Normativity and Motivation

Abstract

Norman Daniels has advanced a number of criticisms of the metaethical views of Richard Brandt.' Two of these arc of particular importance. The first is that Brandt's central normative concepts of rational desire and action are themselves not sufficiently normative or justificatory. That, in Brandt's sense, an agent has a rational desire or performs an action which is fully rational does not show that either was ultimately justified or justifiable. The second is that these same concepts do not, as defined, satisfy a fundamental methodological constraint supposedly accepted by Brandt, the disalienation constraint. The latter lays it down that knowing or believing that one is under a valid normative requirement will, indeed must, motivate compliance. To establish this charge would show not only that Brandt's overall theory is inconsistent, but also call into question the broad internalism it exemplifies. I shall argue that Daniels' criticisms misfire against a suitably augmented theory of normative requirements of the same general type as Brandt's. This new account will be shown to have a number of interesting features. On its conception of overriding normative requirements, practical rationality demands compliance in an extraordinarily austere sense: knowingly flouting them commits one to a straightforward incoherence in one's beliefs and desires.2