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    Motivating reasons are mental states of agents, or facts ... — Carmelics
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    Home/Moral Responsibility
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    Motivating reasons are mental states of agents, or facts about those states.

    Moral Responsibility
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.For a reason to motivate an agent, it must be a reason the agent has.
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    • 2.For an agent to have a reason, the agent must know or believe the consideration that constitutes the reason.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Agents can be motivated by facts themselves, not merely their representations of facts, as when one is moved by the actual danger of a situation.
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    • 2.If motivating reasons were purely mental states, the normative connection between reasons and the world would be severed, making rational criticism of motivated action unintelligible.
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    • 3.Parfit and Dancy argue that what explains action can be the fact that p, not the belief that p, since the belief is merely the epistemic route to the motivating fact.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.The Humean conflation of motivating states with propositional content illicitly treats the vehicle of motivation as identical to its object.
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    • 2.Belief-desire psychology, as Nagel argued in 'The Possibility of Altruism,' cannot account for cases where agents are motivated by recognized objective requirements without antecedent desires.
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    Topics

    Moral ResponsibilityPhilosophy of Language

    Related

    Agents can be motivated by facts themselves, not merely their representations of...Belief-desire psychology, as Nagel argued in 'The Possibility of Altruism,' cann...For a reason to motivate an agent, it must be a reason the agent has.For an agent to have a reason, the agent must know or believe the consideration ...
    +3 moreShow less
    If motivating reasons were purely mental states, the normative connection betwee...Parfit and Dancy argue that what explains action can be the fact that p, not the...The Humean conflation of motivating states with propositional content illicitly ...

    Similar

    Motivating reasons are the contents of mental states, not mental state...90%Motivating reasons are mental states.90%Explanatory reasons are mental states.90%Explanatory reasons are mental states (specifically states of belief a...88%

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    SEP: reasons-just-vs-expl
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    Since motivating reasons are considerations that an agent takes to favour acting, and since the reasons that favour acting are facts, it might seem that motivating reasons are also facts or at least putative facts, rather than mental states. However, the view that they are mental states was, as noted earlier, the dominant view till the turn of the 20th century, and it is still very popular today. A seemingly compelling argument for adopting psychologism for motivating reasons is the following. F
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit