User:DrRetard/Paper2

Many of us find moral judgments somewhat problematic. We have no problem making them, but we wonder about their status. Take another kind of case. Beliefs about the shape of the earth seem unproblematic. My belief that the earth is round comes out true, thanks to the fact that the earth really is round. This feature of the world is what makes my belief true. Or take another case. I don't know how many people in my apartment complex are currently asleep. But I know what it would take for a given answer to be correct. I don't know if the correct answer is 'twenty' or 'three', but the question is unproblematic. There is a correct answer, and we know how the world would have to be for a given answer to be correct.

But moral judgments aren't so easy. It's easy to say that torture is wrong. But it's difficult to say what it is about the world that makes torture wrong. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine what could possibly be true that would make torture wrong. Presumably there aren't any special moral objects -- wrongness, etc. -- populating the world. And even if there were, it's hard to see why the existence of special moral objects should matter in the way that morality does. So moral judgments end up seeming importantly different from other unproblematic judgments. And so we end up puzzled about how moral judgments could be true or false.

We can then take sides. Some hold that moral judgments can be true or false, i.e. that they are truth-apt. Others hold that moral judgments cannot be true or false, i.e. that they are not truth-apt. The dispute is itself difficult to adjudicate, for it's unclear what it would take for moral judgments to be truth-apt. This, I take it, is where moral psychology enters the dispute. First, we take moral judgments to be psychological states (rather than linguistic utterances expressing psychological states). Next, we propose criteria for determining which psychological states are truth-apt. Finally, we can apply these truth-aptness criteria to moral judgments, and discover whether they are truth-apt.

The most common truth-aptness criterion is a motivational criterion. Psychological states with intrinsic motivational valence -- e.g., desires, affections, impulses, passions -- are not truth-apt. Psychological states without intrinsic motivational valence -- e.g., beliefs -- are truth-apt. By 'intrinsic motivational valence', I mean the ability of a psychological state to motivate an agent without the help of other psychological states. As I'll now spell out, this truth-aptness criterion is a product of the common 'Humean' theory of motivation -- I'll call it "motivational Humeanism".

According to motivational Humeanism, a belief cannot motivate an agent without the help of a connected desire-like state. For example, my belief that this is soda will not motivate me to drink it unless I have a desire to drink it. Indeed, my belief that this is soda will not have any motivational effect on me unless I care one way or the other about whether this is soda. Beliefs, then, have motivational influence only by directing the motivational force of desire-like states. Such examples, which have the air of common sense about them, lead many to split psychological states into two camps -- the belief-like states, which are motivationally neutral, and the desire-like states, which are motivationally charged. This is motivational Humeanism.

On the face of it, desires are not truth-apt. My desire for soda is neither true nor false -- it just is, we might say. And the same goes for other desire-like states. Affections, impulses, passions, and the rest do not seem to be truth-apt. In contrast, beliefs are our paradigm case of a truth-apt psychological state. So the general lesson seems to be that motivationally charged desire-like states are not truth-apt, whereas motivationally neutral belief-like states are truth-apt. The motivational split, it turns out, is identical with the truth-aptness split.

There is a common metaphor for capturing this coincidence of splits -- "direction of fit". The background idea is that psychological states and the world can stand in a relation of fitting each other. For example, my belief that the earth is round fits the earth's roundness, whereas his belief that the earth is flat doesn't fit the earth's roundness. The next step is that this fitting can go in two different directions. Some psychological states take the world as given and try to fit the world. Beliefs are like this. They are supposed to fit the world, and in case of a mismatch, the belief needs to change. Other psychological states take themselves as given and try to make sure the world fits them. Desires are like this. The world is supposed to fit them, and in case of a mismatch, the world needs to change.

This metaphor is useful for understanding the motivational split, the truth-aptness split, and why they coincide. Beliefs are supposed to represent the world, not change the world. They are truth-apt in that they depict the world as being a certain way, and they are motivationally neutral in that they take the world as given. Desires are supposed to change the world, not represent the world. They are not truth-apt in that they do not depict the world as being any particular way, and they are motivationally charged in that they have a plan for the world. Metaphors aside, the idea is that the two functions of representing things and changing things are incompatible with each other, and hence a psychological state can perform only one of these two functions. States that represent things are truth-apt, and states that change things are motivationally charged, but no state is both.

Now we can see why motivational valence makes for an appealing truth-aptness criterion. If we find out that a given psychological state is motivationally charged, then we know that its function is to change things, not to represent things. And so we can conclude that it's not truth-apt. The question of whether moral judgments are truth-apt becomes a question of whether moral judgments have intrinsic motivational valence.