Matthew S. Bedke Writing Sample
Abstract
Moral Judgment Purposivism
Consider a traditional version of motivational judgment internalism: necessarily, A’s
sincere moral judgment that he or she ought to ϕ motivates A to ϕ (at least a little). Such
principles fail because they cannot accommodate the amoralist, or one who renders moral
judgments without any corresponding motivation. Based on the possibility of amoralists, the
received view is externalism – roughly, the view that the connection between moral judgments
and motivation is not conceptually grounded, but is instead discovered to be statistical or
nomological. I revive conceptual internalism by offering some modifications of the amoralist
case to show that certain motivational failures are not conceptually possible.
I also suggest that empirical investigation of moral judgments can reveal a motivational
link that is more robust that the statistical and nomological links allowed by externalists. I
introduce and defend moral judgment purposivism (MJP): the purpose of moral judgments is to
motivate prototypically moral behaviors. I argue that moral judgments evolved as a proximate
mechanism to elicit prototypically moral behaviors, which would be evolutionarily advantageous
under a variety of adaptationist models that incorporate assortive interactions. MJP is consistent
with conceptual desiderata and it offers a more illuminating analysis of amoralist cases.
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Matthew S. Bedke Writing Sample
Moral Judgment Purposivism:
Saving Internalism from Amoralism∗
If John Doe sincerely judges that he ought to visit his grandmother in the hospital, we
expect him to be so motivated, at least a little bit. If Jane Doe sincerely judges that she ought to
help someone in dire need (at no inconvenience to herself), we expect her to be so motivated,
again, at least a little bit. And our expectations in these and similar cases are usually met, for
first-person moral judgments1 are usually motivationally efficacious, though the motivation can
be outweighed by other considerations.
That much seems uncontroversial, but there are different ways of clarifying and
articulating the connection between moral judgment and motivation. The orthodox2 internalist
position, motivational judgment internalism, is that there is an a priori conceptually necessity
between sincere moral judgments and motivation along the following lines:
MJI: necessarily, individual A’s sincere moral judgment that he or she ought to ϕ
provides A with at least some motivation to ϕ.
Given that A has a mental state M that bears all other markings of a moral judgment but lacks
motivational oomph, MJI holds that M cannot be a genuine moral judgment. This view strains
∗ Acknowledgments. 1 Throughout I will be concerned with first person moral ought judgments. The literature on this kind of internalism is large, but sadly lacking in recent advances. For excellent discussions see Darwall (1983); Schaffer-Landau (2003), chapter 6; Mele (2003). 2 Some with internalists leanings could retreat to weaker and less orthodox claims, like ‘Necessarily, the virtuous are motivated by their moral judgments’ or ‘Anyone who judges that he ought to X (morally or otherwise) is either motivated accordingly or practically irrational.’ But such theses are more about virtuous or rational people than they are about moral judgments. These theses require the motivational connection to be mediated by something external to the judgments themselves. I want to argue that there is a less mediated motivational role for moral judgments such that denies the robustly externalist view that moral judgments of themselves have no necessary connection to motivation.
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the thought that amoralists—isolated individuals who acknowledge moral obligations but remain
unmoved by them—are at least conceptually possible.
The orthodox externalist alternative says there is no a priori conceptual connection
between moral judgments and motivation. Any observed regularities are merely contingent. It
follows that there are possible states of affairs where genuine moral judgments have no
motivational efficacy whatsoever.
In response to this debate I want to, first, open some middle ground between these
extremes by reflecting on different kinds of amoralist cases. I present a case of community-wide
amoralism that underwrites a conceptually grounded connection between moral judgments and
motivation while respecting the conceptual possibility of isolated amoralists. The case requires
us to consider more nuanced views of the connection between moral judgments and motivation
than those presented in orthodox internalism and externalism. This brings me to my second
project, where I argue that we can only appropriately understand the connection between moral
judgments and motivation by situating these psychological states in wider moral practices. I
introduce and defend moral judgment purposivism, which can be provisionally stated as follows:
MJP: the purpose of a moral judgment is to motivate individuals to act accordingly.
If this is right, there is a sense in which moral judgments are supposed to motivate, and so
judgments are otherwise similar but lack this purpose are not really genuine moral judgments.
MJP explains our reaction to community-wide amoralist cases, avoids the pitfalls of the orthodox
views, and articulates morality’s essential action-guiding role.
I. The Isolated Amoralist
An amoralist is one who makes sincere moral judgments about his or her moral
obligations, but utterly fails to be moved by them. Brink (1989, 45-50) forcefully argues for the
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conceptual possibility of amoralists and it is perhaps the greatest flaw of MJI that it classifies the
amoralist as conceptually impossible. Not only does MJI rule out amoralists, but what is worse,
it rules out the possibility that a normally virtuous person on one occasion issues a moral
judgment that fails to motivate. Though MJI holds that the virtuous person does not issue a
moral judgment in such a case, it is clearly more natural to chalk up the deficiency to a one-time
glitch. Why not call this a motivationally defective moral judgment rather than deny it the status
of moral judgment altogether?3
Indeed, most individuals side with Brink on this issue. Shaun Nichols (2003) has
gathered evidence that the widely-held concept of a moral judgment does not require that it
motivate. He provided subjects with a description of a psychopath who acknowledges that
hurting others is morally wrong, but who claims not to care and who in fact hurts others. Nichols
discusses the results as follows:
Most subjects maintained that the psychopath did really understand that hurting
others is morally wrong, despite the absence of motivation . . .. Prima facie, this
counts as evidence against the conceptual rationalist’s inverted-commas gambit.
For it seems to be a platitude that psychopaths really make moral judgments. And
if it is a platitude that psychopaths really make moral judgments, it will be
difficult to prove that conceptual rationalism captures the folk platitudes
surrounding moral judgment. (74-5)4
3 Proponents of MJI try to avoid the natural thing to say. They might say that the amoralist only makes a moral judgment in the inverted commas sense; that the moral judgment is not sincere; or that the moral judgment does not concern a moral obligation. These moves might suffice for the amoralist, but they seem quite desperate explanations of the single-shot glitch in the otherwise virtuous person. 4 This study bears on the concept of moral judgment if one thinks that pre-theoretic (and particularly pre-philosophical) intuitions employ or otherwise allow access to the contents of our
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Our verdicts in these cases shed light on the concept of a moral judgment. According to our
concept, it is possible to have an amoralist, or to have a normally virtuous person, issue a sincere
moral judgment despite any lack of motivational import.
From these isolated amoralist cases, it is too easy to conclude that externalism is right and
so motivation is no part of the concept of moral judgment.5 However, there are ways to press
back against orthodox externalism and establish a more robust connection between moral
judgment and motivation. One way to do so is to concentrate on particular amoral individuals
and ask whether the motivational failings of their putative moral judgments can be systematic, or
whether they must be understood against a background of motivational efficacy within that
particular agent. Consider the views of Mark Timmons and James Dreier that push us in this
direction. Timmons (1999), for instance, claims that “a moral judgment typically has certain
(defeasible) causal tendencies, including, especially, certain first-person choice guiding
tendencies . . . . Its typically having these tendencies is part of the very concept of moral
judgment.” (140, emphasis added). Similarly, James Drier (1990) says “let us call modest
internalism the principle that in normal contexts a person has some motivation to promote what
he believes to be good.” (14). On the most natural reading of these views, and the view I want to
consider, if we know that an agent, A’s, tokenings of mental state M do not typically (in the case
concepts. Though I am sympathetic to the view, those who have misgivings about this kind of conceptual analysis in this kind of case can rely on the more traditional arguments given by Brink and noted above. In any event, my purpose is not to argue for the conceptual possibility of amoralists, but to investigate whether any brand of internalism can accommodate them. 5 Nichols (2003) seems to embrace this kind of approach, or what he calls “empirical internalism about core moral judgment.” (111). In Nichols’s words, “core moral judgment is nomologically connected with motivation.” (Id.) Though he uses the label “internalism,” this appears to be the standard externalist view advocated by Brink, for any connection between moral judgment and motivation would be contingent.
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of Timmons) or normally (in the case of Drier) have the tendency to motivate A, then we know
the tokens of M are not genuine moral judgments.
I see two worries about these positions as responses to orthodox externalism. First,
lifelong amoralists seem conceptually possible. That is, a particular agent A might render
genuine moral judgments that never have motivational force for A, so the typicality and
normalcy requirements, as restricted to the mental tokens of a particular agent, are simply not
required for A to render genuine moral judgments. Second, even if it were true that A’s putative
moral judgments must typically or normally motivate A to be genuine moral judgments, it is not
clear how much this view departs from externalism. Externalists can and often do acknowledge
statistical and nomological connections between moral judgments and motivational states, and
Timmons’ and Dreier’s references to typicality and normalcy are most straightforwardly read as
statistical claims. As Timmons’ view makes clear, he is claiming that typical motivational
purport is part of the concept of a moral judgment, and that might signal some departure from
orthodox externalism, but that bit of the view relies on the conceptual impossibility of died in the
wool amoralists. As I have indicated, that is the most vulnerable part of the claim.
In any event, there is a more effective way to push back against the externalist if we focus
on communities of agents instead of the mental tokenings of isolated amoralists. To that end, I
want to develop a line of thought introduced by Simon Blackburn (1998) that emphasizes the
intelligibility of amoralist cases only when they are isolated against a background of
motivational efficacy. He remarks:
My own judgment on this debate is that externalists can win individual battles.
They can certainly point to possible psychologies about which the right thing to
say is that the agent knows what it is good or right to do, and then deliberately and
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knowingly does something else. And they can point to psychologies like that of
Satan, in which it can become a reason for doing something precisely that it is
known to be evil. But internalists win the war for all that, in the sense that these
cases are necessarily parasitic, and what they are parasitic upon is a background
connection between ethics and motivation. They are cases in which things are out
of joint, but the fact of a joint being out presupposes a normal or typical state in
which it is not out. (61).
Blackburn thinks that there is a “background connection between ethics and motivation,” without
which we would not understand the exceptional cases as instances of moral judgments. In what
follows I will try to substantiate and clarify Blackburn’s view by suggesting that the background
connection that is essential to moral judgments is community-wide motivational tendencies
(section II-A). I will then raise an objection to the view (section II-B), and develop my own
more detailed account of moral judgments that answers the objection while providing the best
overall theory of moral judgments qua motivational state (section III).
II. From Amorality to Amoralsville
What seems to animate internalists is a sense that moral judgments are essentially action-
guiding, or, as Hare put it, “Moral judgments, in their central use, have it as their function to
guide conduct.” (70). Given the possibility of various kinds of isolated amoralists, and
Blackburn’s helpful suggestion, I suggest that the best place to locate this essential action-
guiding character is in community-wide connections between moral judgment and motivation.
So let us now consider whether isolated amoralist should indeed be treated differently from
communities of amoralists, and whether we can thereby ground some kind of conceptual
connection between moral judgments and systematic motivational tendencies. Let me begin by
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addressing the shortcomings of some other proposals before introducing my own view in the
following section.
James Lenman (1999) offers a starting point for thinking about wide-spread amoralism.
He asks us to consider an entire planet of amoralists, Amorality, where scientists ascertain and
record moral facts, but where no one is ever practically motivated by their moral judgments.
(445-46). According to Lenman, externalists must acknowledge Amorality as conceptually
possible, but because he finds this hypothetical “preposterous,” he concludes that externalism
quite generally cannot be true. Though he does not discuss the isolated amoralist in any detail,
he seems to think that if an entire planet of amoralists is not possible, then neither are isolated
amoralists, even against a background of motivational efficacy.
While I find Lenman’s case to be a nice starting point, there are problems with his
conclusion that planets of amoralists are not possible, and the broader implication of his view
that externalism is false. Oddly enough, what seems to bother Lenman about the putative moral
judgments on planet Amorality is their lack of any propositional content. Indeed, given the bare
assertion that the amoralists on Amorality study the “moral facts,” one can wonder exactly what
it is that is under study, particularly when there would appear to be little by way of moral
behavior on Amorality. But more importantly, the point of disagreement between internalists
and externalists is not supposed to be about content and whether amoralist moral judgments are
meaningless, but rather whether moral judgments with agreed upon contents must have
motivational import.6 To really test externalism as applied at the level of global motivational
failure, we would do better to think of a case where the semantic content of the amoralists is not
at issue.
6 Gert and Mele (2005) press a similar objection against Lenman.
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In addition, even if Lenman’s scenario is impossible, the move from the impossibility of
global amoralism to the impossibility of isolated amoralism is an unwarranted leap, as others
have pointed out (see Gert and Mele 2005 for a nice discussion). Perhaps some background
motivation is necessary to either breath semantic content into the judgments of amoralists, or to
simply understand the judgments they make as moral judgments at all, but it would not follow
that isolated amoralists in our society render judgments with no semantic content, or judgments
which cannot be understood as moral judgments at all.
To see whether community-wide amoralism really is conceptually impossible on
motivational grounds we should construct a case that is as similar to our moral situation, save
some community-wide lack of motivation. We should do our best to table issues of semantic
content. Gert and Mele (2005) have offered a case to further guide the way. They ask us to
consider planet Alpha, where beings “emerge with a strong genetic predisposition to acquire
generic desires to do whatever they morally ought.” (278). They imagine that one day a world-
wide catastrophe strikes that sinks all residents into a deep listlessness. Though the residents of
Alpha continue to make genuine first-person moral ought judgments, these judgments no longer
carry motivational oomph, for everyone is caught in the grip of a depressive funk. After
reflection, Gert and Mele suggest that this kind of scenario is possible. If so, perhaps we are
wrong to think that there must be some kind of community-wide background connection
between moral judgment and motivation.
Still, in the Gert and Mele scenario there is a sense in which the moral judgment affected
by global listlessness is understood against a background of efficacious moral motivation. As
the evolutionary tale emphasizes, the moral judgments on Alpha still have conduct guidance as
part of their function, and we can understand the listlessness as widespread malfunctions of
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genuinely moral judgments. That is, it is not clear that the “background connection” of normal
motivational efficacy that Blackburn wants is missing in the case of Alpha. And if the
listlessness persists, one wonders whether we would be less and less inclined to consider those
judgments genuinely moral as the background motivational purpose fades from view.
A. The Amoralsville Case
I think we can generate another case to show that some community-wide purpose or
function is indeed necessary to understand certain judgments as genuinely moral. Consider a
distant community very much like our own, but unrelated to our own (perhaps they are on
another planet) that developed a very stringent, heavy-handed system of punishment and
coercion to keep its citizens in line. The residents of this community are ruled by single dictator
that metes out sever punishments, but only for moral violations. As a result, individuals in this
community generally keep their contracts, respect each others property, and even help those in
need simply because they fear punishment and coercion should they fail to do so. As external
observers we would say that their behaviors by and large conform to our ethical norms, though
we realize that they are never motivated by anything other than their own interests and fear of
harm to their interests.
Let us call this place “Amoralsville.” So far, there are not even putative moral judgments
in Amoralsville. But imagine that the residents receive radio frequencies from our society and
thereby observe our use of moral language and discourse. With the introduced moral
vocabulary, the residents of Amoralsville learn to apply moral concepts correctly. As a result,
Amoralsville residents correctly pick out what is right and wrong, acknowledge obligations, and
can correctly categorize that which they (morally) ought to do. In fact, forming first personal
“moral judgments” and speaking in ethical terms becomes kind of a fad in Amoralsville, though
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importantly the judgments never garner any motivational force, and moral demands simply do
not weigh with them. Residents of Amoralsville are at all times solely motivated by their own
interests.
Because this community learns at least the descriptive meaning of our moral language,
and uses it correctly, there is no objection that their judgments lack content. The society is in
most respects relevantly like our own, including the kinds of behaviors they typically engage in,
except moral judgments do not now, nor did they ever, perform any kind of social function. The
question is: Do Amoralsville residents render genuine moral judgments? This is quite a different
case than those involving isolated amoralists. It looks like the citizens of Amoralsville do not
really engage in genuine ethical discourse, for an essential ingredient of ethical discourse has
gone missing, viz., its action-guiding character. Amoralsville is also quite different from the
Alphas case raised by Gert and Mele, for in our case first person moral judgments perform no
social function and historically never did. This suggests that the best way to understand
Blackburn’s requisit “background connection” in the following terms: isolated amorlalists only
make sense against a background of moral judgments that are supposed to perform some kind of
social function. That purpose is present in the case of Alpha—evolution programmed it in—but
it is missing in the Amoralsville case and it seems to account for our divergent intuitions in these
cases. Because the Amoralsville case strikes us as missing fundamental moral ingredients in
virtue of a kind of community-wide motivational failing, it looks like orthodox externalist line is
mistaken.
