Class 5.1: The Importance of Motive
For the last three weeks we have been looking at how to give rationalizing explanations of conflicts by seeing how differences in people’s beliefs, values, or both can put them into opposition with one another. We’re now taking a new direction, in order to try to understand what makes conflicts feel personal. Today’s class, which is about the topic of moral worth, will feel at first like a side-topic, but it is a first step in this direction.
Moral Worth
The topic of today’s reading is what has come to be known a “moral worth”. When you act, what you do can be morally right, or it can be morally wrong. But even when you do the morally right thing, sometimes this isn’t especially morally praiseworthy - it doesn’t make sense to congratulate you or give you any moral credit for what you’ve done. The philosopher Immanuel Kant gave an example, about 240 years ago, of a shopkeeper who always does the morally right thing and gives correct change, but who would be happy to cheat his customers if he could get away with it, but just believes that he can’t get away with it without losing business. (Maybe he’s worried about his Yelp ratings.) Kant’s shopkeeper (who is mentioned at the beginning of our reading without explanation) does the right thing, but something is lacking, morally speaking, about his action. The topic of “moral worth” is the question of trying to say what, exactly, is missing in the shopkeeper’s action.
This topic may seem like a side topic to you at first. We’ve been reading authors who have been trying to show us something about differences in belief or differences in goals or values, and it has been relatively obvious what those will have to do with interpersonal conflict. It is less obvious what the topic of moral worth has to do with interpersonal conflict. But for much of the next few weeks, we will be reading and thinking about things that assume that it matters to us not just what other people do, but also why they do it. We care - a lot - about other people’s motives, and not just their actions. And some forms of conflict - as well as some dimensions of conflict - are shaped a lot by the fact that we care about people’s motives, and not just about what they do. The topic of moral worth is our way to get started thinking about whether and why motives matter.
Nomy Arpaly
Our reading for today is from the philosopher Nomy Arpaly, who teaches at Brown University. Arpaly is most famous for her use of the example of Huckleberry Finn to make the argument that she makes in the second half of our reading for today. But she has made many contributions to our understanding of action, desire, responsibility, and praiseworthiness.
Arpaly is also famous for using vivid, realistic, examples often based on her real-life experiences in her philosophical work - in contrast to over-simplified, pale, artificially stipulated examples that are common in much philosophical writing in English over the last fifty years. For example, the “extremist” example in her paper draws on her experience growing up in Israel, and the Ayn Rand example is based on her college roommate.
“Moral Worth”
Instead of reading all of Arpaly’s article, “Moral Worth”, I have chosen to only assign a selection from the article. So today’s reading is very short. Don’t get too excited, though - our reading for Wednesday is one of the most difficult readings of the semester, and I haven’t abridged it. So make sure that you leave time for that reading and extra time to work through Wednesay’s Daily Quiz.
