in the metaphysics of value. If it is the
former, it is the proposal that we ought to think of the rightness
of acts as determined by the goodness of their consequences; this
way of thinking is recommended as preferable to alternatives. If
the thesis is the latter, it is the claim that the value of an act ac-
tually arises from the value of outcomes. Similarly, the thesis of
a certain kind of Kantian ethics can be understood as proposing
either a conceptual or a metaphysical priority between the value
of an act of will and the value of the end the will aims to bring
about. If it is the latter, it is the thesis that the value of the end of an
act arises from the value of a property of the will that produces it.
Christine Korsgaard expresses this position when she says value
“flows into” the world from a rational will.2 Here, Korsgaard’s
thesis is one about the source of value, not about how we ought to
define the concept of a good end. It is a thesis in moral ontology.
Conceptual order may or may not be isomorphic with ontolog-
ical order. It would be helpful if it were, but it is also possible that
our concepts do not map ontology. In the first part of this book,
I will argue for a certain way of conceptualizing morality. I will
propose a theory in which good motives are conceptually more
2 “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” in Korsgaard (1996a), p. 110.
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
basic than good traits, good acts, and good outcomes of acts and
will outline a metaphysical theory to accompany it. In Part II, I
will propose a more substantial theory in theistic metaphysics ac-
cording to which the motives of God are the ontological basis for
the value of everything outside of God. The two parts of the book
are detachable, but together they outline a moral theory whose
conceptual structure is mirrored in the metaphysics of value.
The realm of value is usually considered to be broader than the
realm of moral value, since aesthetic value, epistemic value, the
values of etiquette, and perhaps the values of health and happiness
are nonmoral values. That is possible, but I will have very little
to say about the distinction between moral and nonmoral value
in this book, both because I have never heard of a way of making
the distinction that I found plausible and because I do not think
the distinction is very important. Since the theory of this book
is structured around the traditional units of moral theory – acts,
motives, ends, and outcomes – the values discussed are mainly
moral values, but I will sometimes venture beyond the traditional
category of the moral without comment.
It is sometimes said that what makes the territory of the moral
distinctive is a strong notion of obligation. I see no reason to think
that is true, but the relationship between value and obligation has
been an important issue in modern moral theory. The categories of
the obligatory or required and the wrong or forbidden are distinct
from the axiological categories of good and bad. So in addition to
sorting out the relationships among the various kinds of things
that are good and bad, there is also the problem of specifying the
relationship between the good and bad, on the one hand, and the
required and forbidden, on the other. Again, this question can be
about either conceptual or ontological priority. Value is presum-
ably broader than the required or forbidden, since it is usually
thought that the latter applies only to the category of acts and in-
tentions to perform acts.3 Persons and states of affairs can be good
or bad, but they cannnot be required or forbidden. An act can be
3 A notable exception is that Christians may say that we are obligated to
love. But it is rare in moral philosophy to make an emotion, or any psychic
state other than an act of will, a matter of duty or obligation.
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Constructing an ethical theory
good or bad, but it can also be required or forbidden, obligatory
or wrong. Presumably there is some connection between the two
kinds of evaluation. There are moral philosophers who have main-
tained that requirement is conceptually more basic than good and
have defined good as that which requires a response of a particular
kind – for example, the attitude of love.4 Others have maintained
that good is conceptually more basic than requirement and have
defined wrong and the obligatory in terms of the attitude or be-
havior of good (virtuous) persons.5 Both of these positions are
conceptual, not metaphysical. Robert Adams (1999, Chapter 10)
has recently argued that the good is ontologically more basic than
the obligatory, but that the latter is not derivative from the former.
Of course, there are many other options. I will propose an account
of the way in which obligation derives from value in Chapter 4.
Moral theorists who ask questions about the priority of one
moral concept over another give radically different answers, but
they all share the assumption that it is a good thing to attempt
to construct a conceptual framework that simplifies our think-
ing about the moral life. I will go through a series of alternative
frameworks in section IV, but as I mentioned in the Preface, some
writers doubt the wisdom of any such project on the grounds that
theory distorts morality.6
I have said that I regard theory as a good
thing. I do not deny that it distorts the subject to some extent, but
in compensation, theory helps us understand more with less ef-
fort. I mention this now, not to defend the project of developing
conceptual frameworks, but to point out that while it can be de-
bated whether conceptual moral frameworks are a good thing,
the same debate does not arise about the metaphysics of morals.
The questions of what value is, of where it comes from, and of
whether value in one category arises from value in another are all
4 See Chisholm (1986), pp. 52ff.
5 Rosalind Hursthouse does this in several places, most recently in her book
On Virtue Ethics. I present a similar way of defining a right act in Virtues
of the Mind, at the end of Part II. I will pursue a version of this approach
in Chapter 4 of this book.
6 There is a substantial literature on anti-theory since Williams (1985), which
has been very influential in leading some ethicists to eschew theory. See
also the collection by Clarke and Simpson (1989).
