Divine Motivation Theory / Edition 1

by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Overview

Because she is widely regarded in the field of contemporary philosophy of religion, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski's latest book will be a major contribution to ethical theory and theological ethics. At the core of her work lies a new form of virtue theory based on the emotions. Distinct from deontological, consequentialist and teleological virtue theories, this theory has a particular theological Christian foundation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521535762
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/02/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.

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Cambridge University Press
0521828805 - Divine Motivation Theory - by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Excerpt

Part I

Motivation-based virtue ethics

This book exhibits a way to structure a virtue ethics with a theological 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 basic component of a virtue, where what I mean by a motive is an emotion that initiates and directs action. Chapter 1 raises the central problems involved in providing an adequate metaphysics of value for virtue theory and proposes the methodology of exemplarism. 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.

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, knowledge, 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 nontrivial in common? One plausible answer is that they are all related to persons. That answer applies to states of persons such as pleasure or happiness, character traits, motives, intentions, acts and 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 probably 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 especially 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 regarded 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 theorist 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 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 basic, 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 goodness) 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 actually 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 ontological 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 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 according 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 presumably broader than the required or forbidden, since it is usually thought that the latter applies only to the category of acts and intentions 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 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 maintained 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 behavior 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 thinking 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 effort. I mention this now, not to defend the project of developing conceptual frameworks, but to point out that while it can be debated 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 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 construction. 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 judgments seem to be cognitive because they are often propositional in form, have a truth value (and are not always false), and when 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 convince 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 normally 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 happens that a moral agent struggles before acting when he makes a moral judgment. Sometimes he acts in accordance with his judgment 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 action accompanies his judgment; when he is morally weak, a motive insufficient for action accompanies his judgment. Either way, we think that a motive in some degree accompanies the judgment. 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, because we tend to think that when struggle is unnecessary, the reason is that the moral judgment carries with it a motive sufficiently strong to cause the agent to act without struggle. So whether or not there is struggle, and whether or not the agent acts in accordance with her judgment, there is a strong inclination to expect moral judgments to be motivating.

Among those who accept a Humean psychology, the noncognitivists 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 problem, 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 cognitive 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. Nonetheless, the phenomena of moral strength, weakness, and apathy suggest that what we intuitively expect is complicated. It should turn out that a moral judgment is both cognitive and intrinsically motivating 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 judgment according to which there is a primary class of moral judgments that express states that are both cognitive and intrinsically motivating. I will later give an account of the "thinning" of moral judgment that permits the motivational force of a moral judgment to be detachable from it in such a way that moral strength, weakness, and apathy may occur.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Part I. Motivation-Based Virtue Ethics: 1. Constructing an ethical theory; 2. Making emotion primary; 3. Goods and virtues; 4. Acts and obligation; Part II. Divine Motivation Theory: 5. The virtues of God; 6. The moral importance of the incarnation; 7. The paradoxes of perfect goodness; 8. The problem of evil; Part III. Ethical Pluralism: 9. Ideal observers, ideal agents, and moral diversity.

Editorial Reviews

"Well-written and cogently argued, this is an important text...Agree or disagree with Z.'s arguments, most readers will profit from this fine work." Theological Studies, J.A. Colombo, University of San Diego

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