Hume’s Theory of Motivation

Daniel Shaw
Hume Studies Volume XV Number 1 (April 1989) 163-183.

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P

163
HUME'S THEORY OF MOTIVATION

In this paper I shall defend a Humean' theory

of motivation. But first I should like to examine some
of the standard criticisms of this theory and some
alternative views that are currently in favour.
Both in the Treatise and the Enauirv Hume
maintains that reason alone never motivates action but
always requires the cooperation of some separate, and
separately identifiable desire-factor in order to bring
about action. What are Hume's grounds for this view?
In the Treatise, Hume writes:
'Tis obvious, that when we have the
prospect of pain or pleasure from any
object, we feel a consequent emotion
of aversion or propensity, and are
carry'd to avoid or embrace what will
give us this uneasiness or satis-
faction.. . . 'Tis from the prospect of
pleasure or pain that the aversion or
propensity arises towards any
object....2
This passage suggests that the way we (and
Hume) know about the presence of the separate desire
factor which he claims is always needed to motivate
our every purposive action is by being directly aware
of some desire-feeling, by introspection, each and
every time we act. There is however a familiar objec-
tion to this argument: no doubt we sometimes are aware
of a feeling of desire when we act, e.g., in cases
where we are motivated by strong emotions. But much
of the time when we act calmly or casually, after
having deliberated 'in a cool hour', or when perform-
ing routine and trivial acts, we are not directly
aware of any desire-feeling at the time of action.
164

Hume is not unaware of this objection -- in

reply to it he invokes his notorious doctrine of the
calm passions. He writes:
'Tis natural for one, that does not
examine objects with a strict philo-
sophic eye, to imagine, that those
actions of the mind are entirely the
same, which produce not a different
sensation, and are not imnediately
distinguishable to the feeling and
perception. Reason, for instance,
exerts itself without producing any
sensible emotion; and except in the
more sublime disquisitions of philo-
sophy, or in the frivolous subtilities
of the schools, scarce ever conveys
any pleasure or uneasiness. Hence it
proceeds, that every action of the
mind, which operates with the same
calmness and tranquillity, is con-
founded with reason by all those, who
judge of things from the first view
and appearance. Now 'tis certain,
there are certain calm desires and
tendencies, which, tho' they be real
passions, produce little emotion in
the mind, and are more known by their
effects than by the immediate feeling
or sensation. These desires are of
two kinds; either certain instincts
originally implanted in our natures,
such as benevolence and resentment,
the love of life, and kindness to
children; or the general appetite to
good, and aversion to evil, consider'd
merely as such. When any of these
passions are calm, and cause no dis-
order in the soul, they are very
readily taken for the determination of
reason, and are suppos'd to proceed
from the same faculty, with that,
which judges of truth and falshood.
Their nature and principles have been
suppos 'd the same, because their
sensations are not evidently differ-
ent. (T 417)
The most obvious application of this argument
would be to cases of cool, seemingly passionless
 165
deliberation: e.g., in the course of planning the
family budget I set aside funds for the children's
education. A cursory inspection (or recollection) of
the contents of my conscious mind at the time of
acting would reveal to me some purely rational
considerations that I had in mind at the time. I had
some thoughts at the time whose contents are (roughly)
expressible in such words as " I f I don't put aside so
much per month over so many years we will never be
able to see them all through university." But
cursory introspection or recollection would not detect
any separately identifiable desire-factor present to
my conscious mind at the time. Considered philo-
sophical examination, Hume assures us, will reveal
one, a 'calm' one -- in this case calm 'kindness to
children'.
Less obviously, the calm-passions argument,
most naturally applicable to cases of deliberation,
can be extended also to cover cases of routine habit-
action: e.g., when standing impatiently at a busy
street corner, it is as a matter of habit that I wait
for the lights to turn green before crossing.
Arguably, my grasp of my situation as I stand there
includes certain rational considerations, i.e.,
thoughts, more or less in the background3 of conscious-
ness, thoughts whose contents are (roughly) expres-
sible' in such words as "It really would be dangerous
to bolt across on the red just now." But again,
causal introspection might well overlook the calm
passion that must in Hume's view accompany such
thoughts, in this case my calm 'love of life'.
'Notorious' is the word for Hume's calm-
passions argument, for it is commonly regarded as a
text-book case of an ad hoc supposition introduced to
 a