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
important philosophical questions. Of course, we may doubt that
we will ever get plausible answers to these questions, but that is
not the worry that the anti-theorists have about theory construc-
tion. In what follows, I will present both a conceptual theory and
a metaphysical theory of value. Objections to the two projects will
differ, but my intention is to enhance the plausibility of each by
its relation to the other.
ii three puzzles to solve
There are three sets of puzzles that drive the project I am describing
in this book. One of my purposes is to propose a theory that solves,
or at least makes it easier to solve, these three sets of puzzles. The
first set of puzzles is in moral psychology. The second is in the
metaphysics of value. The third is in natural theology. Each of
these puzzles has a large literature, and my purpose in this section
is not to discuss them in any detail but rather to call attention to
them and to the way the need to resolve them constrains what is
desirable in an ethical theory.
1 A puzzle in moral psychology: cognitivism versus noncognitivism
One of the most enduring legacies of David Hume is his claim in
the Treatise of Human Nature that cognitive and affective states are
distinct and independent states. The former is representational,
the latter is not (Book II, section 3, p. 415). The latter motivates, the
former does not (p. 414). The terminology for describing psychic
states has changed since Hume, but the moral commonly drawn
from Hume’s arguments is essentially this: No representational
state (perceptual or cognitive) has the most significant property
of affective states, the capacity to motivate. An affective state must
be added to any cognitive state in order to motivate action, and
the motivating state and the cognitive state are always separable;
they are related, at best, causally.
This position immediately conflicts with the intuition that
moral judgments are both cognitive and motivating. Moral judg-
ments seem to be cognitive because they are often propositional
in form, have a truth value (and are not always false), and when
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a person makes a moral judgment, he asserts that proposition
and others may deny it. On the other hand, we typically expect
moral judgments to be motivating. A simple way to see that is to
consider our practices of moral persuasion. If we want to con-
vince someone to act in a certain way for moral reasons, we
direct our efforts toward convincing her to make the relevant
moral judgment herself. If we can get her to do that, we nor-
mally think that she will thereby be motivated to act on it. Of
course, we know that she may not be sufficiently motivated to
act on it, because she may also have contrary motives, but the
point is that we think that we have succeeded in getting her to
feel a motive to act on a moral judgment as soon as we get her
to make the judgment. If the Humean view is correct, however,
a moral judgment can motivate only if it is affective – that is,
noncognitive. The Humean view therefore compels us to choose
between the position that a moral judgment is cognitive and the
position that it is motivating. The problem is that we expect it to
be both.
The phenomena of moral strength and weakness highlight
some of the problems with the Humean psychology. It often hap-
pens that a moral agent struggles before acting when he makes a
moral judgment. Sometimes he acts in accordance with his judg-
ment and sometimes he does not, but the fact that he struggles
indicates that a motive to act on the judgment accompanies the
judgment. When he is morally strong, a motive sufficient for ac-
tion accompanies his judgment; when he is morally weak, a mo-
tive insufficient for action accompanies his judgment. Either way,
we think that a motive in some degree accompanies the judg-
ment. But if the making of a moral judgment is a purely cognitive
state, and if cognitive and motivating states are essentially distinct,
the motive must come from something other than the judgment,
something that is not an intrinsic component of it. Moral strength
and weakness therefore pose a problem for cognitivism.
It may also happen that the agent acts on a moral judgment
without struggle, but that case does not help the cognitivist, be-
cause we tend to think that when struggle is unnecessary, the rea-
son is that the moral judgment carries with it a motive sufficiently
strong to cause the agent to act without struggle. So whether or
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not there is struggle, and whether or not the agent acts in accor-
dance with her judgment, there is a strong inclination to expect
moral judgments to be motivating.
Among those who accept a Humean psychology, the noncog-
nitivists are better placed than the cognitivists to explain moral
strength and weakness, since the former see moral judgment as
intrinsically motivating. But noncognitivists face a related prob-
lem, the problem of moral apathy.7 The morally apathetic person
makes a moral judgment while completely lacking any motive
to act on it. Given what has already been said, we would expect
this phenomenon to be rare, but it probably does exist, and it is
a problem for both cognitivism and noncognitivism. Given that
the cognitivist maintains that a moral judgment is a purely cog-
nitive state, he has the problem of explaining why we find moral
apathy surprising. But the noncognitivist cannot explain why it
exists at all. There should be no such thing as apathy, according to
noncognitivism, insofar as noncognitivism takes the motivational
force of a moral judgment to be an essential feature of each such
judgment.
The Humean view on the essential distinctness of cognitive and
motivating states forces us to give up something in our ordinary
ways of thinking about moral judgment, yet I believe that that
view is less plausible than what it forces us to give up. Nonethe-
less, the phenomena of moral strength, weakness, and apathy sug-
gest that what we intuitively expect is complicated. It should turn
out that a moral judgment is both cognitive and intrinsically mo-
tivating in enough central cases that we can see why we find the
phenomena of strength, weakness, and apathy surprising. These
phenomena indicate that the strength of the motivational force of a
judgment varies, and that it is possible for the motive to disappear
entirely. In what follows, I will aim for an account of moral judg-
ment according to which there is a primary class of moral judg-
ments that express states
that are both cognitive and intrinsically
motivating. I will later give an account of the “thinning” of moral
7 Alfred Mele (1996) calls this problem “moral listlessness.” See also Michael
Stocker (1979).
