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Moral Judgment and Volitional Incapacity
Charles Doyle had let down the Mam and condemned his children to genteel poverty. He had been weak and unmanly, incapable of winning his fight against liquor. Fight? He had barely raised his gloves at the demon.
- Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
Failure is instructive. To understand what goes on when we do what we think is right, it is often useful to focus on the different ways in which things can go wrong. It is a central criterion of adequacy of theories of valuing – more precisely, theories of first-personal ought-judgment – that they allow for just the right amount of slack between judgment and action, making sense of both successful self-determination and phenomena like weakness of will and listlessness. Otherwise the picture they present of human motivation and agency is unrealistic or incomplete. While some motivational failures are easily manifest, some are more subtle and difficult to locate. Indeed, I will argue in this paper that contemporary accounts of moral motivation miss out on a subtle but distinct kind of failure of motivation that I will call volitional incapacity. Volitional incapacity, crudely put, is the kind of disorder that Charles Doyle in my epigraph might have suffered from, supposing he genuinely judged that he should stop drinking: it is not that his desire to drink was causally stronger than his will to stop, but that he never really willed to stop in the first place – he "barely raised his gloves" at it. As Gary Watson, who introduced the concept, points out, this kind of incapacity is a neither a failure of judgment nor self-control. Rather, it forces us to distinguish between judgment and the will: as I will put it, one is volitionally incapacitated when one’s self-directed normative commitment or ought-judgment does not result in a corresponding practical commitment or intention due to inadequate functioning of the agent’s rational capacities.
While the relationship between normative judgment and action is important in general philosophy of action – it is central to understanding self-governance and practical irrationality, for example[1] – my focus here will be on its relevance to metaethics. The question of the nature of normative motivation is rightly seen as decisive in the broader debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. To put it very roughly, (moral judgment) internalists[2] believe there is a conceptual connection between thinking that one morally ought to φ and being motivated to φ (or being motivated to take what one believes to be the means to φ-ing); consequently, an agent who is not motivated to φ does not genuinely think that she morally ought to φ. Internalism is perhaps the most important inspiration for all forms of non-cognitivism, including contemporary expressivism: according to them, the best explanation for the conceptual connection between thinking something the thing to do and being motivated to do it is that thinking something the thing to do is to be motivated to do it; normative judgment consists in an inherently motivating attitude, perhaps a higher-order one. Cognitivists face a challenge of explaining why such a connection would obtain between merely believing that one ought to do something and being motivated to do it, given that on the standard story in the philosophy of action, belief alone cannot constitute motivation.[3] While some cognitivists take up this challenge, others simply reject internalism on the grounds that it makes the relationship between judgment and motivation too intimate. These externalists point to the existence of various kinds of motivational failure, which they believe to show that the connection between thinking that one morally ought to φ and being motivated to φ is contingent rather than necessary. Perhaps the link between moral judgment and motivation obtains only if one has a de dicto desire or disposition to do whatever one thinks one morally ought to, for example. Clearly, the main issue in the debate between internalism and externalism is whether the former can accommodate what are intuitively cases where sincere judgment fails to lead to corresponding action. As I will argue, when we look closely at how and where failure may occur, we can see that volitional incapacity raises a serious problem for expressivism, leaving cognitivist internalism the leading contender.
Failures of Motivation
It is evident that we do not always do what we think we ought to do. What is not always clearly understood, however, is that there are two distinct kinds of possible failure of motivation that must be accounted for.
The Gap Between the Will and Action (or Proximal Intention)
The most obvious failures of motivation occur between what an agent sets out to do and what she in fact does or tries to do. There are at least three possible types of failure here. First, it may be that the agent sets out to do one thing, but a desire to do something else is causally stronger, leading her to form at different proximal intention or intention-in-action and thus doing something else intentionally.[4] This is weakness of the will.[5] It is what the paradigmatic guilty smoker suffers from when she yields to temptation. The second kind of failure is accidie or listlessness, where the agent sets out to do something but is capable of mustering no effort to achieve her goal. This seems to be the condition from which some depressives suffer, as Michael Stocker (1979) notes. Thirdly, it may happen that the agent does what she has set out to do, but this action in fact causally results from some other source of motivation than her setting out to do so.[6] This is a failure of self-control that can be relevant to assessing the agent, since it raises the question about what she would have done in counterfactual situations where the desire would not have been present or would have been different.
