Abstract
One of the most important metaethical debates concerns the relationship between evaluative judgments and motivation. The so-called judgment internalists claim that there is an internal modal connection between our evaluative judgments and motivation, whereas the so-called externalists believe that evaluative judgments are connected to desires only through contingent external facts. This debate has reached a standoff. My aim is to introduce a completely new argument for internalism, which does not rely on our intuitions about individual cases. I argue that the truth of internalism explains best why the so-called transparency method yields self-knowledge of what we desire.
Highlights
This article investigates the relationship between evaluative judgments and motivation
Because I assume a Humean view of human psychology, by ‘motivation’ I refer to a desire (Smith 1987: 50–54)
SELFKNOWLEDGE claims that some of the previous type of self-knowledge of our desires is not based on reasoning that begins from observations of behaviour
Summary
This article investigates the relationship between evaluative judgments and motivation. They have the mind-to-world direction of fit: an essential part of their functional role is to be sensitive to evidence. The functional role of desire-like states is to make the world fit their content and so desires have the world-to-mind direction of fit. They are dispositional states consisting of being motivated to bring about an outcome and so they can move us to act together with beliefs about the means. It suggests that we have reason to believe that internalism is true because its truth would best explain how we are able to use the so-called transparency method to know what we desire. The rest of this article defends this new argument. §3–§4 first introduce and motivate the argument’s first preliminary premises concerning the type of self-knowledge we have of our desires and the transparency method, which we can use to acquire such knowledge. §5–§7 focus on the central premise according to which internalism can explain why the transparency method yields self-knowledge better than externalism
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