B. A Concern
Is the above conclusion a significant insight into the nature of moral judgments, or is it an
odd result that should make us mistrust our intuitions? Here is one reason for suspicion. It is
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prima facie plausible that an agent’s mental states are determined by that agent’s internal
psychological makeup. But on the above view, it looks like two agents, A and B, that are
identical with respect to their internal psychology can differ as to whether they token genuine
moral judgments. Imagine that A is an amoralist member of our community who tokens a moral
judgment that has no motivational force. Because A is understood against a certain background
of compliance he nonetheless tokens a genuine moral judgment that is defective. B, by contrast,
is a member of Amoralsville, and though he is a neurological duplicate of A he does not render a
genuine moral judgment because of his external environment and its lack of a certain background
connection between moral judgment and motivation. It seems strange that background societal
conditions can determine whether or not an individual has a particular kind of mental state, and
this oddity might move us to doubt the intuitive differences.
I want to see if we can make better sense of the seeming importance of certain kinds of
background connections by moving beyond conceptual analysis. As we shall see, the key is to
introduce and articulate a historical dimension to moral judgments and their social functions.
Only then can we fully appreciate the essential action-guiding character of moral judgments.
III. A Purpose of Moral Judgments
I argue that moral judgments are best understood as part of larger moral practices within
communities of moral agents, and that situating moral judgments in these larger practices best
illuminates their motivational character. The view I defend I call “moral judgment
purposivism,” which can be roughly stated as follows: moral judgments are mental states whose
purpose is to motivate individuals to engaged in characteristically moral behaviors (or refrain
from characteristically immoral behaviors). What follows will be somewhat exploratory and
suggestive. I rely on some recent thoughts in evolutionary theory, and I grant that my
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suggestions will be subject to further study, which I take to be a virtue. But my main aim is to
open up new possibilities to advance the traditional internalist-externalist debate and to show that
there are interesting connections between morality and motivation that are not contingent (at
least as traditionally understood by the externalist).
To develop the view I will first articulate a biological theory of purposes, or proper
functions. According to the view, natural objects can acquire purposes by virtue of the selection
processes that occur during evolution. I will then apply this view about biological purposes to
moral practices to show that moral judgments also have evolved purposes, one of which is to
motivate prototypically moral behaviors. After laying down the principles of moral judgment
purposivism I will show that the view respects our considered judgments about isolated
amoralists and the residents of Amoralsville, conflicted as they might be. The real payoff is that
purposivism offers us a way of looking at these cases that clarifies the differences between
distinct cases, and further informs our concept of a moral judgment.
A. Evolved Purposes
The purpose of our moral judgments is just one instance of a general theory of the
purposes of evolved functionings. Consider the familiar case of genetic replication. Various
genes express themselves as phenotypes, and the phenotypic expression of a given kind of gene
can make that gene a more or less successful replicator depending on how the phenotype
functions within an environment. Given an environment where various genes express various
phenotypes, those phenotypes that increase a gene’s relative rate of replication will count as
adaptive and so increase the proportion of the gene generation after generation.
From this basic story Ruth Millikan (1984) has developed a theory of proper functions
that applies to biological entities and languages, and her story will closely parallel our account of
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the purposes of moral practices. She considers things like the human heart and asks, What
makes a heart the kind of thing that it is? Millikan gives the following partial reply: hearts are
things that have pumping blood as a proper function. Very roughly we can say that a function F
is a proper function of an entity if F made that entity’s ancestors selectively fit, and so caused the
entity’s ancestors to proliferate relative to its competitors. We can explain why some entities
exist today by appealing to the way in which those kinds of things functioned historically, and
the functions we appeal to in these explanations are proper functions. It turns out the pumping
blood was and still is a useful function for biological organisms to have, and so hearts were
selected for, and the genes that expressed them were more likely to replicate, precisely because
they performed that function.
One interesting thing about this account is that we can come to see the proper functions
that explain an entity’s existence as partially definitive of the kind of thing that it is. For
example, the proper function of pumping blood is a definitive characteristic of hearts, and so
things that do not have pumping blood as a proper function are not hearts. This is not to say that
things that do not actually pump blood are not hearts. Surgically removed hearts, defective
hearts, and other things that do not pump blood might still count as hearts depending on their
proper functionings, which, in turn, depend on the histories of these things’ ancestors.7 But
water pumps do not count as hearts even if they can pump blood precisely because water pumps
do not have pumping blood as a proper function, and having such a proper function is partly
definite of hearts.
7 Artificial hearts might also count as a kind of heart, for pumping blood is a purpose of theirs. However, they do not belong to the same natural kind as naturally occurring hearts because they do not enjoy the right history.
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It is natural to use ‘purpose’ to capture what we mean by a selected proper function, as
we might say that the purpose of a heart is to pump blood, and so we can shorthand this
complicated story of selection and propagation through time by referring to an entity’s purposes.
B. Moral Evolution
While the adaptationist story is familiar in biology, it has a very general form. We can
model change through time with evolutionary dynamics if: 1) there is a population with varied
phenotypes, where 2) the phenotypes are copiable, and 3) different phenotypes result in
differential relative copying success. More importantly, if these three conditions obtain for any
phenotype we expect some evolutionary model to explain why the phenotype was selected for.
And if some phenotype was selected for, then it has a corresponding proper function or purpose.
I want to suggest that moral judgments inherit a purpose by playing a role in certain
wider moral practices, so let me begin by considering whether prototypical cases of moral
behaviors fit these three conditions for adaptationist modeling. It does seem as though different
behaviors have functional differences that can be copied by others or copied on other occasions
and that the behaviors can impact one’s relative fitness. Consider a classic case—the prisoner’s
dilemma—and suppose the prisoners are trying to determine whether to keep or break their prior
promise to cooperate. In this case, defectors can take advantage of those who keep their
promise, and dominance reasoning actually recommends that each party defect no matter what
the other party does. This case presents an adaptationist puzzle that is reiterated for many moral
behaviors, viz., why would a habit of keeping one’s promises evolve, given its continual
vulnerability to the defection strategy? Can we explain why behaviors such as refraining from
theft, lying, and intentionally harming others would evolve given the seemingly obvious fitness
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payoffs for contrary behaviors? Can we explain why honesty and helping behaviors would
evolve?