In each of these cases, we can say that in settling on a course of action, the agent has made a first-personal practical commitment to act in a certain way, a commitment that implies forming a certain causally effective proximal intention at the time of action. This commitment has a world-to-mind direction of fit and a characteristic causal-functional role of leading to intention-in-action. On pain of (subjective) irrationality, it excludes commitments to contrary courses of action and can thus play an important role in coordinating and planning activities. It seems, therefore, to be what we often call intention, or more generally, a planning state. In Al Mele's terms, having an intention is having an executive attitude toward a plan (which has at least one node) (Mele 2003, 28, 210; cf. Bratman 1987). It is natural to talk about the agent's will in this context. Commonsensically, an agent who has a strong or resolute will is one who follows through on her practical commitments, that is, one who does what she has avowed to do. And we talk about weakness of the will precisely when this sort of practical commitment or planning state is causally undermined by a contrary desire. As a result of weakness and other failures of this sort, the agent's intentional actions are not controlled or guided by her will (though they may accidentally conform to it).
The Gap Between Judgment and the Will
It seems possible that sometimes we not only fail to do what we have set out to do, but also fail to set out to do what we think we ought to do. This amounts to a different kind of failure and inner conflict, as many in recent philosophy of action have argued. I will first make the intuitive case by contrasting three kinds of agents.
Brave Michelle
It is wartime, and Michelle is in the Resistance. There’s a wireless in her room, and one day she gets an urgent message to be delivered to René, an explosives expert: “The hawk will be in the henhouse at 1900 hours tonight”. There is a curfew and the town is swarming with Germans, but Brave Michelle believes it is her duty to go out and deliver the message. Consequently, she settles on leaving. Just as she’s about to go, she hears a German armored car rumbling nearby, but maintains her resolve and sneaks out anyway.
Weak Michelle
Contrast Brave Michelle first with Weak Michelle. Her situation is otherwise the same, but when she hears the armored car rumbling nearby, she feels too scared to open the door. Her heart beats loud as she walks around in small circles, her nerves racked. She envisions what will happen if she doesn’t go and tells herself she will do it now and then it will be over, but as she puts her hand again on the handle, there’s another violent sound and she can’t bring herself to do it.
Agoraphobic Michelle
Finally, contrast both Brave and Weak Michelle with Agoraphobic Michelle. Her situation is otherwise the same, but she has, understandably enough in the exceptional conditions, developed a severe case of agoraphobia. The wireless crackles out the message, and Michelle thinks it her duty to deliver it. Lives are at stake. But this would involve leaving the house, and she can’t bring herself to do it. The mere thought of actually doing it makes her shudder. It is not that her resolve fails, as happens with Weak Michelle; she never makes it that far.
In Agoraphobic Michelle's case, there isn't an internal struggle between two competing motivational systems. She is, as Watson puts it in a similar case, too terrified even to try (Watson 2003, 94). Her condition consists precisely in her inability to settle on a course of action that would involve going out.[7] We do not attribute it on the basis of a single case, but on the basis of a pattern in her action, or inaction, as it may be. As Watson notes, “Quite apart from being unable to see clearly what is to be done, or to do what [she] wills, [she] is sometimes unable to commit herself to implementing [her] judgments”[8]. In Mele's terms, we can say that in spite of her judgment, Agoraphobic Michelle has a plan to go out at best as a representation, as a sort of recipe of how to carry out her duty, but she fails to adopt an executive attitude toward it. This situation seems to be a coherent possibility. The lesson is that there is a potential difference between judgment and the will that is distinct from the failure to act on one's plans or intentions (the failure of Weak Michelle), but a failure to adopt an executive attitude to what one takes to be the best supported plan in the first place. This distinct failure is volitional incapacity, the inability to will as one judges best.[9]
Distinguishing between ought-judgment and practical commitment or the will is not an ad hoc move to make sense of volitional incapacity. It does other work as well. Watson argues that it leaves room for the 'work of the will' in cases where it is necessary to form an intention even the through balance of reasons is even or unclear, leaving the normative issue open. I can’t decide whether it is better to stay or to go, but I must do either, and so I will.[10] Second, Jay Wallace argues that a realistic account of normative motivation must leave room for counter-normative intentions. This is manifest in the fact that there doesn't seem to be a Moorean paradox involved in saying "I really ought to do x, but I'm going to do y instead" or "I've chosen to do y, though it's not in fact the best alternative open to me", as one would expect if there was no possible gap between ought-judgment and intention.[11] (There is still something odd about such statements; I will return to this below.) Finally, Al Mele points out that there may be a temporal gap between judgment and decision (understood as settling on an action): on New Year's Eve, Joe after deliberation judges it best to stop smoking at midnight; that will be his new year's resolution (Mele 2003, 199). But he may not yet have resolved to stop, Mele argues. All these cases support distinguishing normative judgment and volitional states.
