Ethics, Deliberation, and Motivation - Part 2

Sorry about the break here—I hope I haven’t lost my 2-3 readers. Anyway…

To recap, we are talking about any situation in which a person has asked, about some situation, “what should I do?” And in particular, we are considering the example in which someone is deliberating about whether or not to eat meat.

I want to claim that an important part of what we do, in these everyday situations, is that we attempt to find what I want to call “rational motivation” or “justified motivation.” We can have all sorts of different motivations in life. We can be motivated by greed, desire, a feeling of obligation, etc. However, when we begin to think about ourselves and our activity, we engage in re-evaluating these motivations. This is not to say that we can always simply rationalize away our desire or feeling of obligation, but this does seem to be what we are attempting to do in many cases. When the person who likes the taste of cheeseburgers considers whether or not to eat meat, they are examining possible reasons why eating meat should and should not be done, and presumably, afterwards, taking those reasons into account as a motivating factor—they are finding rational motivation either to eat or not to eat cheeseburgers.

On to the BIG QUESTION: How can any ethical view other than a moral realist position provide good reasons or justification for acting in ANY PARTICULAR WAY?

Before going into a debate of that question, however, I want to reconsider the situation with eating meat for a moment. Now, lets assume that after considering different possible reasons to eat or not to eat meat, a person comes to the conclusion that to the best of their ability to figure, apart from their desire to eat the cheeseburger, the reasons for and against seem to be a wash. That is, there are just as good reasons to eat the cheeseburger as not to eat it, besides the person’s desire to eat it. What the person is left with, then, is no motivation other than their simple desire to eat the burger. However, isn’t it POSSIBLE to question whether or not to act in accordance with our desires, even when they apparently do no harm? I will grant that this idea seems to be something of a stretch when considering it initially. However, to say that “all other things being equal, one should act in accordance with their desire” does require some sort of justification, doesn’t it? And what would that justification be, if not justification in moral realist terms?

I admit that in the meat eating example we are considering questions similar to those asked on a daily basis by most of us, and that the questioning of desires in this way is not nearly the everyday practice that the other ethical questions are. However, it seems to me that once such questions are pondered, we can only answer them to the best of our abilities or ignore them.

Finally, I want to think through the implications of what it would mean IF we agree that only a moral realist view could provide good reasons or justification for acting in any particular way. IF that is the case, then it seems to me that the ethics we are left with (subjectivism, relativism, or whatever) are missing a key component that has been thought to exist for thousands upon thousands of years by many people—namely, this rational motivation for action.

I’m going to stop here, again with the idea of continuing with my general argument piece by piece and hoping to discuss each part as we go along. Any thoughts on this section of the argument?