Charlotte asked:

What is the definition of a subjective motivational set? What role does this play in how we act? and
can you please give me some help on Hume's view of whether we only do what we want to do, and
names of any philosophers who may disagree with him.

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In Notes From Underground Dostoevsky writes:

a man...likes to act as he chooses and not at all according to the dictates of reason...it is
possible and sometimes positively imperative to act contrary to one's own best interests"

Hume's subjectivist account of ethics starts by looking at how we are motivated to act; we can reason
that to do a is better than b, he says, but then act in a completely different way. The idea is that
reason has no claim on telling us what to do unless we actually wantit to, and there is no requirement
of practical reason to act on the conclusion one arrives at. In other words, we need the presence of
desires when we are motivated to act. A possible anti-Humean argument from theoretical reason
might be this:

*It is true that P
*If P then Q
*Therefore Q

It seems wrong to invoke desires here; we do not conclude Q because we want to believe the logical
consequence of our beliefs. It feels as though we are rationally constrained to conclude Q given the
rule plus the truth of P. If this works theoretically, why not on the practical side? Hume is skeptical for
the reason that ethical propositions are not like mathematical ones. The action guiding nature of
morality is explained by the presence of attitude or feeling, itself constitutive of moral judgement. This
is bedrock when we are subjectively motivated to act. The relevant passages are Hume's Treatise
Book 2, part III, para 1 - 3 and Book 3, Part I, Part II, para 1 &2.

There are really two theses at work there: an argument that concludes that moral grounds are not
sufficient to explain moral action, and that a desire is needed (where he finishes by saying that
'reason is the slave of the passions') The second thesis is that the basic source of action lies in the
presence of an unmotivated desire or conative attitude; the answer to "why did you do that" boils
down to "I wanted to...or...I felt like it". This argument concludes that it is not contrary to reason to
prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of your finger.

Phillipa Foot has put forward an argument against Thesis 1 (in 'Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a
Mistake' Oxford Journal of Legal StudiesVol.15): she claims that for the just person, certain
considerations count as reasons for action; if one understands moral grounds/ reasons, nothing
further is required to explain moral action. Foot thinks this can account for the action guiding nature of
morality without invoking desires in Hume's fashion. Her move against Thesis 2 is to claim that
recognising a reason gives us rational goals and this recognition is not based on some prior feeling or
desire. You simply recognise the truth of the claim (e.g. it is a good idea to co-operate) and this is
sufficient to explain why you do in fact co-operate.

A second move against Hume's theory of subjective desire-based motivation comes from Warren
Quinn in 'Putting Rationality in Its Place". He thinks that if we regard our motives only as desires we
happen to have, these do not give reasons for action. Reasons of the kind we wantare not the same
as rational ones to make senseof our actions. We can always ask whether acting on these desires is
actually good; and we need an affirmative answer it the desires are to provide us with a reason for
action. Desires, in other words, do not show us what we should do. This move tries to block the
Humean starting point.

This is a little more moderate than the Kantian response, but is along the same lines (see my
response to Sergey for an interpretation of Kant — I wanted to concentrate on contemporary
responses here). Contemporary moral philosophers do not think, in general, that we can abstract
completely from the partial point of view. For moral agency we need compassion and sympathy and
so on; equally we fail to capture something important about morality if we simply accept the desires
we happen to have as the real starting point.

My view is that it is a questionable proposition that the understanding (having reasons) is completely
sufficient to account for all moral action; there is a real Dostoyevskean sense that one can
understand the right thing to do and then act against it out of spite. Foot's essential move against the
'akratic' — the individual who succumbs to 'weakness of will' — is to say that such a person just
doesn't understand the reasons properly if he then acts against them. This knotty problem is
something you might like to consider further; I often wonder whether introspection is satisfactory in
coming up with an answer to that question, however.

Adam Gatward