The answer to these questions is ‘yes.’ Let me canvass some recent literature to support
my point. Hamilton (1963) introduced the idea of inclusive fitness, or kin selection, which can
explain why genetically related individuals might help each other out. Trivers (1971) expanded
the idea by discussing reciprocal altruism, where individuals who help only those others who
reciprocate can gain a fitness advantaged over non-reciprocators, who are left to fend for
themselves. In both cases, genetically altruistic behavior given to a non-kin non-reciprocator
puts one at a fitness disadvantage, but so long as the altruistic behavior is correlated with other
altruistic behavior to a sufficient degree, genetic altruists are expected to proliferate.8 Sober and
Wilson (1998) categorize these kinds of theories as models of group selection and they survey
other scenarios wherein altruistic behavior can evolve. More recently, Brian Skyrms (1996) and
(2004) has produced models showing the evolutionary stability of mutual aid, respecting
property, some forms of punishing behavior, and other cooperative behaviors. As with the
foundational work of Hamilton and Trivers, in all of these models the crucial factor that permits
prototypically moral behaviors to evolve is assortive interactions, or the ability of moral actors
to interact with one another (rather than non-moral actors) a sufficiently high proportion of the
time. Moral actors as a class can become fitter than non-moral actors so long as the stick to their
own kind and avoid too much free riding and predation.
Though I have indicated that prototypically moral behavior can be copied from one
individual to the next, there are various ways for the copying to proceed. The most familiar kind
of copying proceeds through genetically expressed functional units, and most models assume
8 For a review of game theory models of social behaviors see Maynard Smith (1982) and Axelrod and Hamilton (1981).
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some kind of genetic determinism where phenotypes are directly produced by genotypes. This is
almost certainly wrong for all phenotypes, for even if genes encode for all the details of
phenotypic expression the processes of expression rely heavily on environment. For example, a
heart will not be expressed properly if it lacks nutrients during crucial stages of development.
Nonetheless, the genetic determinacy simplification is just that: it makes our explanatory task
more tractable and it does not seem to significantly alter the predictive power of evolutionary
models. Alternatively, some functional units might be primarily determined by culture instead of
genetics.9 Genetics might supply the basic substrates for organisms to adopt functional
behaviors (e.g., the ability to adopt a language, or phobic responses to local environmental cues)
without coding directly for those behaviors.
In any search for the proper functions of our moral behaviors we should be sensitive to
the similarities and differences between genetic and cultural versions of evolution. Both can be
modeled with the same mathematical structures.10 The crucial difference concerns the modes of
copying. When functional units are primarily genetically determined, copying proceeds through
the reproduction of the genes, which are passed on through progeny of the genetic host. When
functional units are primarily culturally determined, copying can proceed through a number of
mechanisms, including sophisticated cultural transmissions (e.g., education) and more simple
mimicking mechanisms. Two points are crucial. First, biological fitness and cultural fitness can
pull in opposite directions because the copying mechanisms differ. And second, different moral
behaviors might have different mixtures of genetic and cultural copying. Psychologists Haidt
9 I intend culture to be understood very broadly here, where behaviors can be copied through mimicking behavior, a more sophisticated process of social education, etc. For an overview of approaches to cultural evolution see Sober and Wilson (1998), chapters 4 and 5. 10 The rate of mutation and the modes of copying might make cultural adaptations very difficult to model. See, e.g., Dennett (1995), ch. 12.
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and Joseph (2004), for example, suggest that our moral sense is produced by a combination of
genetic and cultural processes. They argue that relevant studies on human and primate moral
behavior evidence four innate moral modules concerning suffering/compassion,
reciprocity/fairness, hierarchy/respect, and purity/disgust. Different cultures can then emphasize
different aspects of these moral sentiments, but the innate mechanisms will limit the kinds of
moral practices people can adopt. This hypothesis has the virtue that it can explain the common
structure and some of the common intuitions shared by moral practices and at the same time
explain the variations we actually find across cultures.11
It is not my aim to defend any particular account of the evolution of prototypical moral
behaviors save this: that some such evolutionary story will provide the best explanation of (at
least prototypical instances of) our moral behaviors precisely because moral behaviors fit the
three conditions for applying evolutionary dynamics.12 If I am right about this, then the historical
ancestors of some of our current moral practices would have performed some function, and they
were selected for, copied, and propagated precisely because they performed that function.
Applying Millikan’s proper functionalism, our moral behaviors have a proper function, or
a purpose, that corresponds to the functions for which they were selected, and these purposes
would be partially definitive of our various moral practices. The prevailing evidence from
biology and psychology indicates that (at least prototypical) moral behaviors evolved through a
process of assortive interactions, which we might call social interactions because they enable
11 See Haidt (2001) for more detail on his social intuitionist model. 12 I should hasten to mark the difference between proximate and distal explanations. Evolutionary dynamics seeks to explain the distal causes of things that copy over generations. Other approaches might provide workable proximate explanations of our moral behaviors so we can understand why individuals engaged in them from, say a psychological or sociological perspective. But we need something like evolutionary dynamics to explain the persistence or proliferation of moral behaviors over generations.
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cooperative, mutually advantageous outcomes amongst moral actors. Given the evidence we can
preliminarily claim that a purpose (or proper function) of moral behaviors is to enable and
further cooperative, mutually beneficial outcomes for moral individuals.13
C. Moral Judgment Purposivism
So far I have talked about the evolution of moral behavior, though it would be more
appropriate to talk about the evolution of moral practices, which includes behaviors,
psychologies, and language. For it is this complex of things that helps individuals obtain
mutually beneficial outcomes. In particular, to elicit certain moral behaviors we would have to
evolve a mental state responsible for motivating the desired behaviors. Here it is helpful to think
in terms of nested proper functions. Consider again the biological domain. One of a left
ventricle’s proper functions is to squeeze blood out of the heart and that is its contribution to the
heart’s overall function of pumping blood throughout the body. Similarly, moral judgments will
be those mental states that not only recognize when moral behaviors are called for, but also
translate those recognitions into behavior, thereby contributing their part to the moral practices
that enable social cooperation. Moral judgments with some connection to motivational states
will be selected for over moral judgments that merely recognize moral situations and obligations
without translating those into appropriate motivational states. Consequently, they have a
corresponding nested proper function: a purpose (or proper function) of moral judgments is to
motivate individuals to act in accordance with the judgment. This is not to deny the importance
of other moral practices, but merely to point out the role of first person moral judgments.
We are now in position to set forth moral judgment purposivism.14
13 Our moral behaviors might fail to have these effects currently, but it is sufficient that their history bestows them with the purpose of eliciting those effects. More importantly, the mechanisms that enable our moral behaviors might have been co-opted to produce other kinds of behavior that fail to generate cooperative outcomes. I discuss this more below.
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MJP: a purpose of an individual A’s sincere moral judgment that he or she ought
to ϕ is to motivate A to ϕ (at least a little bit), where
a. A’s sincere moral judgment is part of a social (assortive) practice whose
purpose is, in part, to influence individuals to ϕ, and
b. ϕing is a (prototypically) moral behavior
We can think of MJP as a synthetic necessity claim, though we should take pains to avoid
tempting misunderstandings. Evolutionary explanations do not claim that moral judgments of
the sort we have are necessary to perform the social function they in fact perform. Indeed, that
function could be served in other ways. To take an analogous case, evolutionary explanations
would not claim that no other phenotypes could serve the function that our hands actually serve.
That is obviously false. In both cases, evolution purports to explain why our moral judgments or
hands did in fact evolve given contingent facts about available phenotypes in our evolutionary
environment and the functions performed by those phenotypes. Understood as a synthetic
necessity claim, then, MJP is not the view that moral judgments are necessary to perform their
social function, but rather that an essential purpose of moral judgments is that they perform a
particular social function. In other words, the claim is not that if a mental state M serves this
14 I have tried to show that naturally occurring moral judgments of the kind we are familiar have a purpose (via evolutionary theory). What about the possibility of swamp men who are internally identical to us, and who form societies similar to ours? What of their putative moral judgments? They do not have the right history, so they do not satisfy the synthetic necessity claim that partially defines our own moral judgments. Nonetheless, I leave open the possibility that swamp moral judgments could have a (non-evolutionary) purpose, and if such mental states otherwise meet the conceptual desiderata they, too, might count as moral judgments, just not human moral judgments. So if swamp men formed to have moral lives much like our own, swamp-moral-judgments and human-moral-judgments might be different species of moral judgment. One way to put this is to say that moral judgments can be realized by different states, and investigation of one of the realizations reveals a synthetic necessity that does not hold of the other realizations. For a more detailed defense of historical, biological kinds as natural kinds, or what Millikan calls real kinds, see Millikan’s “On Swampkinds” (forthcoming).
20
function, then M is a moral judgment, but rather, if some mental state M does not have a certain
social function as a purpose, then M is not a moral judgment.
Although I have thus far identified moral judgments, as opposed to other kinds of
motivating judgments, by referring to their contents (e.g., keeping promises, not thieving, not
harming others, helping others), it seems that evolution would also select for some of the formal
characteristics of moral judgments. For example, these judgments would have to be especially
weighty to override any tendencies for self-regarding behaviors, at least in some cases.
Otherwise the benefits of mutual cooperation would rest on shaky, less reliable, foundations.
Moreover, we might expect moral judgments to be universal, or near universal—moral actors
would judge the obligations to apply to anyone in the same circumstances—because the
recognition of near universal obligations helps to maintain the high proportion of compliance in a
social group. As we have seen, some such assortive interactions are needed to make moral actors
more fit than their non-moral counterparts.
One thing we need from a theory of moral motivation is to preserve the fact that different
people come to very different moral convictions, and each differing moral judgment tends to
carry with it some motivational import. Yet from the above it might sound like we can only
explain the motivational force of moral judgments that correspond to prototypical moral
behaviors, like altruistic actions. It is important to note, however, that the above comments try to
explain the existence of a motivational mechanism by appealing to the kinds of behaviors it
historically helped generate, and once we discover that the purpose of moral judgments is to
motivate prototypical cases of moral behavior, the machinery that evolved to do this can be co-
21
opted by other practices that differ significantly from their proper function.15 When this happens
we should expect the co-opting normative judgments to motivate corresponding behaviors even
if, historically, these behaviors were not the socially adaptive ones. That is, judgments that make
use of the evolved machinery for making moral judgments will typically have corresponding
motivations because the evolved machinery doesn’t know any better, and it will still be the
purpose of the machinery to motivate the corresponding behavior.
IV. Back to the Amoralist
MJP follows up on the conceptual difference between isolated and community-wide
amoralist cases to offer a more illuminating analysis, so it is fair to say that MJP offers a theory
of moral judgment inspired by some conceptual benchmarks. Let me now comment on how the
MJP theory illuminates the amoralist cases and grounds the action-guiding character of moral
judgments.
First, MJP permits the existence of some isolated amoralists, which nonetheless render
genuine moral judgments. The purposive perspective can explain how some moral judgments
with the right history—and so the right proper function—could be nonetheless be defective and
fail to perform their proper function. Individuals who make sincere moral judgments about what
they ought to do, but fail to be motivated by them, issue defective moral judgments (but moral
judgments nonetheless). Though they issue moral judgments, those judgments are not doing
15 I thank _________________________ for reminding me of this point. Haidt and Craig (2004) say something similar.
Of course, it is possible to teach children to be cruel to certain classes of people, but how would adults accomplish such training? Most likely by exploiting other moral modules. Racism, for example, can be taught by invoking the purity module and triggering flashes of disgust at the ‘dirtiness’ of certain groups, or by invoking the reciprocity module and triggering flashes of anger at the cheating ways of a particular group (Hitler used both strategies against the Jews). In this way, cultures can create variable actual domains that are much broader than the universal proper domains for each module. (63).