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judgment that permits the motivational force of a moral judgment
to be detachable from it in such a way that moral strength, weak-
ness, and apathy may occur.
2 Some puzzles in the metaphysics of value
Philosophers often find evaluative properties more problematic
than descriptive properties. The reason for the worry is unclear,
but perhaps we do not need reasons to find something peculiar.
Peculiarity is only one of the problems, however. Even if there
is nothing especially odd about value, valuable objects, or eval-
uative properties, there is something in need of explanation if
some things (properties) are evaluative and some are not. At a
minimum, we want to figure out where value comes from and
how it relates to the natural or descriptive – or to whatever value
is contrasted with. If the evaluative differs from the nonevalu-
ative in some significant way, that may mean that we come to
know it in a different way. The issue of the way we come to make
value judgments is therefore related to the issue of the nature of
the objects of such judgments. Difficulties in finding a plausible
account of moral judgment are closely connected with difficul-
ties in finding a plausible account of what those judgments are
about. The problem in moral psychology of choosing between
cognitivism and noncognitivism therefore leads us into the prob-
lem in metaphysics of choosing between value realism and value
antirealism.8
Value realism is the position that value properties exist in a
world independent of the human mind. I assume that value real-
ism is the default position for the same reason that realism about
sensory properties is the default position: Objects outside the mind
plainly appear to have (some) evaluative properties just as much
as they appear to have (some) nonevaluative properties. If I see
someone taking advantage of a weaker subordinate, it may be just
as apparent to me that there is badness in the act as that the act
8 Realism about value is commonly called “moral realism,” but the issue is
more general than the nature of moral value.
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causes distress. The judgment “That act is bad” is on a par with the
judgment “That act causes distress” in the clarity of its meaning
and the conviction of its truth. There is allegedly a puzzle about
the grounds for the truth value of the first judgment that does not
arise about the second, but I am not much taken by this worry. I do
not see anything more mysterious about the reality of value than
about the reality of causes. What does sound mysterious is the in-
tuitionism that usually accompanies value realism, for we plainly
don’t have an account of how we come to make value judgments
to anything like the extent to which we have an account of how
we come to make descriptive judgments, particularly the subset
of descriptive judgments that are perceptual. For this reason, I
think that a theory that explains our ability to detect value with-
out referring to unanalyzed intuition has an advantage, and in
what follows I will attempt to begin identifying the capacities and
processes through which we form moral judgments.
The more serious problem for value realism is that evaluative
and nonevaluative properties appear to differ in a way that needs
explanation. Nonetheless, the distinction is not clear-cut. Consider
the following list of properties: square, salty, yellow, smooth, reliable,
brutal, honorable, contemptible, pitiful, offensive, funny, exciting, nau-
seating. Which properties on this list are evaluative and which are
descriptive? Most of them appear to be both, which raises the fur-
ther question of how the two aspects come to be combined in so
many properties if they differ in some metaphysically fundamen-
tal way. But they do seem to differ, and it is commonly thought
that they differ in that some exist in a world independent of the
mind, but most do not. Furthermore, it is also commonly thought
that their degree of independence of the mind is related to their
degree of perceiver variability. Allegedly, the less variation there
is among observers in the perception of a property, the more inde-
pendent of human minds the property is, and hence the more real
it is in some pre-theoretic sense of the real. Usually, this view is
thought to have the consequence that square is more real than any
of the other properties on the list, that yellow is less so, that pitiful
is even less so, and that nauseating is least of all. It is surprising
that this conclusion is so common, since it depends upon at least
two disputable theses: (1) that perceptual variability is inversely
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proportional to degree of existence in a mind-independent world
(apparently there are degrees of reality), and (2) that square is less
perceptually relative than the other properties on the list.
The simplest form of value realism is the position that value
properties are like square. This is highly implausible, but not be-
cause it is obvious that value properties are not as much a part of an
independent world as is square, nor because the thesis that value
properties are like square must reject at least one of the assump-
tions just mentioned. Simple value realism is implausible because
it attempts to maintain the reality of value properties by ignoring
the differences between evaluative and descriptive properties. The
properties on the list differ from square and from each other in a
number of ways. Some are more observer-variable than square.
More importantly, many of them are not detectable through sen-
sory powers alone. To say that contemptible is like square does not
explain what value is, and more importantly, it does not explain
the fact that whatever value is, it is contrasted with something that
is not value. It seems to me, then, that the project of defending the
place of value properties in a mind-independent world should
not depend upon the view that there are no significant differences
between value properties and nonvalue properties.
For this reason, the situation is no better if we go the other way
and claim that value properties are like nauseating or exciting in
that they are not part of an independent world. This is often as-
sociated with the further position that value properties express or
project properties of the observer. Again, this is highly implau-
sible, not because it is obvious that these properties are part of
an independent world, but because this position does not explain
the fact that the properties on the list are not all the same. They
are not all detectable through the same faculties, and we need an
explanation for this difference. This seems to me to be a more se-
rious problem than the objection commonly given to antirealism
about value, namely, that it makes value trivial. If value properties
are nothing but properties expressing a response in or an attitude
of the observer, then, the objection goes, there is no more reason
to be interested in them than there is to be interested in what is
nauseating or exciting. My interest does not extend beyond what
is nauseating, exciting, good, or bad to me. I find this objection
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
unconvincing. It seems to me that the position that value prop-
erties are projections or expressions of observer responses
in fact
guarantees that these properties are of interest to us, the observers.
Of course, it follows on the antirealist position that value prop-
erties are not of interest from Sidgwick’s “point of view of the
universe,” since they are not in a mind-independent world. But it
is not obvious that we should care about that more than we care
about what is nauseating, exciting, boring (etc.) to ourselves. I am
not denying that an argument can be given that we should care
about that, but it does take an argument. And whether or not one
can be satisfactorily given, the fact that the properties on the list
are not all on a par remains a puzzle in need of explanation.
Many moral theorists aim at a position somewhere between
realism and antirealism. This seems sensible if we take the con-
servative approach of accepting both the thesis that degree of re-
ality in an independent world is inversely proportional to degree
of perceiver variation, and the view that the evaluative proper-
ties on the list are somewhere between square and nauseating in
their degree of perceiver variation. I have already said that I find
both assumptions questionable, but what makes this task partic-
ularly daunting is that it is very hard to see how there can be
any such position. The reason is that realism is usually associated
with cognitivism, and antirealism with noncognitivism. Granted,
there is no necessary connection between the metaphysical thesis
and the thesis in moral psychology, but suppose that we accept the
Humean position that cognitive and affective states are necessarily
distinct, and suppose also that we assume that the objects of cog-
nitive states are necessarily distinct from the objects of affective
states, if the latter have objects at all. Suppose also that accord-
ing to value realism, moral properties are the objects of cognitive
states, and that according to value antirealism, moral properties
are the objects of, or are constructed out of, affective states. It fol-
lows that we have to choose between realism and antirealism for
the same reason that we have to choose between cognitivism and
noncognitivism.
This argument also has disputable assumptions, but one way to
avoid the conclusion is to begin with the desideratum I identified
from the first puzzle. If I am right that there are moral judgments
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expressing states that combine the cognitive and the affective in
a way that is not simply causal, the objects of such states may
also differ from the objects of purely cognitive or purely affective
states. If so, this would give us hope of getting a theory that is
genuinely distinct from both realism and antirealism. One of my
purposes in this book is to propose a way to think about value
and the detection of value that leaves intact the pre-theoretic intu-
ition that evaluative properties are properties in an independent
world, but that also explains the difference between descriptive
and evaluative properties.
3 Some puzzles in natural theology
The first two sets of puzzles are problems with the property of
goodness and related properties. The third set of puzzles are prob-
lems with the property of perfect goodness. The idea of perfect
goodness has a long history in Christian philosophy, one with
strong Platonic roots. Usually, but controversially, perfect good-
ness is thought to entail the maximal degree of goodness. In ad-
dition, perfect goodness has traditionally been thought to entail
impeccability, the property of being unable to do anything bad.
But impeccability appears to conflict with the attributes of om-
nipotence and freedom. If God is impeccable, there are things he
cannot do, namely, acts that are evil or that express evil traits.
But for the same reason that perfect goodness is thought to en-
tail the maximal degree of goodness, omnipotence is thought
to entail the maximal degree of power. There are many differ-
ent accounts of what maximal power consists in, but it has often
been understood as something close to the power to do anything
possible.9 But since doing evil is a possible thing to do, if a per-
fectly good being lacks the power to do evil, such a being lacks
the power to do something possible, and hence is not omnipo-
tent. This puzzle was brought into the contemporary literature
9 This assumption has been challenged by many writers on omnipotence,
but it is important to see that it is an assumption that is given up only
because of logical puzzles. The starting point is the assumption that om-
nipotence entails the ability to do anything possible.
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
by Nelson Pike (1969), but it was discussed in the Middle Ages,
and Aquinas’s way out is well known (ST I, a. 3, q. 25, obj. 2 and
reply).
