WiP - Joe Gurrola / Newly acquired values and morally worthy qctions
WiP - Joe Gurrola / Newly acquired values and morally worthy qctions
Wednesday May 5, Joe Gurrola presents his work on "Newly acquired values and morally worthy actions" at our Work-in-Progress meeting.
Many theories of morally worthy action appear promising when motivation is a black box. But such theories appear less plausible once we have a clear scientific picture of motivation. In this paper, I review a promising theory of motivation in the cognitive sciences known as valuationism, and argue its conclusions suggest the right-reasons account of moral worth is implausible. My argument works by way of a counterexample. I present a case of morally worthy action and argue that the conclusions of valuationism imply that the agent’s action in the case could not have been motivated by the non-instrumental reasons that explain why it is right. This leads right-reasons theorists to a dilemma: either they bite the bullet and argue the action in question is not morally worthy, a choice requiring a drastic revision of our intuitions about what morally worthy action looks like, or they abandon the idea that for an action to have moral worth it must be motivated by the non-instrumental reasons that explain its rightness. I argue that the latter choice is preferable, since it allows us to retain a plausible picture of morally worthy action.