22
what they are supposed to be doing. This is no different than the discovery of defective left
ventricles that are supposed to perform a certain function but fail to do so.
Externalism can also accommodate amoralists, but MJP does a better job at identifying
and explaining the thought that the moral judgments of isolated amoralists are defective. It is not
just that amoralists fail to follow an observed regularity; there also seems to be something wrong
with their moral sensibilities. Just as the spark plug that fails to fire is defective insofar as it fails
to do what it is supposed to do, moral judgments that fail to translate into appropriate
motivational states are defective insofar as they fail to do what they are supposed to do.
Second, MJP has a rather refined view of the Amoralsville case and how it differs from
isolated amoralists in our own society. Under MJP, whether or not a particular social group has
moral practices depends on whether or not bits of thought, language and behavior were selected
and propagated in the past because those practices elicited moral behavior. And moral
judgments play a part in that vast system of moral practices. A society like ours, with only a
few, isolated amoralists, would evidence society-wide moral practices and moral judgments.
Isolated amoralists render moral judgments that do not fulfill their purpose, just as we find a few
individuals with left ventricles that do not fulfill their purpose.
Recall that Amoralsville residents generally behave in ways that respect moral norms, but
they are never motivated by putative moral judgments. In fact, they learned about moral
language from our society, and in Amoralsville moral categories are merely classificatory.
Though most citizens purport to make judgments about their moral obligations, no citizen is
thereby motivated. What gets them going is the fear of punishment and their own self-interest.
Here it looks like Amoralsville did not develop a system of thought, language and behavior that
facilitated mutually beneficial social interactions. As a result, they did not inherit moral
23
judgments as part of those practices. Unlike the isolated amoralist, who has a mental state that
counts as a broken moral judgment, Amoralsville residents do not even have broken moral
judgments. Though the resident can descriptively pick out occasions of moral obligation, there is
an essential motivational aspect of moral judgments that goes missing. In short, these mental
states are not supposed to motivate in the requisite way, and so they do not count as genuine
moral judgments.
The purposive perspective offers an interpretation of the claim that moral judgments are a
type of state that typically motivates in normal conditions. Societies will not have moral
practices unless they have a mental state that typically motivates most people to behave morally.
There is some threshold below which non-compliance with moral norms would lead to the
dissolution of society. And the conditions of normalcy are the conditions under which the moral
practices developed. If conditions change radically—perhaps Hobbesian scarcity comes to pass
and death hangs in the balance—then moral judgments might fail to motivate, but for a time at
least they might still count as moral judgments because they would motivate in the normal
conditions of non-scarcity and the absence of constant threat to life and limb.
And now we can see how background, external conditions might play some role in
determining whether an individual has a particular mental state. If the mental state type M is
essentially part of a developed social practice—as I have argued is the case with moral
judgments—then we have to look to the history of one’s internal psychology and how it relates
to social practices to determine whether a particular token state m is of the type M. There
probably is no bright-line level of motivation that determines whether a society is more like our
own, where amoralists render moral judgments, or more like Amoralsville, where they do not.
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What is important is the history of interaction and the development of attitudes and other
practices that enable cooperative social behaviors, which can occur in stages and degrees.
Third, MJP offers a theory of how moral judgments are essentially action guiding. The
connection between moral judgments and motivation extends beyond contingent relationships.
To be sure, there is a sense in which it was entirely contingent whether moral practices and so
moral judgments evolved to do the work that they in fact do. But the claim here is that, given the
way the world is, and so, if I am right, given that moral judgment did evolve to do this work, the
connection between moral judgment and motivation is not entirely contingent. Given the way
the world is, it is not possible to have certain community-wide failures moral motivation. In the
actual world moral judgments motivate most of the time, but more than this we can say that they
are supposed to motivate, or have motivation as a purpose. Mental states without this purpose
are not genuine moral judgments.
Now I turn to address some potential criticisms of the view.
V. Objections and Clarifications to the Purposive Perspective
Perhaps most concerns about the view will focus on its adaptationist underpinnings. The
evidence suggests that some moral behaviors—including those that biologists call altruistic or
cooperative—were selected because they made moral actors more fit than their competitors, and
this increased fitness depended on assortive interactions. Though different social groups could
have developed slightly different ways of achieving these mutually beneficial outcomes, one
might wonder whether this perspective makes moral behaviors look too monolithic. If moral
behavior is merely fit behavior, then how do we distinguish moral from other kinds of behaviors
that also contribute to fitness? In reality, our moral lives are very complex and one might
wonder whether evolutionary modeling does justice to the complexity.
25
The view I propose does not attempt to boil down all of morality to a single function that
it is meant to serve, though some philosophers appear to do just that. Arguably, Hobbes thought
that moral practices are just those things that we need to solve the problems we face in the state
of nature, where the problems can be modeled by a prisoner’s dilemma. Similarly, Gauthier has
argued that moral norms are rationally pursued and adopted when self-interested individuals are
faced with certain game-theoretic problems. By contrast, the perspective I offer is sympathetic
to a plurality of moral practices that could each have a different purpose or purposes as complex
responses to local environments, and influenced by a mixture of genetic and cultural selection.16
I do not have a monolithic account of our complex social practices. If the analogy with the
evolution of biological entities is any indication, the variety of purposes served by our moral
practices could be as rich as the variety of functions served by our bodily organs.17
16 Compare those norms and attitudes that are appropriate within the realm of family and friends with the norms and attitudes that are appropriate within the realm of politics. In politics we do not believe it is appropriate to favor ourselves and those close to us, but in our private lives we do believe it is not only permissible, but imperative to concern ourselves primarily with the well-being of those close to us. The purposive perspective I offer can explain the variation by appealing to the different purposes that moral practices evolved in these two domains. 17 Hayek (1960) indicates that liberal political practices developed over time because they were “evolutionarily” advantageous in the sense that they allowed individuals to experiment with different forms of life. The plurality of forms of life provided by liberal society ensures a competitive environment where more successful forms of life win out and proliferate. For Hayek, it appears that liberal institutions provide the conditions for selective pressures to weed out worse ways of life, and allow better ways of life to flourish. Unfortunately, it is unclear what Hayek had in mind when he claimed that some ways of life are better than others. He might have meant that some ways of life are better at accomplishing the ends that individuals have (perhaps specialization is better in this sense because it tends to be more efficient at converting resources into products). He might have meant that individuals find some ways of life more satisfying. To stay true to the evolutionary model we should read “good ways of life” as just those ways of life that win out in the competitive liberal environment. It is an extremely interesting question what factors would make a life more likely to propagate in a society governed by liberal institutions. At an even deeper level we can ask what why liberal political institutions might have been selected for and propagated, and I suspect that the answer will involve some social problem that liberal institutions solved.
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Given that I have talked about the purposes of moral practices one might also worry that I
have made some kind of genetic fallacy or naturalistic fallacy, moving from claims about
evolutionary selection to claims about what behaviors we should perform. On the contrary, I try
to avoid any such normatively loaded conclusion. That certain behaviors were selected for
shows us that they have a biological purpose, but that kind of purpose does not translate into a
reason for action. When I say that moral judgments are supposed to motivate, that does not give
us a reason to act on the motivation any more than the fact that a car’s ignition is supposed to
start the engine gives us a reason to start the engine.18 This point is often overlooked because
‘should do’ can mean what we have most reason to do, or it can mean what we expect something
to do, or it can mean what something would do if it functioned properly. MJP only engages this
third sense of ‘should’ and it is an independent question what we have most reason to do.
On a related point, MJP and its appeal to purpose talk does not commit one to non-natural
facts. The way I use it, purpose talk is one way to describe things that arise in a dynamic process
of selection, and all of this is as consistent with naturalism as is evolutionary biology. Having
said that, nothing here precludes realist or non-naturalist metaethics. I have argued that moral
judgments have a purpose by appealing to natural facts, but I have not argued that that is all there
is. In sum, moral judgment purposivism appears to be consistent with a variety of metaethical
views.
MJP is congenial to empirical studies in two respects. The theory itself requires some of
the details to be filled in through a posteriori discovery. Research regarding the origins and
historical functionings of moral practices can expand our understanding, just as research into the
18 A related point: the theory of purposes does not justify our moral practices, not even those within the scope of morality’s proper function. Consider the possibility that racist attitudes are within the proper functions of our cognitive makeup. Clearly, this would not justify racism. More generally, there might be evolved functions that we would rather abandon.
27
material constitution of watery stuff expands our understanding of water. Moreover, with a
better theory of moral judgments in hand empirical studies can also explore observed statistical
and causal connections between moral judgments and motivation. Far from engaging a turf war
with empirical studies, moral judgment purposivism is a view that invites cooperative ventures
between philosophical analysis and empirical research.
And, lastly, I should remark on how MJP bears on some of the traditional debates in
metaethics. Motivationally internalist theses are usually thought to favor some brand of non-
cognitivism about moral judgments. The thought is that cognitive judgments are akin to belief
states, and so are not the right kind of state to issue any motivational oomph. If moral judgments
are necessarily motivating, then they must be a kind of non-cognitive state, more akin to desires
than beliefs.
Under MJP, moral judgments do not necessarily motivate, but it is their purpose to
motivate, which means that in favorable circumstances they do have some motivational force.
One might be tempted to look at those cases where moral judgments do perform their purpose
and motivate, and conclude that moral judgments are non-cognitive even on the purposive view.
The basic inference is this: if motivational force, then non-cognitive state. To my mind, this is a
mistake. MJP is neutral as to whether the moral judgment itself motivates—whether motivation
is built in—or whether moral judgments are cognitive states, which, in combination with other
desire-type states, have motivational purpose featured in MJP. In either case it is the purpose of
moral judgments to play some role in motivational structures to produce characteristically moral
behaviors. Indeed, there is a third option whereby moral judgments play double duty as desire-
28
type states and belief-type states, what has been called “besire” states,19 according to which the
traditional cognitive, non-cognitive options are not exhaustive.
As a result, internalist theses cannot do the work non-cognitivists hoped for. Internalism
of the kind I have proposed can help us further understand our moral psychology and nature of
morality’s action-guiding function, but it is ultimately neutral on the cognitive/non-cognitive
divide. This, I take it, is a virtue of the view, for the structure of the motivational features is an
issue best left to empirical psychology.20
VI. Conclusion
Reflection on various amoralist cases suggested that certain community-wide amoralist
cases should be treated very differently than isolated amoralist cases. There seems to be a
conceptually grounded action-guiding character to moral judgments that is best captured in the
systematic motivational failures featured in Amoralsville. Thus, orthodox externalism cannot be
right. And given the possibility of isolated amoralists, orthodox internalism cannot be right
either. We need some middle ground. Guided by this reflection on cases, I have constructed a
detailed and informative theory of moral judgments that illuminates their motivational features
by embedding them in wider, social moral practices. That theory, motivational judgment
purposivism, articulates a purpose of moral judgments that serves to distinguish intuitively
different cases. It is the best theory on the table that offers a step forward in the perennially
gripping internalist-externalist debate.
19 See Altham (1986). 20 Many thanks to ________________________ for pressing me on this point.
29
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