166

save a false theory. A recent example of this sort of

criticism is to be found in Barry Stroud's book, m.'
Stroud claims that the calm-passions argument is both
unsound in itself and also inconsistent with one of
Hume's most fundamental views about the mind -- the
incorrigibility thesis -- the belief that we cannot be
mistaken about the contents of our own minds at any
given moment.
In support of his claim that Hume's argument
is unsound, Stroud writes:
He says that the calm passions are
"more known by their effects than by
their immediate feeling or sensation",
but what are the effects by which such
passions are known to exist? The only
candidates would seem to be the
actions or inclinations which the calm
passions actually cause. But if the
calm passions are known to exist from
the fact that certain actions or
inclinations occur, and the fact that
those passions are the causes of those
actions or inclinations, then there
must be some independent way to
discover that calm passions are the
causes of those actions and inclina-
tions. If we knew that passions were
always involved in the production of
every action we could infer from the
occurrence of an action that a passion
existed, even if it was not "violent"
enough to be felt. This is in effect
what Hume does. But he still has
given no such independent justifi-
cation. The question of whether a
separate passion is in fact involved
in the causality of every action is
precisely what is at issue. (pp. 1 6 4 -
165)
Regarding the charge of inconsistency Stroud
writes :
Hume agrees that direct inspection or
introspection does not always yield a
passion as the cause of action. He
thinks that although i t often seems to
 167

