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In answering the foregoing questions, philosophers have been led to sharply differing views
about moral motivation, and these views have sometimes been thought to have important
implications for foundational issues in ethics. More precisely, differing views about moral
motivation involve commitment to particular theses which have been thought to bear on
questions about moral semantics and the nature of morality. Perhaps most famously, certain
theses have been jointly deployed to support skeptical or anti-realist views in metaethics.
This entry provides an overview of the main positions philosophers have taken in their
efforts to understand and explain the phenomenon of moral motivation. It also briefly
explains how key theses concerning moral motivation have come to inform and structure
debates about moral semantics and the nature of morality.
1. The Basic Phenomenon of Moral Motivation
2. Moral Motivation and the Nature of Moral Properties
3. Moral Judgment and Motivation
o 3.1 Humeanism v. Anti-Humeanism
o 3.2 Internalism v. Externalism
4. Moral Motivation and Metaethics
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affairs. Taking the apparent representational form of moral judgments as our lead, we might
try to explain moral motivation by appealing to the nature of the properties that figure in our
moral judgments. Perhaps we are reliably motivated by our moral judgments, at least when
those judgments are roughly correct, because moral properties
like rightness and goodness themselves motivate us, when we apprehend them.
J.L. Mackie (1977) famously criticizes this picture of moral properties in his extended
argument against the objectivity of ethics. Mackie claims to find something like it in the
work of a number of historical figures, including Kant and Sidgwick, but his clearest
presentation of the picture comes in his remarks about Plato. Mackie writes: In Plato's
theory the Forms, and in particular the Form of the Good, are eternal, extra-mental, realities.
They are a very central structural element in the fabric of the world. But it is held also that
just knowing them or seeing them will not merely tell men what to do but will ensure that
they do it, overruling any contrary inclinations. The philosopher-kings in the Republic can,
Plato thinks, be trusted with unchecked power because their education will have given them
knowledge of the Forms. Being acquainted with the Forms of the Good and Justice and
Beauty and the rest they will, by this knowledge alone, without any further motivation, be
impelled to pursue and promote these ideals (Mackie 1977, 2324).
Certain features of Plato's picture of moral motivationor at least Mackie's characterization
of itmerit attention. First, as Mackie construes Plato's view, moral motivation springs
directly and entirely from moral properties themselves. Those properties move an agent to
act, and they do so unaided by any additional source of motivation; their motivational power
is wholly intrinsic, depending on no desire or disposition of the individual herself. Second,
moral properties not only motivate entirely on their own: they provide overriding motivation.
Of course, their motivational power depends on an individual's grasping or apprehending
them. Once an agent does apprehend them, however, their motivating power overcomes any
opposing desires or inclinations.
In maintaining, as he does, that Plato's theory of the Forms depicts what objective values
would have to be like, Mackie, in effect, subscribes to (and attributes to Plato) a view
called existence internalism. According to existence internalism, a necessary connection
exists between having a certain normative status and motivation. [1] A state of affairs
couldn't be good, for example, unless it, or at least apprehension of it, was capable of
motivating, though it need not motivate overridingly. If an individual apprehends something
and fails to be moved, then ceteris paribus, it isn't good. As Mackie describes Plato's view,
objective values provide overriding motivation, and so the view reflects a particularly strong
form of existence internalism. The internalist character of Mackie's Platonic picture curiously
aligns it with contemporary views that similarly accept existence internalism, while holding
that the capacity for motivation in fact depends on a preexisting desire. Consider a view
about reasons associated most prominently with Bernard Williams (1981). According to what
is called internalism about reasons or reasons internalism, it is necessarily the case that if an
or a state of affairs good, while remaining wholly unmoved. Efforts to understand moral
motivation in terms of motivation by moral judgments must confront two central questions.
First, what is the nature of the connection between moral judgment and motivationdo
moral judgments motivate necessarily or do they motivate only contingently? Second, can
moral judgments motivate on their own or can they motivate only by the intermediation of a
desire or other conative state? Of course, philosophers have answered these questions in
varying ways.
then motivate in conjunction with the moral beliefs that produced them. Believing that it is
right to keep a promise produces a desire to do so, and these cognitive and conative states
jointly move the believer, at least to some degree, to act so as to keep the promise. Certain
virtue theorists offer a quite refined version of the latter idea, arguing that only a particular
type of moral beliefone tied to an ideal or complete conception of a situation in light of a
more expansive understanding of how to livenecessarily generates in an individual the
motivation to do as a moral belief of that type indicates she ought. [4] The virtuous person has
not mere moral beliefs but a complex of moral belief and outlook which will reliably move
her to behave morally. Proponents of various anti-Humean views readily acknowledge that
persons often fail to be moved and to act as they believe they ought. According to any of
these views, however, a failure of motivation springs from a cognitive failure.
As already noted, many have found the basic Humean picture most plausible. Before
examining a few of the considerations thought to favor it, we should make note of the fact
that Humeanism does not itself commit one to any particular view as to the sorts of desires
responsible for moral motivation. A Humean might well take the view that no particular
desire is implicated in moral motivation. On the contrary, varying desires may, when
contingently present, move an individual to do what she judges she ought to do, including the
desire to be well regarded by her neighbors, to advance her interests in some way, or to
promote the welfare of those who matter to her. Appealing simply to some contingent desire
or other may be inadequate, however, to explain the basic phenomenon of moral motivation.
After all, what needs to be explained, many would argue, is not merely how we may, on
occasion or even frequently, be motivated to do as we think we ought: what needs to be
explained is how we are reliably motivated to do as we think we ought. That includes
explaining why motivation reliably shifts so as to track changes in our moral beliefs. As we
will see, those who accept the Humean picture have sometimes suggested that we look to
quite particular desires or to deep features of human psychology to explain moral motivation.
One argument in favor of Humean picture alleges that if beliefs were sufficient to motivate,
then we would expect people with the same beliefs to be motivated in the same way. In fact,
however, whereas some people are motivated by their moral belief, say, that contributing to
famine relief is a duty, to write a check to Oxfam, others feel no such inclination whatsoever.
But anti-Humeans claim that they can explain away these differences by showing either that
differential motivation is in fact due to other differences in belief or to motives that compete
with and override the desires generated by moral beliefs (Shafer-Landau 2003, 129130).
A second argument in favor of Humeanism appeals to the view about reasons associated with
Williams (1981), briefly discussed earlier. Recall that according to internalism about reasons
or reasons internalism, it is necessarily the case that if an individual has a reason to do an
action, then he must be able to be motivated to do that action. On a more specific version of
the view, an individual has a reason to do an action only if he has a desire to perform that
action or to achieve some end which requires doing that action. If internalism about reasons
is correct, then when an individual correctly judges himself to have a reason to perform an
action, he must already have a preexisting desire. Anti-Humeans sometimes reject reasons
internalism, as well as the Humean theory of motivation. But even allowing that reasons
internalism is correct, they believe this second argument fails to undermine their position.
For it seems possible that not all of our moral judgments involve the judgment (correct or
otherwise) that we have a reason for action. An individual could, for example, judge that it
would be right to fulfill a promise without judging that she has a reason to do anything. What
might explain this? Perhaps, for instance, she fails to reflect on the connection between what
it is right to do and what one has reason to do; or perhaps she mistakenly believes that truths
about morally right action do not entail truths about what one has reason to do. If an
individual can judge an action right without judging that she has a reason to perform the
action, then even if an action's being right entails a reason for action and reasons entail
desires, moral beliefs need not involve a preexisting desire (Shafer-Landau 2003, 128129). [5]
Perhaps the most sophisticated argument in favor of the Humean theory of motivation
appeals to considerations in the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, specifically, to
fundamental differences between belief and desire that would seem to count against antiHumeanism.[6] Belief and desire, as a conceptual matter, it is argued, differ in what has been
called their direction of fit. They differ in such a way, it would seem, that belief states
cannot entail desire states. Whereas beliefs aim to fit the world, desires aim to change the
world. That is to say, whereas beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit, desires have a
world-to-mind direction of fit. For a mental state to count as a belief, it must be at least
somewhat responsive to evidence that bears on the truth or falsity of its propositional
content; that the facts are contrary to a belief counts against it. In contrast, facts contrary to
the propositional content of a desirethe fact that the world is not currently as one wants
need not count against that desire. Precisely because desires aim not to answer to the world
but to make the world answer to them (to make the world fit their propositional contents or
what the desires are desires for), they may well persist even when the world refuses to
cooperate. Assuming the foregoing claims about belief and desire are true, as they surely are,
so the argument goes, at least some versions of anti-Humeanism would require what is
incoherent, namely, mental states with incompatible directions of fit: mental states that could
be at once representational in the way that beliefs are and motivational in the way that desires
are. But anti-Humeans would argue that their picture of moral motivation via moral belief
need involve no incoherence. To see this, we need merely consider the possibility that a
mental state could have opposing directions of fit so long as in exhibiting each direction of
fit, the mental state was directed at different propositions: the virtuous agent believes
(belief direction of fit), say, that a state of affairs S ought to be promoted and desires
(desire direction of fit) that S be brought about (Little 1997, 64).[7]
Anti-Humeans have offered various considerationssome positive, others negativeto
support their rejection of Humeanism. On the negative side, they attempt to defeat
considerations thought to favor the Humean theory, as we have already seen in the course of
Anti-Humeans have given us no reason to favor their explanation over the Humean
alternatives. Of course, anti-Humeans need not think the phenomenology, as they suppose it
to be, settles the dispute, but Humeans will insist that it does not even tend to favor the antiHumean position.
The foregoing discussion does not, of course, cover every argument that has been offered in
the longstanding debate between Humeans and anti-Humeans, just a few of the ones that
philosophers have evidently found most persuasive. Whether and how the debate might be
resolved remains uncertain, in part, because the nature of the dispute is rather unclear. Is it at
bottom a conceptual dispute to be resolved, for instance, by analysis of the concepts of belief
and desire? Perhaps, though arguments that appeal to considerations in the philosophy of
mind and moral psychology have thus far proved less than fully convincing. Is the dispute
instead fundamentally empirical? The tendency to appeal to common sense and the
phenomenology of moral action would seem to betray some temptation to treat the issue as at
least partly empirical, though perhaps these appeals are meant to serve merely as a check on
conceptual claims. Appeals to our experience can, in any case, be just as well, and just as
inconclusively, invoked by those on either side of the debate. In the context of warding off
criticisms of the view that virtue is knowledge, Little (1997) suggests that the dispute is
fundamentally theoretical, implicating large and complex questions about the nature of
agency, normativity, and responsibility. Whether or not that is so, Little may be right in
suggesting that the dispute will not be resolvable by appeal to merely local arguments of the
sort we have considered. How plausible one finds either side may turn, in the end, on the
plausibility of the larger normative theories in which these views respectively figure.
ultimately, best explained internally as due to the very content or nature of moral judgment
itself (Smith 1994, 72). Those who accept internalism will, of course, ultimately owe us an
account of the content of moral judgments that explains and captures the necessary
connection that supposedly exists between moral judgment and motivation. [9]
The thesis that directly opposes motivational judgment internalism, motivational externalism,
or just externalism, denies the existence of a necessary connection between moral judgment
and motivation. According to externalism, any connection that exists between moral
judgment and motivation is purely contingent, though it may turn out to rest on deep features
of human nature.[10]The foregoing argument in favor of internalism in effect denies that
externalism can adequately explain the basic phenomenon of moral motivation and, in
particular, the reliable shifting of moral motivation to match changes in moral judgment. But
why think externalism will be explanatorily inadequate? Once we have the internalist thesis
about the necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, it seems we have,
as it were, the whole story: if an individual makes a moral judgment, she is, ceteris paribus,
motivated; if she is not motivated, she was not making a sincere and competent moral
judgment at all, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Because the externalist denies
the existence of a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, the
externalist thesis leaves us in need of an independent explanation of moral motivation. The
internalist maintains that any such explanation will fall short.
According to one important version of the internalist challenge, offered by Michael Smith,
the externalist would have to explain the connection between moral judgment and
motivation externallyas due not to the content of moral judgments but, rather, the content of
the motivational dispositions possessed by the good and strong-willed person (Smith 1994,
72). But this allegedly commits the externalist to an unacceptable picture of moral
motivation. The internalist will say that an agent who is moved to do the right thing is moved
to do the very thing that is given by the content of her moral judgment; she is motivated to do
the right thing, where this is read de re and not de dicto (73). The person who judges it
right to perform an act that advances another's welfare, for example, acquires and is moved
by a non-derivative desire or concern to advance his welfare. In contrast, the externalist must
say that an agent is moved to do what she judges right due to the content of the motivational
dispositions that she has in being a good person. The question then is what those dispositions
might be. They cannot be nonderivative concerns for the values her judgment is about, such
as another's welfare, for in the case in which a person's judgment changes, her motivation
changes. If motivational shifting is to be explained in terms of the motivational dispositions
of the good person, rather than in terms of the content of her moral judgments, then the only
disposition that could do the explaining would be the motivation to do the right thing,
whatever it happens to be; the good person is motivated to do the right thing, where this is
read de dicto and not de re (75). According to Smith, such a view implausibly treats moral
motivation as derivative; it derives from the desire to do the right thing together with a
person's current moral judgment about the right thing to do. A person desires to promote
another's good, not non-derivatively because she judges it right to promote his good and so
desires to do just that, but because she desires to do what is right, and that just happens to be
promoting his good. But the good person, Smith claims, cares non-derivatively about justice,
equality, and the welfare of loved ones. To care non-derivatively only about doing what one
believes right, to be motivated in that way, and not by these other things, is a fetish or moral
vice (75). Smith suggests that in taking the good person to be motivated to do what she
believes morally right, whatever that might be, the externalist picture alienates her from the
ends at which morality properly aims (76).
Externalists have responded to this challenge by pointing out that the fact that a good person
is motivated to do what she thinks right does not preclude her from also being motivated
non-derivately by direct concern, for example, for the welfare of loved ones. They have also
argued that there is nothing fetishistic in supposing that the good person is motivationally
disposed to do the right thing and that, in any case, alternative externalist explanations of a
reliable connection between moral judgment and motivation are available (Copp 1997, 49
50). An individual could, for example, simply be disposed to desire immediately to do
whatever she believes it right to do or whatever she judges to be valuable (Copp 1997, 50
51). Sigrun Svavarsdottir (1999) has argued that while Smith is mistaken when he claims that
the externalist's only option for explaining motivational shifting is to appeal to a desire to do
the right thing, something close to the view Smith rejects provides just the right externalist
picture of moral motivation. We should, on her view, understand the good person as
concerned with doing what is morally valuable or required, where that concern should be
understood to encompass what is honest, fair, kind, considerate, just, and so on. The fact that
the good person is so motivationally disposed does not mean, as Smith seems to suggest, that
she cares only about one thing, namely, doing what she believes is right. Nor does it mean
that she undertakes an act conceiving of it simply as the right thing to do. On the contrary, it
is compatible with the externalist picture that the good person will often simply respond
directly to another's need for comfort or relief. Finally, an externalist view that conceives of
the good person as motivated by the desire to be moral does not involve introducing an alien
(or alienating) thoughtit's the right thing to do into her consciousness in order to
explain moral motivation. Rather, having formed the moral judgment that she ought to , the
desire to be moral plays, in the good person, a role in effecting the psychological transition
from judging it right to to wanting to (Svavarsdottir 1999, 201).
Indeed, the point on which perhaps most externalists want to insist is that some conative state
must be at work in the movement from judging it right to to wanting or being moved to .
We do not, after all, the externalist will remind us, see this movement occur in all moral
agents; some will judge it right to without coming to want to . Externalists typically take
it as a point of common sense observation that wide variation exists in the impact moral
judgments have on people's feelings, deliberations, and actions (Svavarsdottir 1999, 161).
Debates between internalists and externalists often center on the figure of the amoralist
the person who apparently makes moral judgments, while remaining wholly unmoved to
comply with them. Internalists insist that the amoralist is a conceptual impossibility. The
standard strategy internalists employ to cope with the hypothetical amoralist is to identify a
content for moral judgments which would have the result that no agent (or no rational agent,
anyway) could employ moral concepts competently and make a sincere moral judgment,
while remaining unmoved. Internalists allow that moral motivation need not be overriding;
competing desires may be stronger and so may win out. They allow, too, that moral
motivation is defeasible; a person may judge it right to , while failing to be moved to , due
to depression or weakness of will. Cases of irrationality aside, however, the person
who appears to be making a moral judgment, while remaining unmoved, must really either
lack competence with moral concepts or be speaking insincerely. In the latter case, she
judges an act right only in an inverted commas sense, as when the unrepentant criminal,
seeking a lesser sentence, tells the judge, in a remorseful tone, that he knows what he did was
wrong.
Externalists maintain that the amoralist is not a conceptual impossibility. After all, if we can
imagine such personsand we surely can imagine amoraliststhen they are not
conceptually impossible (Shafer-Landau 2003, 146). Contrary to what internalists claim,
individuals can sincerely and competently apply moral concepts without being motivated in
any specific way. While some amoralists may use moral terms only in an inverted commas
sense, not all cases of motivational failure can be explained away as cases of irrationality,
conceptual incompetence, or insincerity.
At this point in the dialectic, internalists and externalists tend to produce additional cases and
probe our intuitions further in an effort to overcome what seems an impasse. Externalists, for
example, may invite us to consider cases in which a person judges it right to , while
believing it would in fact be impossible to succeed in doing , or cases in which she thinks
doing would markedly interfere with her welfare or would prevent her from obtaining
something she dearly desires. Doesn't it seem plausible that in such cases a person could
judge it right to , while failing to be moved to ? More generally, externalists argue that
internalists cannot make sense of morality's historical challengerthe skeptic who asks,
Why be moral?
Externalists maintain that they can fully and adequately account for the strong but ultimately
contingent connection between moral judgment and motivation, offering various
explanations of how moral judgments reliably motivate. As we have seen, Svavarsdottir
seeks to explain moral motivation by appealing to a particular conative state, namely, the
desire to do what is morally valuable or requiredthe desire, in short to be moral. Peter
Railton appeals to the concern people generally have to be able to justify their choices and
conduct from a more impartial standpoint. But he also apparently thinks that people's more
ordinary motives play a part; at least this is suggested when he remarks that, if we really
want people to take morality seriously, we should ask how we might change the ways we
live so that moral conduct would more regularly be rational given the ends we actually have
(Railton 1986a, 203). According to David Brink, externalism makes the motivational force of
our moral judgments a matter of contingent psychological fact, depending on both the
content of people's moral views and their attitudes and desires (Brink 1989, 49). Still, these
attitudes and desires may be widely shared and rooted in central features of human nature.
Suppose, as the philosopher David Hume maintained, that sympathy is a deep and widely
shared feature of human psychology. Then, Brink observes, while it may be a contingent fact
that most people will have some desire to comply with what they believe morality requires, it
will also be a deep fact about them. Moral motivation, on such a view, can be widespread
and predictable, even if it is neither necessary, nor universal, nor overriding (Brink 1989,
49).
Philosophers who endorse externalism commonly also endorse Humeanism. Indeed, some
contend that the basic observation that supports the former thesis also lends support to the
latter thesis: wide variation in the motivational impact of moral judgments suggests not only
that they motivate contingently but that they do so via some conative state. Still, externalists
need not be Humeans. Shafer-Landau, who rejects both Humeanism and internalism, holds
that moral beliefs are indeed intrinsically motivatingthey can motivate by themselves. But
contra internalism, they are not necessarily motivating. Intrinsically motivating beliefs may
fail to motivate under conditions of extreme exhaustion, serious depression, or overwhelming
contrary impulses (Shafer-Landau 2003, 147148). The fact that Shafer-Landau treats the
defeasibility of moral motivation under such conditions as supporting a form of externalism,
whereas Smith treats defeasibility under like conditions as compatible with a form of
internalism, suggests some disagreement among philosophers as to precisely when a view
should be classified as a form of internalism or externalism. [11]
The development of metaethical theories over roughly the past seventy years has perhaps
been shaped most profoundly by the use of certain theses about moral motivation to
supportnoncognitivist anti-realism. Noncognitivist anti-realism, like cognitivist anti-realism,
rejects the existence of moral properties and moral facts. But unlike the latter view, it rejects
cognitivism in favor of noncognitivism, which as traditionally depicted is the view that moral
judgments express attitudes rather than beliefs and propositions, and that, consequently, they
are not truth evaluable.[12]
Shafer-Landau (2003) offers a formulation of what he calls the Non-cognitivist Argument,
which helpfully makes explicit how theses that have figured in efforts to understand moral
motivation have been employed to support noncognitivist anti-realism:
1. Necessarily, if one sincerely judges an action right, then one is motivated to some
extent to act in accordance with that judgment. (Motivational Judgment Internalism)
2. When taken by themselves, beliefs neither motivate nor generate any motivationally
efficacious states. (Motivational Humeanism)
3. Therefore, moral judgments are not beliefs. (Moral Non-cognitivism)[13]
Because every form of cognitivism and moral realism hold that moral judgments are beliefs,
that some moral judgments are true, and that therefore there are moral facts, the
noncognitivist argument entails that moral realism is false.
Contemporary philosophers who have sought to defend versions of moral realism or
objectivism have had to come to grips with this basic line of argument, even if they have not
always engaged it explicitly. The Non-cognitivist Argument therefore provides us with a
useful tool for mapping out competing positions in metaethics. We can categorize
philosophers' positions negatively in terms of which premises of the noncognitivist argument
they accept or reject.[14] Some have rejected premise 1, often going on to defend forms
of naturalist moral realism that embrace externalism (e.g. Railton 1986; Brink 1989).
According to the latter views, moral properties are a kind of natural property and moral facts
are natural facts. Judgments about these facts express propositions, and so they can be true or
false, but these judgment do not necessarily motivate. Whether our moral judgments
motivate us is fixed by contingent facts about our psychologies and our substantive moral
beliefs. Some have rejected premise 2, aligning themselves with versions of moral
constructivism or rationalism (e.g. Darwall 1983; Scanlon 1998). The latter views take
widely varying forms, but they generally see moral principles as requirements of rationality
or reason, or as the output of a hypothetical agreement among reasonable, suitably situated
persons. Moral reasons are considerations that are motivating, at least when we properly
reflect on them, but their motivating force does not depend on a prior desire. Some have
rejected both premises 1 and 2, defending forms of nonnaturalist moral realism (ShaferLandau 2003). Moral properties, on this view, are not identical with natural or descriptive
properties, although they may be wholly constituted by them. Moral judgments are
intrinsically motivatingthey can motivate in the absence of a preexisting desire, but they
are not necessarily motivating. Finally, some have accepted both premises 1 and 2, at least
appropriately refined, arguing that we can see them both to be compatible with moral realism
(Smith 1994). Normative reasons are given by facts about what we would, suitably idealized,
want ourselves to desire; and the existence of such facts means that some desires are
rationally required. If we believe ourselves to have a normative reason to , then rationally
we ought to , and in judging that we have normative reason to , we will necessarily,
insofar as we are rational, be moved to . The concept of rightness is the concept of what we
would desire ourselves to do in our actual world, were we fully rational. When we believe it
would be right to , then, we will, insofar as we are rational, be motivated to .
The debate about moral motivation has been presented in this entry following a fairly
common way of framing it. But Thomas Scanlon (1998, ch. 4) suggests that the debate about
moral motivation has, in fact, been misleadingly framed. It would, he claims, be better
understood as concerned not with motivation but with understanding the reasons people
have. According to Scanlon'scontractualism, an action is wrong if its performance under the
circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the regulation of behavior
that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement
(153). Moral motivation, on his view, requires no appeal to a conative state. Rather, we can
explain how persons are moved, say, to avoid wrongful actions by the fact that people have
reason to want to act in ways that could be justified to others, together with the fact that
when a rational person recognizes something as a reason we do not need a further
explanation of how he or she could be moved to act on it (154). Scanlon's position turns on
a number of controversial ideas, among them, rejection of the Humean theory and, perhaps
most important, his contractualism together with his view about the normative primacy of
reasons.
Full consideration of Scanlon's rich system of thought would obviously take us far afield. It
is worth simply registering here, however, his suggestion that the debate about moral
motivation has been framed improperly. For his suggestion serves to illustrate that how we
ought to understand the debate about moral motivation is itself a matter open to dispute.
Theses about moral motivation have shaped arguments about foundational issues in ethics.
But as Scanlon's own ideas suggest, views about foundational issues in ethics may in turn
shape both how we understand the question of moral motivation and how we answer it.
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cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | moral anti-realism | moral non-naturalism | moral
realism |naturalism: moral | practical reason: and the structure of actions | Williams, Bernard
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Sarah Buss for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.