The reasoning behind the alleged incompatibility of perfect
goodness and omnipotence leads to a second puzzle. Under the
assumption that a perfectly good being is incapable of doing evil
or of willing anything but good, the will of such a being does not
appear to be free in any morally significant sense. On a standard
interpretation of the conditions for moral praise and blame in the
human case, persons are morally praised because they choose the
good when they could have chosen evil, and they are morally
blamed because they choose evil when they could have chosen
good. Of course, the understanding of moral praise and blame as
conditioned upon the ability to do otherwise is a modern idea,
and the idea that the ability to do otherwise is morally meaning-
less unless it includes the ability to choose something with the
contrary value is open to dispute, but both of these assumptions
are ones that many philosophers accept. But if perfect goodness
involves the inability to choose evil, a perfectly good being is not
free in the morally significant sense. Further, it follows that a per-
fectly good being cannot be praised in the moral sense of praise
and hence cannot be good in the moral sense of good. This leads
to a third problem. If the concept of perfect goodness is meant to
include moral goodness, and yet the concept of perfect goodness
is inconsistent with the concept of moral goodness, as allegedly
demonstrated by the foregoing argument, it apparently follows
that the concept of perfect goodness is self-inconsistent.
An even harder problem for the attribute of perfect goodness is
the apparent incompatibility between perfect goodness and om-
nipotence, on the one hand, and the existence of evil, on the other.
Not only is the problem of evil the single most difficult prob-
lem in natural theology, it also poses a serious challenge to the
religious belief of ordinary people. The logical form of the prob-
lem is the putative conceptual inconsistency among the following
propositions:
(1) A perfectly good being would be motivated to eliminate all
evil.
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(2) An omnipotent being would be able to eliminate all evil.
(3) There is a being who is both perfectly good and omnipotent.
(4) Evil exists.
It is now widely held that these propositions are not logically in-
consistent, and in recent years greater attention has been focused
on the problem that these propositions seem to be jointly improb-
able. They therefore pose a problem for the rationality or justifica-
tion of religious belief even if they are not logically inconsistent.10
The apparent inconsistency or joint improbability of (1)–(4)
needs to be resolved. There have been many attempts to show
that (1)–(4) are not jointly improbable or that it can be rational
to believe them. I find some of these arguments plausible, and I
would not find it surprising
if there is more than one way to show
the rationality of a given set of beliefs, even a set as apparently
threatening as (1)–(4). But as I see it, the problem of evil is serious
enough that the more central to the theory of value a given solu-
tion is, the better. It is important that the rationality of believing
(1)–(4) not be an ad hoc solution invented to fix the problem, but
rather that it follow naturally from the theory itself. I will aim for
an approach of that kind.
The same point applies to the problem that perfect goodness
appears to be incompatible with omnipotence and divine freedom,
and that the concept of perfect moral goodness appears to be self-
inconsistent. If the metaphysics of value in conjunction with an
account of the divine attributes generates a puzzle that can be
solved by amending something either in value theory or in natural
theology, that may be acceptable; but it would be preferable if,
given the metaphysics of value and natural theology, the problem
did not arise. I will aim for a theory on the nature and origin
of value from which the puzzles do not arise, or do not arise in
their most threatening form. This will be the task for Chapters 7
and 8.
10 This has been recognized from the beginning of the contemporary dis-
cussion stemming from J. L. Mackie’s famous paper (1955). More recent
examples appear in Howard-Snyder (1996); see especially the paper by
Richard Gale in that volume.
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iii some confusions i wish to avoid
1 States of affairs versus outcomes
I want to make it clear at the outset that I do not think of an outcome
as the same as a state of affairs. The outcome of an act is a state of
affairs, but there are states of affairs that are not the outcomes of
acts – for example, a meteor crashing into the Earth. Of course, no-
body is likely to confuse an astronomical event with the outcome
of an act, but the confusion is just as mistaken when a state of af-
fairs is also the outcome of an act. The same state of affairs can be
evaluated either as an act outcome or independently of its status
as an outcome, that is, as a state of affairs simpliciter. Consider the
state of affairs of some human or animal feeling pain. I would agree
with most others that that is a bad state of affairs. It is bad no mat-
ter where it comes from, and we know that because we say it is bad
without first inquiring into its origin. But suppose that the pain is
the outcome of an act. Suppose, in fact, that it is intentionally in-
flicted by a human agent. We can evaluate that state of affairs as the
outcome of an act, and as an outcome it is bad in a different way.
It has another sort of badness than the badness of the mere state
of affairs of someone’s feeling pain. It does not actually matter for
my point that it is a different sort of badness, although I think that
it is. What matters is that it is an additional badness. The evalua-
tion comes out differently when the state of affairs is evaluated as
an act outcome than when it is not. In both cases, it comes out bad,
but as an outcome it has an additional badness that it would not
have if the pain were accidental. The analogous point applies to
pleasure. Pleasure intentionally produced is better than pleasure
accidentally produced, even when the state of affairs is otherwise
the same. There is one state of affairs of Eve’s feeling pleasure
at a particular time, but that state of affairs can be evaluated as
the outcome of Adam’s act or just as a state of affairs simpliciter.11
11 The analogous point applies to true belief. I have argued elsewhere that
in order to understand what makes knowledge better than true belief, we
need to look at the source of true belief in human agency. See Zagzebski
(2001a, 2003a)
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This point will be important when we get to my account of
human acts in the rest of Part 1. I will argue that typically an act is
a response to the affective perception of some preexisting state of
affairs, and that the act produces another state of affairs that is its
outcome. The evaluation of the outcome of the act is different in
kind from the evaluation of the state of affairs to which the agent
is responding. The former is evaluated in relation to the prior act
that produced it; the latter is not.
2 Intrinsic good versus the good of ends
Christine Korsgaard (1983) has reminded us of the distinction be-
tween intrinsic good and the good of ends in a very interesting
paper, “Two Distinctions In Goodness.” Later, I will argue that the
concept of intrinsic good is ambiguous, and the sense Korsgaard
uses is not the one I will use. But the point I want to make initially
is just that an intrinsic good should not be confused with a good
end, and that this is the case whether we mean “end” in the sense
of a natural telos, or “end” in the sense of a conscious aim. The
difference between intrinsic and extrinsic goods is a difference in
the location of value. An intrinsic good gets its goodness from
itself; an extrinsic good derives its goodness from something else.
By contrast, the difference between goods as ends and goods as
means is a difference in the way we value things. It is a distinction
in goods considered as objects of desire or choice. Something can
be valued as an end in itself – that is, not as a means – even though
it is not an intrinsic good. For example, Korsgaard says that hap-
piness is such a good according to Kant. That is because happiness
is sought as an end, not as a means to something else, even though
the value of happiness is conditional, and Korsgaard infers from
that that it is extrinsic. I will argue later that Korsgaard is mistaken
in thinking that something is an extrinsic good because its good-
ness is conditional, but she is right that happiness can be good as
an end and not as a means and yet be good extrinsically as long as
it derives its goodness from something else – for example, a good
will.
So something can be good as an end even though it is not in-
trinsically good. I also maintain that something can be an intrinsic
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I. Motivation-based virtue ethics
good even though it is not good as an end, although Korsgaard
does not discuss that possibility.12 For one thing, there are intrin-
sic goods that ought not to be ends of action. Pleasure for oneself
is often in this category, as well as many good emotions. (Think,
for example, how odd it is in most circumstances to aim at feeling
love.) There are also things that are both intrinsically good and
good as ends, but even then we should distinguish the two ways
in which they are good. God is said to be a final end, not desirable
as a means to something else, but to say that God is intrinsically
good is not to say that. It is to say that God is not made good by
anything else. In addition, there may be intrinsic goods that are
not the sort of thing that can coherently be considered something
we choose or at which we aim. The beauty of nature may be an
intrinsic aesthetic good, but ordinarily it cannot be good as an
end because it cannot be an end, since we cannot choose means
to bring it about.13 The goods of fortune (such as health, long life,
and the absence of war and strife) may also be intrinsically good,
even though it is very difficult, and in some cases impossible, for
them to be the objects of our aims – although they can be ends in
the related sense of objects of desire, and according to Aristotle
they are components of eudaimonia, our natural end. I would also
propose that the value of personhood is intrinsic, but it does not
make sense to say that it is desirable as an end in itself, because
personhood is not the kind of thing that can be either chosen or
desired, and because nothing is a means to it, nor is it a natural
telos in the Aristotelian sense.14
12 Korsgaard has said in correspondence that she does not think that there
can be intrinsic goods that are not good as ends; in fact, she now thinks
that there are no intrinsic goods at all. Not even a good will is intrinsi-
cally good. All value is conferred by human choice. But as we will see,
Korsgaard means something different from what I mean by intrinsic good.
See Korsgaard (1996b) for the development of her view on intrinsic goods
since the publication of “Two Distinctions of Goodness.”
13 Actually, we can, up to a point, bring about the beauty of nature by cul-
tivating gardens. But the result is no longer nature, but nature improved
by art.
14 Kant, of course, makes the idea that persons are ends in themselves a cor-
nerstone of his theory. But in making that claim, Kant is referring to the
way persons ought to be treated. Since it is possible to treat persons as
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The mistake of confusing intrinsic good and the good of ends is
typically made by assimilating the former to the latter. Korsgaard
discusses the way in which this error has arisen in recent philos-
ophy, but it can also be found in Plato and Aristotle. Plato says
that the good is what every soul pursues (Republic, Book 6), and
Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with the pronouncement,
“Every craft and every investigation, and likewise every action
and decision, seems to aim at some good; hence the good has been
well described as that at which everything aims” (emphasis added). By
claiming that the good just is the good of ends, Aristotle and Plato
ignore intrinsic good. Many contemporary philosophers make the
same mistake.
