McDowell - Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives

In this paper, McDowell argues against the thesis put forth by Foot in her paper claiming that morality is just a system of hypothetical imperatives. Her essential claim is that for any moral requirement to be acted upon, one must have a reason for so acting. The only thing, she believes, that can account for this would be a desire to to act in accordance with morality or something similar. As a result of this, moral requirements turn out to be no more than hypothetical imperatives because they will only move one to act if one first desires to conform to them. This means that reasons for acting are necessarily internal and are not something that can be found outside of a person.

McDowell, however, disagrees. Though he does think that one can certainly consider his reasons for acting as morality requires, this does not show that a desire must play a part. The way he understands it some facts about the world may motivate a person's action and from this it follows that he had some desire related to those facts, however the desire is entailed by his being motivated and is not a cause of the motivation itself. (He gets this idea from Nagel in "The Possibility of Altruism".) McDowell sees desire as a consequence of the person's action. If X motivates A to do Y, then A desires X but it is not the desire that explains anything here. The idea is that A desires X as logical consequence of X motivating A to act in a particular way.

Yet one may wonder what, if not a desire, is doing the motivating here? (This is exactly what I am wondering.) McDowell claims that it is one's conception of the world (i.e. the facts, one's possible actions, the possible consequences of these actions, etc.) that casts a favorable light on a particular course of action (i.e. motivates him). Therefore, on this view it can not be the case that two people have the same conception of the world and yet one is moved to act in one way while the other is moved to act in another. The idea is that how things are constitutes a reason for action.

McDowell wants us to resist, at this point, the thought that the will (appetitive aspects of our mind) and reason (cognitive aspects of our mind) are two distinct entities in our minds and so too the thought that any cognitive state that entails an appetitive state is somehow not purely cognitive. He wants to deny that one can parse out all the appetitive aspects of a mental state and then be left with an entirely neutral cognitive state. In other words, he wants to deny that two people can see the world in the same way yet be motivated to do different things because of a difference in their wills (or appetitive nature or desires). He is, therefore, against the thought that the world itself is motivationally inert. This thought, though popular, is by no means a given according to McDowell and is instead an implication of a metaphysical view that the will and reason of a man are in some way separate and distinct entities. Though his thinking here is contrary to that of the natural sciences, McDowell think that this is OK because morality is not like the natural sciences and what is needed here is a metaphysical notion of the world (whatever this is...) not a scientific one. Any attempt to criticize his ideas here, says McDowell, would be not be a criticism from science but rather one from scientism. As a result, on McDowell's view one can be motivated to act without a desire being a part of the motivation.

I am inclined to suppose that somewhere along the line I missed something big here, because as it stands this view seems very implausible. It is not as though one distinguishes the will and reason arbitrarily but because they seem very different. It is one thing to describe a situation and another to evaluate it. Contrast: "There is a book on the shelf" with "I want a book to be on the shelf". What makes the former sentence true is the world whereas what makes the latter sentence true is me. Reasoning along these lines is what brings one to believe that the will and reason are distinct. Moreover, I am reminded of Taylor's discussion of conative beings and his highly intuitive claim that beings with no desires would never act. If McDowell is to be correct than Taylor's claim must be false which seems utterly crazy to me.

What I think is going on here is that McDowell is simply conflating the will and reason and thereby imagining them to be one entity. As a result, he is able to project his values (desires, etc.) onto the world and then claim to find them there. What makes me think this is that he emphasizes, not the way the world really is, but one's conception of the world as being the thing that motivates. Yet, if one's conception of the world is simply the way the world is, then clearly it must be motivationally inert because the world by itself can not give a reason (if it could why does McDowell say "conception of the world"?). Thus, all I can understand one's conception of the world to be is simply one's view of the way things are plus his values, desires, etc.

I do not want to disparaging of these ideas because it would be sort of neat if they were true, but I just can not see it. Though, I may have missed something important because I know this was a very influential essay...