How Humeans can make normative beliefs motivating

Abstract

Normative realism faces a problem concerning the practicality of normative judgment, the presumptive view that normative judgments are motivational states. Normative judgments, for the normative realist, must be beliefs. This is problematic because it is difficult to see how any belief could have the necessary connection to motivation required to account for the practicality of normative judgment. After all, the Humean theory of motivation has it that motivated action is only brought about by a belief and a desire working in tandem. Here I show how the normative realist, simply by embracing a certain philosophical psychology, can hold that normative judgments are both beliefs and motivational states, all consistent with the Humean theory of motivation. Given the plausibility of both the practicality of normative judgment and Humean psychology, a theory that allows the realist to reconcile them is preferable (ceteris paribus) to any picture in which one must be rejected. The (low) price to pay for this reconciliation is the acceptance of a strong form of cognitivism about intention, the doctrine that your intentions to act are beliefs about what you are going to do, and a small???yet highly plausible???adjustment to our theory of what it is to be a motivational state.