us as i f there is no passion or
emotion involved, nevertheless in such
cases we are wrong. There is a
passion there, although it is entirely
natural that we shoulc! miss it.... We
do not simply feel calm passions";
their existence and efficacy is not
discovered by direct inspection. But
Hume says "'tis certain" that there
are such passions and desires; they
feel to us just like "determinations
of reason" but he claims to know they
are not. This does not cohere very
well with his fundamental principle
that we cannot be wrong about the
contents of our own minds at a given
moment.
Apparently we are often mistaken about
whether or not a certain calm passion
is before the mind. On the basis of
the feeling or sensation alone we
often think that only a "determination
of reason'' is leading us to act, but
in fact, unknown to us, it is a calm
passion. Hume is willing to forget
one of the foundations of the theory
of ideas in order to support his
account of the role of reason in
action, although as we shall see, his
theory of action takes its shape
primarily from the theory of ideas.
(pp. 163-164)
Having criticized the 'calm-passions' argument
on these two grounds Stroud then attacks the heart of
Hume's theory of motivation -- Hume's belief in the
indispensible desire-factor without which no motivated
action is ever performed. Hume is right, Stroud
argues, to maintain that in some sense or other of
'desire', a desire must always be present every time
we perform a motivated action. According to Stroud
where Hume goes wrong is to suppose that the desire in
question must always be a separately identifiable
factor, identifiable by the agent in his conscious
experience by introspection as something extra, some-
168
thing over and above his purely rational considera-
tions for action. As an alternative to this Humean
theory of desire Stroud sketches a non-experiential
non-introspectionist account of desire. (More
positively Stroud's proposal could be described as a
functionalist theory of desire, though Stroud himself
does not use this term.) Stroud writes:
It might well be that to have a desire
for or propensity towards E is simply
to be in a state such that when you
come to believe that a certain action
will lead to E you are moved to
perform that action.. ..
And being in some such dispositional
state might be all that having a
certain desire or propensity consists
in. It need not be an additional
mental item that its I f produces the
action. (pp. 167-168)%
Desire on this account is defined not in terms
of any intrinsic property knowable in experience but,
neutrally, in terms of its function in leading along
with belief to action.
Stroud does not attempt to develop this out-
line of a non-experiential account of motivating
desire, but such an account has been recently defended
at greater length in Thomas Aagel's book The P o s s i -
bility of Altruisq.' I do not myself think that this
sort of non-Humean non-experiential account of moti-
vating desires is on the right track. Rather I
believe that it is possible to give a plausible inter-
pretation of Hume's own experiential account of
desire, including the doctrines of incorrigibility and
the calm passions, which comes much nearer the truth.
This is what I will now attempt to do. I shall take
Nagel's account as my starting point.
 169
Bagel claims that contrary to Hume there do
exist at least some cases in which reason alone --
i.e., the agent's grasp of certain purely rational
considerations -- is all that motivates the action.
In the context of these purely rationally motivated
actions, Nagel argues, our talk of desire does not
refer to any additional inclination towards, or
preferences for, or sentiment about some goal that we
have, but is either just another way of saying that
the act is motivated, i.e., that we are in state
which disposes us to do whatever we think will lead to
a certain result, or else indicates some structural
feature of the reasoning behind our behaviour, e.g.,
indicates the fact that, in view of purely rational
considerations which confront us, it would be
irrational of us not to perform the act in question.
In stark opposition to this rationalist belief
in the motivational power of pure reason alone' stands
the Humean view that necessarily desire is always a
distinct motivational factor, e feeling, always
operating at the time of action in addition to a n y
purely rational beliefs the agent may hold, and in the
absence of which no motivated action conccivabl y could
be performed. Let me say what I think is wrong about
the rationalist view of motivating desires. This is
best done by considering some 'hard cases' for the
m e a n view which Nagel discusses in The Possibility
of Altruism. Nagel begins by considering actions
mativated by prudence -- i.e., by a person's sonsider-
ation of his own future interests. Consider, for
example, the action of someone who buys groceries when
he is not hungry because he knows he is going to be
h m q r y later. Setting aside the sease of 'desire'
which just means 'motive' O K which points to some
170
purely rational principle (prudence in this case),
Nagel wants to deny that the shopper has distinct
desire relevant to his motive at the time of acting:
for after all the shopper is not hungry at that time
and has no desire to eat at that time. According to
Nagel, the shopper's knowledge that he will be hungry
later, is sufficient by itself to motivate his action,
and this piece of knowledge is not itself a present
desire of any kind but rather a purely rational con-
sideration concerning one of his future desires.
Nagel points out that Humean could try to deal with
such cases by postulating a present desire on the part
of the agent to satisfy all his future desires. But
he thinks that this move is vacuous. For what other
reason have we for attributing such a present desire
to the agent at the time of acting other than the fact
that he is at present acting to provide for his
future? To speak of such a present desire to satisfy
his future desires is just another way of saying that
he is performing a motivated action which is motivated
by the purely rational consideration of prudence; it
is not a way of identifying some additional sentiment
or preference over and above thia consideration of
pure reason.
It seems to m e that lapel's argument suffers
from a certain blind-spot. In cases of the kind which
Nagel discusses, the agent's present desire is
typically present in the form of a disDosition, not in
the form of a distinct psychological occurrence (e.g.,
such as a hunger pang). I do not of course mean a
behavioural disposition. To say that would be to make
the vacuous move which Nagel rightly rejects. If talk
of present dispositional desires merely refers to the
fact that when the opportunity to go shopping arises
 171
the agent does perform that activity, then indeed
'present desire' means no more than 'motive' and is
entirely compatible with rationalism. What 1 d o mean
by speaking of the shopper's present dispbsitional
desire is a disposition he has not just to behave in
certain ways but to have certain desire-experiences
uhich may not actually be occurring at the time of
acting but which at that time must be present in
disDositiona1 forq, and therefore must be accessible
to the agent at that time, even if he does not seek
access to them just then. Anyone who, at a time when
he is not hungry, goes shopping for food for later,
dves have this specific experiential disposition at
the time of acting: at the time of acting were he now
to consider the prospect o € having food when h e needs
it later, he would now be aware of preferrinq
prospect to the prospect of an empty cupboard when
hungry later.
Since the shopper is not hungry at the time of
acting, the disposition he now has consciously to
prefer food later is obviously not a disposition to
feel hunary now if he now thinks of food. But poten-
tial hunger pangs are not the only kind of desire that
such a person can have, and the fact that the
shopper's present desire-disposition is not of this
kind does not imply that it is wholly reducible in
rationalist fashion to a purely intellectual consider-
ation. We can see that this cannot be so by consider-
in9 a fictitious case in which 'reason alone' really
is the only factor. Let us suppose that s o m e m e who
is not at all hungry is standing in his kitchen
examining his dwindling food supply. Let us grant him
the full measure of rational understanding: he knows
full well that if he does not go shapping today, he
172
will have no food to eat when he wants it tomorrow.
But let us further suppose that if he now thinks of
the prospect of having food when he wants it later, he
has not the least tendency to favour that state of
affairs, and if he thinks of the prospect of wanting
food later when the cupboard is bare, he is not at all
averse to that idea. How could this be? Well, per-
haps he is an ascetic who thinks that frustrating his
bodily desires will benefit his soul, or maybe he is
so tired of living that he would not mind starving to
death. In any case, whatever the explanation, let us
suppose that in terms of the person's subjective
experience at the time, both actual and dispositional
in form, the desire to have food on hand when he gets
hungry later simply does not exist. Now this is the
hard case for the rationalist. For suppose we
introduce into the midst of this absolute emotional
vacuum, the purely rational thought "the cupboard will
be bare tomorrow when I get hungry" and let us suppose
that this bare idea, without arousing the least actual
or potential introspectible aversion to that prospect,
or any introspectible preference for its opposite,
somehow impels this ascetic or suicidal person out of
the kitchen, through the door, to and through the
store and back again with baskets full of food. Well
might he say "1 don't know what hit me. I didn't do
it voluntarily, I didn't want to provide for my
future desires. All I know is that the moment after
this thought occurred to me it drove me into 'action'.
I didn't purposely go shopping, it happened to me.
This obsessional thought drove me through an extended
stretch of compulsive shopping-behaviour -- behaviour
which was neither what I wanted to do nor what I
believed might lead to anything that I wanted.''
 173
This is the kind of 'action' we are left with
when we drain the last drop of experiential content
from the motive of desire. While pure rationalist
'action' is not loaically impossible, it never i n fact
happens, and when we seriously consider what it really
would be like if it did happen, we find it would not
count as voluntary PurDosive action in the fullest
sense.
Nagel of course claims that purely rational
considerations, e.g., considerations about one's
future welfare, sometimes motivate people to act ,lo not
merely impel or drive people into 'action', as in the
above counter-example. But that claim of Nagel's does
not in itself provide an adequate reply t o the
counter-example, the point of which is to question the
possibility of distinguishing, in xmrelv rationalist
terms," prudential reasons motivating action from
thoughts about one's future welfare causing 'action'.
To argue that since Nagelian reasons can
motivate, they can motivate the shopper, does not
refute the counter-example but merely begs the
question that it raises.
In the above discussion I have suggested a way
of resisting the attempt to reduce certain cases of
motivating desire to the operation of purely rational
considerations alone. I have argued that in those
cases although desire is not present in the form of an
additional psychological occurrence it is present in
the form of an additional though unactualized disposi-
tion to have desire-experiences. On this account "A_
desires, at time L, some state of affairs &'' means
roughly " I f , at L, A were to think about or seriously
contemplate the realization of g as opposed to the
realization of not he would then experience an
17 4
introspectible pro-attitude towards the former
prospect and/or an introspectible aversion to the
latter prospect (i.e., he would then be aware of
favouring the former prospect and/or disfavouring the
latter) .*r12 This dispositional fact about the agent,
though in certain cases not a fact about a psycho-
logical occurrence is nevertheless an additional fact
about him and about his introspectible experience and
it is something over and above any facts concerning
purely rational considerations.
Two further comments about the proposed
analysis: Firstly, as it stands it does not cover the
case of pathologically unconscious (i.e., repressed)
desires. In this case even if the desirer thinks
about or even seriously contemplates the object of his
unconscious desire he is typically unaware of having
any pro-attitude towards it. Frequently the attitude
of which he is aware is one of aversion.
A natural way of extending the analysis to
cover unconscious desires would be to include among
the conditions needed to actualize the desire in
awareness the removal of whatever resistance, defence
mechanism, etc., is keeping it repressed. On this
analysis "A has an unconscious desire €or x" means
roughly 'A has some repression such that were it
removed and were he then to seriously contemplate X he
would then be aware of an introspectible pro-attitude
towards the realization of X."
I believe this analysis is borne out both by
the way the concept of unconscious desire is used in
theories of the unconscious and by therapeutic
practice.
In attributing an unconscious desire to a
patient an analyst commits himself to the existence of
 175

