The Humean Theory of Motivation Rejected 1

G. F. Schueler

University of New Mexico

Hume famously wrote that “[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the

passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”2

Though defenders of the contemporary account of rational motivation that follows

Hume’s view would not put this quite so strongly, they still hold that desires, or what

Hume called ‘passions’, broadly understood, are necessary features of motivation. In this

paper I will argue that this view is mistaken.

Hume proposed an account of rational motivation, but it is important to recall at

the outset that the term “rational” has both normative and descriptive senses. The

normative sense of ‘rational’ implies that there is some (unspecified) standard and of

course that entails the possibility that not everyone lives up to that standard, whatever it

is, at least not all the time. In this normative sense ‘rational’ contrasts with ‘irrational’

(or maybe ‘less rational’). But there is also a descriptive sense of ‘rational’ in which it

seems to be an important fact about humans that, even when they don’t live up to the

standards of rationality, they are still rational in a way that other things in nature are not;

they do things for reasons. In this descriptive sense ‘rational’ contrasts with ‘non

rational’. It is in this descriptive sense that the Humean Theory is a theory of rational

motivation.

Other objects in nature beside human beings can be correctly said to ‘do’ things.

Storms flood cities. Trees sprout buds in the spring. But to say that humans are rational

in the descriptive sense is to say that some of the things we do can be explained in terms

of our reasons for doing them, however good or bad those reasons are. That is, it is to say

that these things can be explained with a form of explanation – an explanation in terms of

the agent’s reasons – that contrasts sharply with the explanations we give for the things

that storms and trees do. When a person performs some action, it always makes sense to

ask what her reasons were for doing whatever she did. This is not so for storms or trees.

Most of the things we do, and do for reasons, are not preceded by any explicit or

conscious process of trying to figure out what to do, i.e. by practical deliberation. But of

course sometimes we do explicitly deliberate, and since it only makes sense to think of

rational beings as deliberating at all, one way to focus the difference between

explanations of actions in terms of rational motivation and explanations which do not

involve appeal to the agents’ reasons is to think about cases where such deliberation does

take place and is acted on. Practical deliberation is the process of reasoning about, trying

to figure out, whether to do something and even when someone doesn’t consciously

deliberate before acting it makes sense to understand her reasons for doing what she did

as the things that would have come into her deliberation had she actually deliberated and

then acted on the basis of that deliberation. The normative questions here are questions

2

about what sorts of things should be considerations in some instance of deliberation, and

how much they should be counted as ‘weighing’. The descriptive questions are questions

about what considerations actually did move someone on some specific occasion to

perform some action. The Humean Theory of Motivation is a theory about how that sort

of motivation works, that is, about how agents’ reasons explain their actions. Of course it

should apply whether or not conscious deliberation takes place.

Someone might be tempted to say that Hume’s actual account of motivation

wasn’t really an account of ‘rational’ motivation because, of course, Hume did not think

‘reason’ came into motivation at all, as the quotation above about reason being the slave

of the passions dramatically illustrates. But for the purposes of this paper, this is just a

terminological point. Hume certainly intended his account to apply to the sort of

intentional actions that humans engage in but storms and trees do not; that is, he was

discussing ‘rational motivation’ in the descriptive sense.

It is just that Hume also tried to get some argumentative mileage out of his

terminology by packaging it together with a substantive account of how ‘reason’ works.

He held the contentious view that human reason deals only with ‘relations of ideas’ and

‘matters of fact’, that is, roughly with logical or mathematical beliefs and with factual and

causal ones, because these are the only sorts of things that can be true or false. That is

not just a terminological point though, since he also claimed that discovering or figuring

out some mathematical relation or causal connection won’t by itself move anyone to do

anything at all. The question for him is then what more is needed to move someone to

3

act and he held that it is a special, motivational state, which he called a ‘passion’. So

even discovering for example that the building is on fire, which is of course a matter of

fact, will only move someone to get out of the building if she has a desire not to be

burned. Lacking such a desire (or some analogous one) the discovery that the building is

on fire will not move her to act any more than will any other discovery about which she

cares nothing, according to this view, such as that there are an odd number of chairs in

the room. And given Hume’s view of the scope of reason, as applying only to things

such as beliefs that can be either true or false, he thought that passions, that is desires and

other such motivational states, could not be either supported by or opposed by reason.

Like hunger or thirst, passions can perhaps be explained causally, but that is essentially

the whole story3. Either we have them or we don’t and that is it.

This is a substantive and contentious conclusion that goes well beyond

terminological issues about where to apply terms such as ‘rational’ and ‘reason’.

Contemporary advocates of the Humean Theory of Motivation agree with Hume in

holding that a desire or some analogous motivational state is always needed to move

anyone to act – that is the heart of this ‘theory’ - but they don’t always think of desires as

utterly outside the scope of reason. (I’ll say a bit more about this below) They agree that

rational agents do things that can be explained in terms of their reasons. That is central to

being a rational agent. Humeans though disagree with non-Humeans about the place of

desires in explaining actions,4 that is, they disagree over whether an agent’s reason must

always involve a desire of some sort.

4

Both Humeans and non-Humeans are trying to answer Davidson’s question:

“What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action

by giving the agent’s reason for doing what he did?”5 The disagreement is over how to

understand what an agent’s reasons essentially are, that is, over what things or sorts of

things the phrase ‘the agent’s reasons’ refers to or, more generally, what the form or

structure of explanations of actions in terms of agents’ reasons really is. Humeans hold

that a desire (or other such motivating state) must always be part of an agent’s reason for

doing whatever she does, or at least must figure essentially into any such explanation.