Expressivism and Failures of Motivation
Let me now turn back to different accounts of moral motivation. I said earlier that internalism, the thesis that moral judgment and action are necessarily connected, is a central motivation for non-cognitivism in ethics. Now, any failure of motivation is a counterexample to crude non-cognitivism, which simply identifies valuing with desiring. More sophisticated non-cognitivists, such as contemporary expressivists, respond to this challenge by making a distinction among non-cognitive attitudes: only some of them constitute valuing, and having these more complex attitudes is compatible with lacking occurrent motivation.
I will focus here on Allan Gibbard's recent work, which provides perhaps the most detailed expressivist account of ought-judgment available. In Thinking How to Live, he begins with the observation that moral judgments, and normative judgments in general, are essentially judgments about what to do. Correspondingly, ought-questions and reason-questions are questions about what to do. To judge that something is the thing do, in turn, is to settle on doing it or to decide to do it – more precisely, to rule out doing anything else (Gibbard 2003, 137). As he puts it, "When I deliberate, I ask myself what to do and I respond with a decision. Thinking what I ought to do amounts to deciding what to do." (Gibbard 2003, 17) Gibbard's main goal is to argue that seeing normative utterances as expressing ‘contingency plans’ or 'hyperstates'[12] explains why they behave in many ways as Moorean assertions about non-natural properties would, but without the need to commit to queer metaphysical or epistemological theses. He claims that this is, for example, the key to solving the Frege-Geach problem about the behavior of normative predicates in unasserted contexts. I do not here take a stand on whether planning states can play this sort of role; my question is simply whether Gibbard's view can be a theory of ought-judgments in the first place.
How does Gibbard's view accommodate motivational failures? His first response is to deny that someone who fails to (try to) act as she judges does not really judge she ought:
For a crucial sense of 'ought', I say, the following holds: if you do accept, in every relevant aspect of your mind, that you ought right now to defy the bully, then, you will do it if you can. For if you can do it and don't, then some aspect of your mind accounts for your not doing it – and so you don't now plan with every aspect of your mind to do it right now. … And so, it seems to me, there's a part of you that doesn't really think you ought to. (Gibbard 2003, 153)
These sort of cases result from “conflicts among motivational systems” (Gibbard 2003, 153; see also Gibbard 1990) – here between the planning system and the more primitive one that results in fear of the bully. It seems that we can make sense of failures like weakness of the will in these terms, whether we describe it as a case of being of two minds about what one ought to do or being defeasibly motivated. To accommodate cases of accidie, Gibbard allows that a state may be a planning state even if it only normally issues in action (Gibbard 2003, 154). The same goes for an ought-judgment, he argues. In brief, it seems that sophisticated expressivism can indeed make sense of failures like weakness of will and accidie between deciding and acting while at the same time making intelligible the internal connection between judgment and action.
Of course, expressivism is not the only kind of theory that asserts an internal relation between judging and acting; internalist cognitivists do the same, though they refuse to identify judging with deciding. Gibbard argues, however, that once we admit the internal connection exists, distinguishing between the two is superfluous: "[W]hy then think that deciding and thinking what one ought to do are separate activities?" (Gibbard 2003, 13) Making a distinction here merely incurs an extra explanatory debt, so that expressivism has an advantage here.
But we have seen that Gibbard’s question isn’t merely rhetorical, as he intends it to be. If there is such a failure of motivation as volitional incapacity, we do have good reason to think that deciding (settling on what to do, entering a planning state) is a separate activity from making an ought-judgment. I have already argued, with Watson and others, that volitional incapacity indeed is a distinct failure, and that we have further reasons as well to distinguish between judging and willing. This, then, is a kind of motivational failure that expressivists cannot possibly explain because of their identification of ought-judgment with a decision or planning state, even if they can explain motivational failures between practical commitment and action.
Moral Motivation and Rational Capacities
I have argued that expressivism has a serious problem with volitional incapacity. But though externalists win this battle, they do not win the war if internalist cognitivism is tenable – moral judgment may still have an internal tie to will and action. I will finish with sketching the form of an internalist cognitivist solution to the problem. To begin with, not every intentional action involves a judgment of the type “I ought to φ”. But I take it that the various motivational failures we have considered show that when ought-judgments play a role and everything goes well, the causal chain that leads to action has at least the following steps: