Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology

Abstract

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Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the Specification Problem

“…Here it seems much less clear that they think that the actions they label are wrong. 8 5 See, e.g, Stocker 1979, Brink 1989(Ch. 3), Svavarsdóttir 1999(pp.…”

“…Since many aspects of this function are obvious enough, and since everyday encounters with paradigmatic wrongnessjudgements constitute nearly all of our experience with what is naturally 40 For discussion of these and related examples, see Stocker 1979, Brink 1989(Ch. 3), Dreier 1990, Smith 1994, Svavarsdóttir 1999, Gert 2002, and Zangwill 2008 understood as wrongness-judgements, we should expect our ordinary understanding of wrongness-judgements to reflect this fact.…”

Weakness of will, akrasia, and the neuropsychiatry of decision making: An interdisciplinary perspective

“…In the philosophical literature, certain kinds of akrasia are described as cases of accidie-that is, sloth, or just not caring (Dancy, 1993;A. O. Rorty, 1988;Stocker, 1979;Tenenbaum, 2003). The idea is that sometimes people just do not care about translating their general values into concrete options for action.…”

“…Hypogeneration of options is, in the philosophical discussion, usually understood to be a lack of motivation. People who suffer from akrasia as accidie are thought to lack motivational drive or energy (Mele, 1987;Stocker, 1979;Tenenbaum, 2003). However, this is not the only explanation available.…”

The Guise of the Bad in Augustine’s Pear Theft

“…Recent philosophers who explored the possibility of action beyond the guise of the good or of desiring the bad have sometimes invoked the idea that motivation and evaluation are different stories (and indeed more different than we often think), and that if our motivations usually accord with our evaluative judgments (so that our motivating reasons provide some subjective justification under the guise of the good), this is due to effective (self-)education rather than a conceptual a-priori (Stocker 1979;Velleman 1992). Applying this to the case at hand, one might perhaps take a somewhat Pauline line.…”