Non-Humeans deny this.

In this paper I will argue that the latter group is correct. My argument focuses on

practical deliberation and has two parts. I will discuss two different problems that arise

for the Humean Theory and suggest that while taken individually each problem appears

to have a solution, for each problem the solution Humeans offer precludes solving the

other problem. I will suggest that to see these difficulties we must take seriously the

thought that we can only understand an agent’s reasons for her action by looking at her

actual or possible practical deliberation. So let’s look at the first problem.

1.

The Humean Theory is well summed up by Michael Smith, following Davidson,

in a principle Smith calls ‘P1’:

5

R at t constitutes a motivating reason of agent A to phi iff there is some psy such

that R at t consists of an appropriately related desire of A to psy and a belief that

were she to phi she would psy.6

Davidson puts his version of what looks like the same claim in a principle he calls ‘C1’:

R is a primary reason why an agent performed the action A under the description

d only if R consists of a pro attitude of the agent towards actions with a certain

property, and a belief of the agent that A, under the description d, has that

property.7

I will assume here that by “a motivating reason of agent A to phi” Smith is referring to

the same thing Davidson calls “a primary reason why [the] agent performed the action”,

i.e. to what in the more ordinary terminology I used above (and the terminology of

Davidson’s original question) would be called the agent’s reason (or one of the agent’s

reasons) for doing what she did. Beyond this terminological difference, though, these two

principles differ in some other ways. Davidson speaks of a “pro attitude”, Smith of a

“desire”. Davidson’s principle gives only a necessary condition for a reason. Smith says

an agent has a motivating reason “[if and only if]” she meets the conditions he describes.

But it is a third difference on which I want to focus. Smith says the desire in question

must be “appropriately related” to the belief, a phrase which has no analogue in

Davidson’s version of this principle.8

6

Smith explains what he means by this phrase in the sentence following his

statement of the principle. He says, “To say that the desire and belief must be

‘appropriately related’ is merely to acknowledge that in order for a desire and belief to

constitute a motivating reason the agent must, as it were, put the relevant desire and

belief together.”9 This seems to me to be an important claim, one worth examining.

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Pacific Division meeting of the

American Philosophical Association, in March, 2005, in San Francisco and at the

University of Texas, San Antonio in May, 2005. Thanks for helpful comments and

questions are due to Mark Phelan, who was the APA commentator, and to Michael

Almeida, Robert Audi, Mark Bernstein, Arthur Miller and Sergio Tenenbaum. The paper

has also been much improved by the comments of an anonymous referee for Philosophy

and Phenomenological Research.

2 A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk2, Pt3, Sec3.

3 Though not quite of course since Hume also thought that if a desire was founded on a

false belief, or involved a false belief about causation, discovery that this associated

belief was false would cause the desire to go away. This seems rather optimistic to me

but since it is not relevant to the issue here, I will not pursue it.

4 There is also of course a normative question about the role of desires which is at least

prima facie distinct from the explanatory one. So one might want, like Michael Smith, to

accept the Humean view that desires are required in explaining actions done for reasons

while denying that one has a good reason to do something only if one has some desire to

do it. (Smith marks this distinction by the terms ‘motivating reason’ and ‘normative

reason’, a distinction I will discuss below.) In this paper I will be discussing mostly the

7

We can see what is at issue, I think, if we shift briefly from ‘practical’ reasoning,

where we are thinking about what some agent does, to so called ‘theoretical’ reasoning.

Anyone who has ever taught (or, for that matter, taken) a logic course will be able to

testify that it is possible for someone to fully believe premises which in fact entail some

conclusion without realizing that this conclusion is entailed and hence without actually

drawing this conclusion, that is, coming to believe it. This is easy enough to see if one

thinks of complex premises in difficult arguments, but actually, human reasoning ability

being what it is, the phenomenon is ubiquitous. Books of ‘brain teasers’ and ‘logic

puzzles’ are full of examples.

So in the case of theoretical reasoning, if we want to explain why someone

believes some conclusion, it is not enough just to cite beliefs she already has which entail

the conclusion in question. Entailment is merely a relation between or among the

propositions she believes. It tells us nothing about the genesis of the beliefs themselves.

If we want to explain why she believes a conclusion entailed by premises she believes we

must also add that she has ‘put together’, in Smith’s phrase, the various premises, that is,

explanatory issue. See Smith, Michael: The Moral Problem (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994).

5 Davidson, Donald, “Actions, Reasons and Causes” in his Essays on Actions and Events

(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 3.

6 Smith, 1994, p. 92.

7 Davidson, p. 5.

8 Nor does it appear in the earlier version of P1 that Smith defended in “The Humean

Theory of Motivation”, Mind Vol XCVI, no. 381 (Jan, 1987), pp. 36-61. See p. 36.

9 Smith,1994, p. 92.

8

we must add that she has noticed or figured out that this conclusion is entailed by what

she already believes. Otherwise we leave open the possibility that she acquired her belief

in the conclusion in question in some other, perhaps completely irrational, way.

It is tempting to put this point by saying that she must also believe that the

premises she accepts entail the conclusion here but that is really not right either. It is not

enough, or even strictly relevant, that she realizes, that is, holds the belief that the

premises she accepts entail the conclusion in question, since she might still fail to put that

belief together with the (other) premises in such a way as to come to believe the

conclusion.10 So, on pain of regress, ‘noticing’ or ‘putting-together’ must be understood

as a sort of activity rather than as just another belief of the same sort as her beliefs in the

premises. But this activity is still a cognitive activity, one that can go wrong. We do,

after all, sometimes reason fallaciously, i.e. we sometimes draw conclusions from

premises that don’t entail or even support them. In Smith’s terminology this is to say that

we sometimes ‘put together’ things in ways we shouldn’t.

To return to the two principles quoted above, this is what the phrase

‘appropriately related’ in Smith’s principle adds to Davidson’s claim. (Of course, in

Davidson’s defense, if we are only making claims about the necessary conditions of

explaining someone’s belief in some conclusion in terms of her reasons, as Davidson is in

C1, then this ‘putting-together’ point need not come up. It could be a necessary condition

of such an explanation being correct that the person doing the reasoning hold the relevant

10 As Lewis Carroll’s Tortoise made clear long ago. See “What the Tortoise Said to

Achilles”, Mind, 4 (1895), pp. 278-280 [reprinted in Mind, 104 (1995), pp. 691-693].

9

premises as beliefs even if it is also a necessary condition that she ‘put them together’.)

In theoretical reasoning we can explain the agent’s coming to believe some conclusion on

the basis of beliefs she has that support (or seem to her to support) this conclusion only if

we add that she has ‘put together’ these beliefs in such a way as to actually draw the

conclusion. Similarly for practical reasoning, Smith is claiming, it is not enough, in

explaining an action, that the agent merely has the relevant desire and belief (even if that

is, as Davidson says, a necessary condition). She must also put these together. Without

this extra claim the Humean Theory is open to counter examples since someone might

have both a desire and related belief but not act on them because she failed to ‘put them

together’.

Suppose I want to get to campus and know perfectly well that the bus that stops at

my corner goes right there. (I just this morning explained it to someone perhaps.) Still,

when my car doesn’t start and I am frantically trying to make it to class on time, I may

not put these two things together. I may have gotten so habituated to driving to campus

that it never occurs to me to consider taking the bus to get there even though, if I just

stopped and thought about it for a moment, I would realize that I could do that. If, in

these circumstances, I do in fact get on the bus, this particular desire-belief pair (my

desire to get to campus and my belief that this bus will take me there) will not be what

explain my action, even though I do in fact have both this desire and this belief. Some

other explanation will have to be the correct one. Perhaps I decided to take the bus to my

sister’s office, which is only a short walk off the bus route, to see if I could borrow her

car.

10

If this putting-together point about explanations of actions in terms of the agent’s

reasons is correct, it is an important, in fact essential, feature of the Humean Theory since

it is needed to block counter examples of the sort just described. At the same time,

however, it raises a serious question for the Humean, desire-belief account of action

explanations, including the one Smith himself proposes. Again, it may be easiest to see

the problem by comparing theoretical reasoning. If we are explaining why I believe q by

citing my belief that p and my belief that if p then q, then, as just explained, we also have

to add, or at least implicitly assume, that I ‘put these two things together’ since otherwise

the explanation won’t work. I could hold these two beliefs and yet never draw the

conclusion that q. ‘Putting these two things together’ is reasoning, a term which refers to

this mental activity (of drawing a conclusion), not to, e.g., consciously rehearsing the

relevant sentences to myself or the like, which is neither necessary nor sufficient for

reasoning. But as I have just argued this reasoning, that is, this extra activity beyond

merely believing the premises, is essential to the explanation. Without it my belief that q

won’t be explained even if in fact I believe some premises that entail q.

So Smith’s putting-together point is really just the thought that desire-belief

explanations of actions rely for their explanatory force on the fact that the agent whose

action is being explained is engaging in some practical reasoning, whether or not this

reasoning (the ‘putting together’) is conscious or explicit, which presumably it usually is

not. Colin McGinn, in his discussion of one specific account of practical reasoning, the

11

practical syllogism, is I think expressing the same thought when he writes,

‘Whenever someone acts for a reason we can assume some such reasoning [as is

represented in the practical syllogism] to have occurred. We can thus say that an

action is a bodily movement issuing from such practical reasoning as is codified

in the practical syllogism.’11

Though I don’t want to commit myself to the thought that the practical syllogism is the

correct account of practical reasoning, this doesn’t matter for the point I am making here.

The practical syllogism looks like the ideal way of understanding practical

reasoning if one is an advocate of the desire-belief account of action explanation, that is,

the Humean Theory of Motivation. It has a place for representing the desire (or pro

attitude) in the major premise, a place for representing the associated, instrumental belief

in the minor premise, and a place for representing the action in the conclusion, which is

the judgment on which one acts, presumably a judgment to the effect that this is the best

thing to do or that this is what one should do or will do. As Robert Audi puts it,

‘We might represent this schema as follows:

Major Premise – the motivational premise: I want phi;

Minor Premise – the cognitive (instrumental) premise: My A-ing would

11 McGinn, C., “Action and its Explanation” in Bolton, N. (ed.): Philosophical Problems

in Psychology (London, Methuen, 1979), p. 24.

12

contribute to realizing phi;

Conclusion – the practical judgment: I should A.’12

12 Audi, R.: Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (Abington, Routledge, 2006), p.

96.

13

2.

The problem is this. According to the Humean Theory of Motivation, “No belief

could motivate us unless it is combined with some independent desire”.13 But if

reasoning is required on the part of the agent in order for a Humean, desire-belief,

explanation of her action to work then it is hard to see that any actual desire is needed.

Reasoning after all is a mental process that uses representations of things, that is, beliefs

about things, not the things themselves. And these beliefs could be false.

Representations can misrepresent. Nobody doubts this for theoretical reasoning, or for

the minor premise of the practical syllogism. I might be led to perform action A, say

getting on this bus, partly because I think that, in Audi’s words, “A-ing would contribute

to realizing phi”, say getting to my sister’s office. Unbeknownst to me though, the bus

routes have changed (or I am standing on the wrong side of the street) and this bus

actually goes away from my sister’s office, not toward it. The bus doesn’t actually have

to go toward my sister’s office in order for me to think it does and to get on this bus

partly on the basis of this false belief.

It is hard to see why the same thing couldn’t happen to the major premise of my

reasoning. I might believe that I want phi, to get to my sister’s office for instance, but in

fact I do not. One might think that I can’t be wrong about my own desires (and I will

discuss this idea further below) but on the face of it that would seem to show an

13 This is Derek Parfit’s way of putting it. See Parfit, Derek, “Reasons and Motivation”,

Aristotelian Society Proceedings, Supp. Vol. LXXI (1997), p. 105.

14

unjustified faith in human cognitive powers. I may be better aware of my own desires

and other mental states than anyone else but that hardly makes me infallible. So perhaps

what I really want is to get to my sister’s house, not her office, since that is where she

will be today. Or perhaps I really want to get to my brother’s office, since he is the one

who might not be using his car for the next few hours. If nothing else, lots of desires on

the basis of which we reason are themselves formed as a result of prior reasoning. They

are what Thomas Nagel has called “motivated desires”.14 For many of these, it is hard to

see that they have, so to speak, any independent existence outside their role in

deliberation. If I only want to get to my sister’s office because I want to borrow her car,

having forgotten that she and her car will be home today and not at her office, then it

seems I only think (i.e. falsely believe) that I want to get to her office. What I really

want, unbeknownst to me, is to get to her house.

In any case though, once we accept Smith’s putting-together point, that is, the

point that desire-belief explanations of actions require us to attribute to the agent enough

reasoning to ‘put together’ the fact that she wants something with the fact that (as she

believes) she can promote getting what she wants by performing some action, then it is

hard to see how to avoid the conclusion that it is the agent’s representations of things,

and how she ‘puts these together’, that explain her actions, not the things themselves,

even when the ‘things’ here are her own desires15, just as in theoretical reasoning it is her

representations of things, her beliefs, and how she puts these together, that explain the

14 Nagel, T.: The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 29.

15 Of course a desire, such as the one being represented by my belief that I want to get to

my sister’s office, is itself a representational state.

15

conclusions she draws. That is, really, it would seem that what the agent ‘puts together’

is not the fact that she wants something with the fact that (as she believes) she can get it

by performing some action. What she puts together is the fact that (as she believes) she

wants something and the fact that (as she believes) she can get it by performing some

action. It may of course be, indeed probably is the case, that as a matter of psychological

fact people are mostly not wrong about what they want, especially for wants closely

connected to bodily needs and the like. But even if people were in fact never wrong

about what they wanted, it is not obvious that this would affect this point.

Reasoning is done with representations of things, not the things themselves, even

when the things being represented are one’s own desires. So, given that fact, if we agree

that an agent must be reasoning about how to satisfy her desires if desire-belief

explanations of her actions are to work, then we have ipso facto agreed that it is not (or

not only) the facts about how things are, including the facts about what she wants, that

explain her actions. It is her reasoning about what she takes those facts to be. So why

couldn’t it turn out, analogously to what seems common in theoretical reasoning, that her

understanding of these facts, including her understanding of what she thinks she wants,

was mistaken and yet the so-called ‘desire-belief’ explanation of her action might still be

exactly the same?16 In short if, as the putting-together point has it, reasoning is required

on the part of the agent in order for desire-belief explanations to have any explanatory

force, then it is hard to see why it isn’t only the agent’s representations of her desires

(that is, her beliefs about what she wants) that need to be present for these explanations to

16

work.17 In that case the desires themselves would have no actual role in these

explanations.

3.

This is a surprising enough possibility that before we move to the second part of

the argument it is worth considering how a defender of the Humean Theory might try to

reject it. I think the most obvious way to do this would be to hold that perhaps after all

we cannot be wrong about our own desires. That looks like a way to defend the Humean

Theory here since in that case even though we use beliefs about our desires in reasoning

about what to do, the desire being referred to would still always be there to do the

motivational work.18

16 Russ Shafer-Landau develops the example of someone who talks himself into believing

that he wants to be a lawyer, since both his father and grandfathers were lawyers, it has

always been expected he would follow in their footsteps, and so on. Later, when facing

the drudgery of law school, he realizes that he was deceiving himself. He never really

wanted to be a lawyer at all. Still, he had acted on the basis of this false belief. See

Shafer-Landau, Russ: Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford, Oxford University Press,

2003), pp. 124-125.

17 David Velleman makes a similar point in his essay “The Possibility of Practical

Reason” where he says the reason expressed by the first premise of practical deliberation

expresses not your desire but “your recognition of [your] desire”. See Velleman, David,

The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 198.

17

I have been claiming that when we act on the basis of our desires we must reason,

using beliefs, when we ‘put together’ the fact that we have some desire with the fact that

there is some way to satisfy this desire. And I then suggested that since apparently the

reasoning and subsequent action could go the same way even if the belief about the desire

was false, desires themselves might not be needed to explain the action performed to

satisfy them. But if we are never mistaken about our desires then even if I am right that

such reasoning is required, the desire being reasoned about will still always be there, that

is my beliefs that I have these desires will always be true. So, apparently, this wouldn’t

be enough to show that we can act only on the basis of what we believe we want, without

actually having the desire itself.

Though contemporary philosophers who discuss mental states such as desires

frequently, in fact I think routinely, deny that agents are infallible about their own mental

states19, when dealing with practical reasoning one might still feel tempted to think that in

cases of the sort we are examining one cannot be wrong about what one wants. The (or

at least one) apparent main source of this temptation, however, involves a confusion. So

it will be well to set this mistake aside.

18 Of course this would then raise the opposite problem for the Humean. Why do we

sometimes not act on the desires we believe ourselves to have? There would certainly

seem to be cases where the agent fully believes she has some desire, nothing stands in the

way of acting, and yet she fails to act. At a minimum the existence of such cases would

seem to require the Humean to accept that practical reasoning involves beliefs about ones

desires, beliefs that might be false.

18

Consider again the exciting example of my bus trip to my sister’s office. One

might think that denying that I want to go to her office in this case, when I actually do go

to her office, would be impossible, that is, the idea that I could be wrong in thinking I

want to go to her office would involve a reductio. To see this, first grant for a moment,

for the sake of this discussion, that I really am simply mistaken in thinking that I want to

go to my sister’s office. (This is the premise on which the reductio is supposed to work.

So we need to grant it for the moment to get the argument started.) Still, on the basis of

this mistaken belief and my (correct) belief that this bus goes near her office, I decide I

should get on this bus and in fact do so. If you were to ask me, at that point, why I was

getting on this bus, my answer presumably would be that I wanted to go to my sister’s

office and this bus goes right near it. That is the way I understand what I am doing. This

by itself settles nothing, of course, since the fact that I would make this reply only shows

that I believe I want to go to her office, not that I really do, just as it only shows that I

believe this bus goes near her office, not that it really does. It would be a mistake to

conclude from my answer that I really have this desire, just as it would be a mistake to

19 For instance, David Chalmers, in discussing our knowledge of our own conscious

states, endorses what he calls “the reliability principle”, that “our second-order judgments

about consciousness are by and large correct”, and “the detectability principle”, that says

“where there is an experience, we generally have the capacity to form a second-order

judgment about it”. The ‘by and large’ and ‘generally’ in these principles are intended to

leave it open that we can sometimes be wrong about these states. See Chalmers, David

J.: The Conscious Mind (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 218-219.

19

conclude from my answer that the bus really goes by my sister’s office.

But there is another point here. As Thomas Nagel pointed out long ago, from the

fact that some consideration motivated me, it follows that I wanted (or had a desire for)

the thing in question.

‘That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these

considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future

happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a

desire for my own future happiness.’20

So if my thought that an act is likely to promote my future happiness moves me to

perform that act, “then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future

happiness.” Similarly, from the fact that my belief that this bus goes to my sister’s office

was what led me to get on this bus, it follows that I wanted to go to my sister’s office.

And that certainly looks like it flatly contradicts our assumption that I was mistaken in

thinking that I wanted to go to my sister’s office. So it seems that if Nagel is right (and I

think he pretty obviously is) what we have here is a reductio of the original assumption

that I was mistaken in thinking that I want to go to my sister’s office. The fact that this

consideration moved me to act entails that I wanted to go there.

But surely something has gone wrong here. Even leaving other things aside, this

would be an implausibly spectacular result for the epistemology of mental states. It

20 Nagel, 1970, pp. 29-30.

20

seems to show that I can’t, after all, be mistaken about what I want, in any case where

this is what moves me to act (which would seem to be among the most important ones).

Not only does this seem psychologically inaccurate21, if it is right all those philosophers

who want to deny that we are infallible about our mental states will have to do some

significant backtracking.

But I think this is not right. In fact what Nagel is pointing to here is simply a

different, distinct, sense of ‘want’ or ‘desire’, one which merely indicates the point or

purpose of the action.22 Here is a way of seeing this. In the example we have been

discussing I need to get to campus because I have a class today. My car won’t start. So,

not ‘putting together’ with my desire to get to campus my knowledge that I can actually

take the bus all the way there, I decide to take the bus to my sister’s office in hopes of

borrowing her car for a few hours. In the discussion so far we have implicitly been

thinking of the steps in this chain of reasoning as being put in terms of what I want. I

want to get to my sister’s office because I want to get to campus and think that by getting

to her office I can get to campus by borrowing her car. But it would be equally accurate

(and arguably clearer) to put them in terms of what I think I should do or is a good idea in

the circumstances or the like. If we shift to that terminology the reasoning goes like this:

21 See the example in note 16 above for instance.

22 See Schueler, G. F.: Desire: Its Place in Practical Reason and the Explanation of

Action (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995), pp. 29 – 38.

21

I have a class today. So I need to get to campus. But my %$&# car won’t start.

So I need to borrow someone else’s car for a few hours. My sister will almost

certainly be willing to lend me her car, and she will be at her office. So it would

be a good idea to go to her office. I can get within a short walk of her office by

getting on this bus. So I’ll get on this bus.

Here the part of the reasoning which was earlier implicitly rendered as “I want to

get to my sister’s office” appears as “It would be a good idea to go to her office”. I can’t

see that the second is any less accurate than the first. Both ways of speaking are saying

the same thing. In fact this same thought might be even better put as “I should go to my

sister’s office”. The point is that getting to my sister’s office seems to have much to be

said for it in these circumstances (as I understand them, of course). It is something I

think I have good reason to do. If as before we suppose that I act on this reasoning and

get on this bus, it follows, as Nagel says, that I wanted to go to my sister’s office. But

obviously that does not in any way confirm the truth of my belief that it would be a good

idea to get to my sister’s office (or that this is what I should do or had good reason to do

in these circumstances). That belief is false if, as we are supposing, getting to my sister’s

office won’t do me any good at all in getting to campus. But that is just the same belief

that we have been describing as my belief that I want to get to my sister’s office.

What this shows, I think, is that it is simply a mistake to conclude that I can’t be

wrong in my belief that I want to go to (it would be a good idea to go to) my sister’s

office just because the fact that I got on the bus in order to go to my sister’s office entails

22

that I wanted to go to my sister’s office,. What Nagel’s point shows is not that I can’t be

wrong about my own desires but merely that there is a sense of ‘want’, ‘desire’ and their

cognates where these terms refer simply to the point or purpose of the action in question.

So of course it follows from the fact that the point of my getting on the bus was to get to

my sister’s office that, in that sense, I wanted to get to my sister’s office. The thought

that getting on this bus would be a good way to get to my sister’s office was what led me

to get on this bus. That was the point of what I was doing in getting on that bus. But this

in no way shows that going to my sister’s office really was a good idea i.e. was what I

really should to do, given my need to get to campus.

Of course the fact that one might be led by such bad reasoning to think that we

cannot be mistaken about our own desires does not show that we really can be mistaken

about this, let alone that we can act on those mistaken beliefs. So the fact that the

apparent reductio of the assumption that I am mistaken about the desire to get to my

sister’s office is based on a confusion won’t show that I really might be mistaken, or that

I might act on that mistaken belief. That is simply a logically distinct question. This

seems to leave the defender of the Humean Theory of Motivation with the possibility of

holding that even though (or even if) we always need to reason about how to satisfy our

desires, still without a desire one never acts. And that is the heart of the Humean Theory.

Still, a question has been raised here. This first part of the argument I am

presenting doesn’t by itself refute the Humean Theory of Motivation. It merely shows

that the theory won’t work without supposing that the agent who has the desire and belief

23

in question ‘puts them together’, i.e. reasons about them to at least that extent. That

raises a serious question. When we are discussing theoretical reasoning we can explain

someone’s acceptance of some conclusion by referring to the beliefs she took as premises

and the reasoning she used. And of course any of this can go wrong. In particular, any or

all of her beliefs might be mistaken and yet still explain how, on their basis, she came to

accept the conclusion. The putting-together point is required for the plausibility of the

Humean Theory and argues that practical reasoning, on this theory, works in a similar

way, with the difference that what the reasoning leads to is an action rather than the

acceptance of some proposition. So the question raised here is why the analogous thing

couldn’t happen. Why couldn’t it happen that my belief that I have a certain desire, even

though false, leads me to act so as to satisfy the desire I think I have, in which case no

actual desire would have been needed to explain what I did? It seems to me that this sort

of thing happens rather commonly.23 Whether or not that is so, however, to see the full

importance of the putting-together point we will have to look at the second part of the

argument against the Humean Theory of Motivation.

4.

We can see the issue here by looking more directly at practical deliberation. We

have been concentrating on the fact that the Humean Theory of Motivation, since it

requires that the agent put together the fact that she wants something with the fact that

there is a way to promote getting it, must involve at least some reasoning, that is, some

23 Again, see the example in note 16.

24

deliberation (though as I said this need not be conscious or explicit). And that

deliberation starts so to speak from the fact that one has some desire for something. One

then reasons about how to satisfy that desire. But obviously not all, or even much,

genuine deliberation starts from the agent’s own desires. No doubt all of us occasionally

restrict our deliberation to how to satisfy our desires. This happens perhaps when we are

ordering dinner from a restaurant menu and have only to weigh the various available

dishes against our gastronomic preferences, while factoring in our desire to remain

solvent after the check has arrived. But it is difficult to believe that anyone, let alone

everyone, reasons on the basis of nothing but her own desires all the time. That would be

a level of self-absorption almost beyond belief and certainly far beyond the ordinary.

Much of the time we reason on the basis of things other than our own wants, needs, cares,

preferences and the like, for instance on the basis of some evaluation of some possible

state of affairs we think an action of ours can promote or prevent.

In the example we have been using so far, where I need to get to campus to teach

a class, it seems quite possible that my fundamental (so to speak unmotivated) reason for

going to campus, the reason not itself based on anything else, is not that I want to teach

that class but that I am obligated to do so (having signed a contract) or that it is

important or valuable that I do so (given all the wonderful things I can teach my students)

or perhaps simply that my students are depending on my doing so. Of course it is

possible that I have an ‘ulterior’ motive for teaching that class. Perhaps I badly want to

buy an expensive new car and so want the fabulous salary I will only receive if I show up

for my classes. But it seems obviously inaccurate psychologically to think that all

25

motivated actions are like this. Many cases, by far the majority I would say, start from

facts, or perhaps evaluations of facts, about things other than the agent’s own desires,

needs, cares and preferences. That is, the first premise in the agent’s practical reasoning,

if made explicit, would not refer to something the agent wants but to something he or she

holds to have some positive or negative value, or to be a requirement of some sort or the

like.24

Supporters of the Humean Theory of Motivation typically do not deny any of this

of course. If they did their theory would be refuted by obvious psychological facts.

Rather they hold that the desire referred to in their theory (the “desire to psy” in Smith’s

principle P1), while the agent has to have it, does not occur in the agent’s practical

deliberation at any level. Instead it remains in the ‘background’. According to Philip

Pettit and Michael Smith, “[A] desire is present in the background of an agent’s decision

if and only if it is part of the motivating reason for it: the rationalizing set of beliefs and

desires which produce the decision. A desire is present in the foreground of the decision

if and only if the agent believed he had that desire and was moved by the belief that a

justifying reason for the decision was that the option chosen promised to satisfy that

desire.”25 Pettit and Smith go on to argue for what they call “the strict background view

of desire”, that is, the view that while the Humean Theory of Motivation26 is true of every

24 As Pettit and Smith say, “[T]evidence of intuition and introspection – the

phenomenology of deliberation – is squarely against the hypothesis that desire always has

a foreground presence.” See Pettit, Philip and Smith, Michael, “Backgrounding

Desires”, Philosophical Review, Vol. XCIX, no. 4, Oct., 1990, p. 574.

26

intentional action, it is not the case that the desire that motivates every action is “in the

foreground”, that is, it is not the case that the agent motivated by that background desire

believes she has this desire or believes that it is her justifying reason for acting as she

does.27

But if we have been right in arguing that the Humean Theory of Motivation must

be understood so as to include Smith’s ‘putting-together point’ then the claim that the

desires that motivate actions are ever, let alone usually or always, completely ‘in the

background’ simply cannot be true. The Humean Theory, to be plausible, requires that

agents put together the fact that they want something with whatever they believe about

how to get it. Thus they need to do at least some reasoning, and in order to do that they

need to be aware of their own desires (i.e. to believe they have them).

So advocates of the Humean Theory face a dilemma. In order not to deny obvious

psychological facts about the sorts of considerations from which people frequently

deliberate, it must be claimed that the desire which does the motivating work is one

which the agent does not use in deliberation, indeed one of which she is often not aware.

It does its work ‘in the background’ in Pettit and Smith’s phrase. But in order for desires

to motivate in the way the Humean Theory claims, agents must be aware of their desires

enough to reason from them. That is an essential feature of the Humean Theory, one

without which it is not plausible. So the desires needed for this theory cannot merely be

25 Pettit and Smith, p. 568.

26 They refer to this as “the intentional conception”.

27 Pettit and Smith, pp. 572-573.

27

‘in the background’. The explanatory mechanism that the Humean Theory makes use of

requires enough awareness of one’s desire to put together the fact that one has this desire

with the fact that it can be satisfied by performing a specific action open to one. But

agents commonly reason about how to act on the basis of considerations that have

nothing at all to do with their own desires, indeed remain completely unaware that it is

(supposedly) their own desires they are acting to satisfy. So the Humean Theory will

either have to deny Smith’s ‘putting-together’ point after all, opening itself up to counter

examples of the sort discussed in section 1. above, or else claim that agents always reason

on the basis of their own desires, which is obviously psychologically inaccurate.

5.

I myself see no way out of this dilemma other than by simply rejecting the

Humean Theory; hence the title of this paper. But perhaps it is appropriate to briefly

survey some apparent ways out before concluding. The most straightforward of course

would be to deny the first part of the argument I have been presenting, i.e. that the

Humean Theory of Motivation is only plausible if it includes what I have been calling the

‘putting-together point’. I have argued for that point mostly on the basis of one example

but it seems to me that once one notices this example it is easy to think of many others

that have the same form. And in any case denying the putting-together point would be

tantamount to holding that desires and beliefs simply interact on their own to produce

actions, independently of whether the agent is aware of them or not, rather in the way two

28

different chemicals might interact whether or not anyone is aware of them. That would

be analogous to thinking that one’s beliefs simply interact on their own to generate the

further beliefs that they logically entail, with no actual reasoning on the part of the agent.

Both these views seem deeply implausible. It could be though that thinking that we have

explained how desires and beliefs produce actions and further beliefs simply by speaking

of ‘causation’ here, allows such views to sneak in undetected.

Another possible move, or set of moves, involves making a sharp distinction

between the ‘reasons’ that explain, and those that attempt to justify, the action in

question. That would seem to allow one to hold that ‘motivating’ reasons, that involve

desires, are one thing and ‘normative’ or ‘justifying’ reasons, that refer to what the agent

thought spoke in favor of her action, are something else.28 One version of this idea would

be to say that we discover the candidate for what is supposed to justify the action by

looking at what the agent considered in her deliberation (or would have considered) while

we always refer to her desires (which are sometimes completely ‘in the background’) to

explain her action. Since agents only infrequently regard their own desires as providing

good reasons to act, it will only be in such cases that the question of whether her own

desires justify what she does arises. In other cases, where the agent thinks for instance

that it is the benefit her nephew will get from a good education that gives her reason to

28 This is roughly Pettit and Smith’s view, see Pettit and Smith, pp. 565-568. In The

Moral Problem Michael Smith adopts a similar strategy, giving a Humean account of

motivating reasons and an anti-Humean account of normative reasons. See Smith (1994),

Chapters 4 and 5. For an excellent discussion of the sorts of problems this entails see

Dancy, Jonathan, Practical Reality (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 1.

29

give him the money for tuition, the background desire that explains her action (perhaps

her desire that things go well for her nephew) will not even be a candidate for what

justifies it.

But the question of what someone’s reason for doing something really is cannot

be just what went through that persons mind at the time by way of deliberation, or would

have if she had deliberated. In most cases of course people simply do not deliberate at

all. And even when they do deliberate there is always the possibility of self deception. I

could think, pretend to myself, that my reason is one thing when in fact it is something

quite different. So the question of what a person’s real reason for doing something is

must be the question of what really moved that person to act as she did. According to the

Humean Theory the answer is always some desire (or pro attitude) of the agent’s.

Intuitively there would seem to be a huge difference between someone who does

something because she thinks it important or in some other way worth doing and

someone who does something because she wants to do something important and thinks

this thing is important. But it is hard to see how the Humean Theory can say anything

other than that the first person lacks self knowledge, doesn’t understand her own motives.

Whatever she thinks, her real reason for doing what she did was that it satisfied one of

her desires.

Such a view has some seriously counterintuitive consequences. It entails that the

person who acts out of admirable reasons (that it would be a good thing for her nephew to

have an education) and the person who is totally self centered and acts out of nothing but

30

her own desires, differ only in their level of awareness of their motives. The former

agent simply doesn’t realize that, like the self-centered agent, what is actually motivating

her is nothing but her own desires. So the advocate of the this ‘backgrounding’ view will

have to say either that no one ever acts from morally admirable reasons, though some are

so lacking in self awareness that they (or we) think they are, or she will have to say that

what makes for admirable motives is this lack of self awareness, which seems even more

counterintuitive.

Then too, the actual content of the background desire hypothesized by this view is

quite indeterminate. Consider that agent who reasons that her nephew will benefit from a

good education and so, since he doesn’t have the money for tuition, she will give him the

money for it. The ‘backgrounding’ view we are considering will say that what motivates

her is her background desire for … what? One might think it would have to be a desire to

benefit her nephew but wouldn’t a desire to benefit needy relatives also work? Or why

not a desire to benefit whomever she can? Or, for that matter, why not a desire to do

whatever she thinks she has most reason to do? 29

But in any case the real problem with sharply distinguishing motivating and

justifying reasons is that it doesn’t in the end deal with the putting-together point. The

29 One of Al Mele’s thought experiments involves imagining a race of beings “a great

majority” of whom desire to do what is morally required. For these people this desire

comes into play motivationally when they come to believe that something actually is

morally required. See, Mele, Alfred, Motivation and Agency (Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2003) p. 112.

31

explanatory mechanism by which desires and beliefs explain actions, according to the

first part of the argument I have been making, essentially involves the agent putting

together the fact that she wants something with the fact that there is some way to promote

getting that thing. Calling this background desire the agent’s ‘motivating reason’ and

distinguishing it sharply from her normative or justifying reasons doesn’t change that

fact. If the agent does not use this ‘background’ desire as the basis of her practical

deliberation about how to act, indeed if she is not even aware of having this desire, then

how can she possibly ‘put together’ the fact that she has this desire and the fact that she

can satisfy it by acting in a certain way? In putting the desire completely in the

background an essential element of the mechanism by which the Humean Theory of

Motivation explains action is removed.30

6.

30 So the definition of a ‘background desire’ that Pettit and Smith give (quoted above) is

quite problematic. They say a background desire is part of “the rationalizing set of

beliefs and desires which produce the decision.” (Pettit and Smith, p. 568) That makes it

sound as if the desires and beliefs causally interact completely on their own and seems to

ignore completely the fact that in order to ‘produce’ the decision the agent must put

together these desires and beliefs, something that seems impossible if the desire is not

also ‘in the foreground’, i.e. if she is not aware of it.

32

It seems at least possible that failure to keep in mind that there are really two

distinct senses of ‘desire’ and its cognates, accounts for at least part of the continuing

attraction of the Humean Theory of Motivation. Since it seems to be an essential feature

of actions that they have a purpose or point, when someone performs an action it will

always be correct to ascribe to her a desire for whatever it was that was in fact the point

of that action, if the term ‘desire’ here simply refers to the purpose or point of what she

was doing. And here of course no reasoning need be attributed to the agent since the

desire attributed to her is simply another way of referring to an essential feature of her

action, its point. Desires of the sort specified in the Humean Theory of Motivation, on the

other hand, are, as Smith says in his principle P1, the sort that only explain acts if we ‘put

them together’ with the relevant beliefs. So it would also be easy to overlook the need

for attributing reasoning to the agent when we employ desire-belief explanations of

actions of the sort specified in the Humean Theory of Motivation if we overlook the

difference between the sorts of desires that agents reason about how to satisfy (proper

desires) and mere reference to the purpose or point of the action of the sort Nagel was

describing. If it is true that whatever action I perform intentionally has some point or

purpose or goal, and that, as I understand Nagel to be saying in the quotation above, we

can refer to this point as what I wanted (or had a desire for) in performing this action,

then that leaves completely open the question of whether it was one of my own desires or

something else entirely that served as the basis of my practical deliberation and so led me

to act.

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