The conflation of intrinsic good with the good of ends is partly
responsible for J. L. Mackie’s famous complaint about the oddity
of morality. Mackie says:
The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides
the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive;
something’s being good both tells the person who knows this
to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would
be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because
of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so
constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has
to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. (Mackie 1977, p. 40)
It does seem odd that a property in the world could be essentially
magnetic to any perceiver of it, but the peculiarity arises largely
because Mackie assumes that objective value is the value of ends,
means, to say that a person is an end in Kant’s sense is just to say that he
ought not to be treated that way. The good of ends in the Kantian sense, in
the Aristotelian sense, and in the sense of aims must all be distinguished
from intrinsic good, since the former have to do with the way we value
things rather than with the source of the value. This may be less clear in
the Aristotelian sense of “end” than in the other two. That is because an
Aristotelian telos is given to us by nature and we need not be explicitly
conscious of it, although Aristotle thought that we do consciously aim at
our telos, eudaimonia, but with only a dim awareness of our target. Peo-
ple all agree that we’re aiming at eudaimonia, but disagree about what it
consists in.
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of objects of pursuit. If value is objective, he assumes, it must
exercise its motivational force from outside the mind. But there
is also the possibility that there are things that are intrinsically –
and hence objectively – good, but that are not ends. They may also
motivate, but as forces inside the mind moving the agent to act
rather than as magnets attracting the agent to them. I see no reason
to deny that there are states in the mind that are intrinsically good.
Many philosophers already think that there are states in the mind
that have intrinsic epistemic value – for example, true beliefs. Why
not think that there are other psychic states with intrinsic value
as well, even moral value? I will argue in Chapter 2 that emotions
can have intrinsic value. I do not expect readers to be convinced
yet of the truth of this claim, but only of its possibility. However,
its possibility will not occur to anyone who does not distinguish
intrinsic good from the good of ends.
3 Motive versus aim
A related confusion is that between motive and aim. It is often
convenient to identify a motive by its end, since we name a motive
in the context of giving an explanation for an act, and an easy way
to explain an act is to show how that act constitutes the specific
means to some specific end of the agent. For example, the agent’s
searching behavior is explained by pointing out that she aims
at finding her keys, and this can be expressed by saying that her
motive is to find her keys. Or her behavior of preparing her re´sume´
and reading the classified ads is explained by saying that her end
is getting a job, and so it is said that her motive is to get a job. But
it confuses the nature of motives to identify them by their ends,
for several reasons. For one thing, more than one motive can have
the same end; there is more than one motive aimed at getting a
job. More importantly, even though motives have characteristic
ends, the intentional structure of a motive is quite different from
the structure of a psychic state that aims at a particular end. We
can see this by comparing motive explanation with means-end
explanation of human action. Means-end explanation tells us why
an agent acts under the assumption that he has a certain end, but
a further explanation is needed for the fact that he has the end
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that he has. Motive explanation tells us why the agent does x,
not because x leads to y and the agent aims at y, but because
x-behavior exhibits motive M (love, jealousy, compassion, etc.),
we understand what it is like to be in state M, and we see that
x-behavior is part of a pattern of behavior exhibiting M. Motive
explanation explains a much wider range of an agent’s behavior
than means-end explanation. This is why insight into the motives
of characters in novels explains so much of their behavior, and
why insight of this kind allows us to predict the future behavior
of others.
Motives are essentially pushing states, not pulling states, and
they push the agent to perform a variety of different acts in dif-
ferent circumstances and to adopt a variety of different ends. A
jealous lover sometimes tries to harms his rival and sometimes
harms his beloved or himself instead. We understand this because
we understand that the intentional object of jealousy (he is jealous
of her) is distinct from the end of jealous action (to harm the rival,
or her, or himself). So more than one motive can have the same
end, and the same motive can have different ends.
The value of the aim of an act and the value of its motive
can differ, so the difference between motive and aim can make
a moral difference. In the scene in which Elizabeth Bennett meets
Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, he tells her that Mr. Darcy’s
good acts – indeed, good aims – are motivated by pride: “It has
often led him to be liberal and generous – to give his money
freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and relieve the
poor. Family pride, and filial pride, for he is very proud of what
his father was, have done this” (Chapter 16). We find out later
that Wickham has been grossly unfair in his description of Darcy,
but the person
he describes is a possible one. There are various
motives for the aim to give to the poor – one might give out of
pride, or fear, or simply because their suffering sickens one – and
not all of these are morally laudable. In fact, Elizabeth is horri-
fied at Darcy’s alleged motive. In each case, the motive can be
the cause of the act without being the aim. A man can have the
same aim as the compassionate person – to alleviate suffering –
without acting out of the motive of compassion. His motive is
not as good, and arguably his act is not as good either. But
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that difference cannot be explained if motives are confused with
aims.
The confusion of motives with aims leads to a problem in ex-
plaining the source of the value of a motive. It is common and not
unreasonable to think that the value of aiming at some end derives
from the value of the state of affairs at which the agent aims. It is
good to aim at relieving suffering, because the relief of suffering
is a good thing. It is bad to aim at punishing the innocent, because
the punishment of the innocent is a bad thing. But if a motive is
not defined by its end, there is no temptation to think that the
value of a motive derives from the value of an end. A given mo-
tive is not identical to whatever state it is that has a given end.
