Abstract
Our third chapter begins with difficulties for the view that human beings are agent causes of actions. These are posed by the possibility of a deterministic universe and by allied difficulties for the view that an act of will can genuinely contribute to the production of a bodily movement. In section II difficulties for Reid’s notion of genuinely free action couched in terms of restrictions on determinations of the will are considered. In section III a Humean alternative to agent causation as a model for human action is presented and Reid’s main reasons for rejecting it given. Sections IV, V and VI introduce Reid’s classification of motives and present his interesting discussion of whether or not widely differing motives conform to a maxim of the alternative position that the strongest motive prevails. The concluding section VII links Reid’s acceptance of a variety of kinds of explanation under the head of explanation by motives to the acceptability of folk psychology as an enterprise.
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Notes
William L. Rowe, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality, Cornell University Press 1991, p147f.
Here, surely, is a clear instance in which Reid explicitly appeals to the doctrine of Providential Naturalism. But to say this is not to admit that as many cases of such an appeal exist as is contended by David Norton in ‘Hume’s Scottish Critics’, McGill Hume Studies, Austin Hill 1979.
See her Virtues and Vices, Blackwell 1978, Essay IV, ‘Freewill as Involving Determinism’. She cites with some approval R.E. Hobart, ‘Freewill as Involving Determination and Inconceivable without it’, Mind, New Series 43, 1934, pp1–27.
See Hume’s Treatise II,III, sections I–IV.
See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, Second Edition, Chapter 5, p116 on Goodall on the chimpanzee called Figan.
See Smith and Jones, The Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, Part II, XII, 2 p166.
See Dancy, Moral Reasons, 1 Internalism and Cognitivism, p2: So Humeanism is the view that there are two sorts of motivating states, the essentially motivating and the contingently motivating. The former are called internally motivating states and the latter externally motivating states. This is because the latter, the beliefs, get their ability to motivate from elsewhere — from the desires — while the desires motivate in their own right. Immediately after having said this Dancy rightly remarks: Crucially, we need a state of each sort to get an action going. This makes it hard to see how the view that a desire (presumably including what I have called a desire proper or an affection) is essentially motivating is sustainable, either as a part of any view that Hume, or indeed Reid, held, or in any other way.
Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, in The Fable of the Bees, ed. Harth, Penguin 1970 begins, p81:
All untaught Animals are only Sollicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others. Is it Mandeville’s view that these inclinations are not inclinations to benefit others? That is none too clear as the following sentence from p8If shows: But whether Mankind would have ever believ’d it or not, it is not likely that any body could have persuaded them to disapprove of their natural inclinations, or prefer the good of others to their own, if at the same time he had not shew’d them an Equivalent to be enjoy’d as a Reward for the Violence, which by so doing they of necessity must commit upon themselves. It seems then that Mandeville is committed to the view that to prefer the good of others to one’s own is to have had violence done to oneself; but this is not, as such, to rule out the possibility that one’s own good could consist, in part at least, in others being pleased by what one does.
See Treatise II,III,III. Hume says SBp414: ‘Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction. This is in line with Mandeville’s position. But Hume also says in the same section SBp418: When I receive any injury from another, I often feel a violent passion of resentment, which makes me desire his evil and punishment, independent of all considerations of pleasure and advantage to myself.
Thus consider Kant. In the Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Abbott, Part I, Book I, chapter I, section 3, Theorem II, p108, Kant maintains the following thesis: All material practical principles are, as such, of one and the same kind and come under the general principle of self-love or private happiness. And on p111f we find: The principle of private happiness, however much understanding and reason may be used in it, cannot contain any other determining principles for the will than those which belong to the lower desires; and either there are no [higher] desires at all, or pure reason must of itself alone be practical: that is it must be able to determine the will by the mere form of the practical rule without supposing any feeling, and consequently without any idea of the pleasant or unpleasant, which is the matter of the desire, and which is always an empirical condition of the principles. Then only, when reason of itself determines the will (not as the servant of inclination), it is really a higher desire to which that which is pathologically determined is subordinate, and is really, and even specifically, distinct from the latter, so that even the slightest admixture of the motives of the latter impairs its strength and superiority; just as in a mathematical demonstration the least empirical condition would degrade and destroy its force and value.
See Cicero: On Duties, ed. Griffin and Atkins, Cambridge 1991, p104f.
See Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, M.I.T. Press 1984.
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Gallie, R.D. (1998). Action, Motivation and Moral Psychology. In: Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 78. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9020-4_3
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