The value of the motive, therefore, cannot be explained by the
value of the end but must be explained in some other way. I have
already mentioned in passing the possibility that a motivational
state such as love is an end itself. It is possible to aim to produce
love or compassion in oneself. In that case, a motive would have
the kind of value that ends have. Its value would not come from
an end; it would be an end, and its value would be the value of
ends.15 A moment’s reflection, however, reveals that this is not
typical. We do not often act in order to produce certain motives
in either ourselves or others, and in any case, the evaluation of
motives is not limited to those cases in which we do. Ordinarily, a
motive is neither identical to whatever state it is that aims at some
end, nor an end itself. If intrinsic good is confused with the good
of ends, the apparent conclusion is that motives have no intrinsic
value. In Chapter 2, I will argue that this is a mistake, but in order
to identify the mistake we need to clear up the confusion between
motive and aim as well as that between intrinsic good and the
good of ends.
15 The idea that virtuous motives should be the ends of the moral life is a
form of perfectionism. An interesting and rarely discussed example of
a theory of this kind appears in Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty.
Royce makes the motivational state of being loyal central to his theory. As
I read Royce’s account, he sees loyalty as both intrinsically valuable and
valuable as an end. Loyalty is the only ultimately proper object of loyalty.
Good causes and bad causes are distinguishable in that the former are all
forms of loyalty to loyalty. See Royce (1916), pp. 118ff.
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To summarize, a motive is not the same as the state of aim-
ing to bring about a certain end, nor is it typically an end itself.
Its value does not derive from the value of a state of affairs at
which it aims, nor is its value typically the kind of value that
ends have. A motive is a psychological spring of action with an
intentional structure, and the kind of value it has needs to be deter-
mined. I will argue in Chapter 2 that emotions can have intrinsic
value.
4 The myth of value bipolarity
The fourth confusion is related to the previous two, but it is the
mistake not of confusing two things for one but of confusing many
things for two. The mistake is in thinking that value is bipolar.
Almost everyone assumes that there are two values, good and
bad, which fall on opposite ends of a spectrum, and it is almost
as common to think that the appropriate response to the former is
attraction and to the latter repulsion. I want to insist not that the
good/bad bipolarity is a mistake, but only that it might be. I am,
however, convinced that the attraction/repulsion bipolarity is a
mistake, both as a way of explaining the meaning of value and as
a way of explaining the appropriate response to it, and I have not
found any other bipolar response that applies to all value.
Consider the following ways of having value or disvalue: pe-
culiar, humorous, awesome, enviable, ugly, contemptible, unjust,
pitiful. If the only values are degrees of good and bad, and if the
good is the attractive and the bad the repellant, these properties
should differ only in their descriptive components and in the de-
gree to which they attract or repel. I doubt that that is true of any
of them, but perhaps the clearest cases are the last two, the unjust
and the pitiful. I would not deny that there is something unattrac-
tive about both, although there is probably also some feature of
both of them that is attractive. In the case of the unjust, we may
be attracted to the victim with whom we identify; in the case of
the pitiful, the quality that makes a person pitiful rather than con-
temptible might attract us. And we probably also feel repelled by
persons we perceive to be pitiful or unjust. But turning away is
not the appropriate response or even the natural one; at least, it is
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not the dominant response. We do not always turn our backs on
the pitiful and the unjust, nor should we.16
Perhaps there is some other bipolarity of appropriate response
to value. Another candidate is promotion and elimination. Per-
haps we aim to promote the good and to eliminate the bad. This
does seem to apply to the unjust and the pitiful, since the appro-
priate response is to eliminate them, usually by eliminating their
causes. But while promotion/elimination applies to some of the
values on the list, it is doubtful that it applies to all of them. Is
the appropriate response to the awesome to promote it or to the
enviable to eliminate it? I do not think so.
We now have two bipolarities, and neither appears to be re-
ducible to the other. But perhaps both are reducible to a third.
Attraction/repulsion and promotion/elimination have this in
common: We are glad that the object of the first response in each
pair exists, and we are sorry that the object of the second response
in each pair exists. That does seem to come close to a commonality
in the two pairs of value responses, and arguably it applies to all
of the values on the list; but it does not apply to all values. There
are forms of good and bad about which gladness and sorrow seem
to be beside the point – in fact, about which all responses seem
beside the point. Would we say that the appropriate response to a
life of Aristotelian eudaimonia, a life that fulfills human nature, is
gladness? The problem is not so much that gladness is the wrong
16 Aristotle and other Greek writers classified pity as a form of pain, and so
they attempted to put it into the category of the repellant. In his study
of pity in ancient thought, David Konstan (2001, p. 11) speculates that
the biological evidence might explain why the Greeks classified pity as
a painful emotion. Joseph LeDoux (1996, p. 165) argues that basic emo-
tions, such as fear, involve parallel transmissions to the amydala from
the sensory thalmus and sensory cortex. The subcortical pathways are
faster, but more accurate representations of the external cause of the emo-
tion come from the cortex. Konstan proposes that pity might also involve
an initial aversive reaction followed by a more subtle and