resistances and defence mechanisms which are at least

in principle removable and whose removal would result
in the patient's becoming conscious of his desire or
a~ersi0n.l~ Moreover in therapeutic practice such
conscious acknowledgement of the desire by the patient
is regarded as an indispensable part of the complete
confirmation of any such hypothesis about his uncon-
scious desires. I'
A second comment about the suggested analysis:
It is clear that a desire which is, at a given moment,
unactualieed in a person's conscious feelings may at
that very time be operative in his behaviour. Indeed
this is the very case which prompted Hume to introduce
the doctrine of the calm passions. For this is the
case which looks suspiciously like an example of
reason alone motivating behaviour. Nevertheleas on my
account, as on Hume's, even in this case there is a
distinct desire-factor present and operative in
motivating behaviour. It is easily overlooked because
it is 'calm'. On the standard interpretation, a calm
passion for Hume is a very 'faint' feeling, i.e., a
feeling of low intensity; this seems implausible for
the reason that many people do not recall having had
such faint feelings on all such occasions. My inter-
pretation (or development) of the doctrine of the calm
passions allows that such desires may not merely be
'faint' but may be wholly unactualieed in the agent's
feelings at the very time when they are motivating his
action. Now it might be thought that this conception
of the calm passions is even less plausible than the
standard one. At least on the standard view there
actually is somethina there at the time of action,
some event, the occurrence of a feeling, albeit a very
faint one, capable of acting as part of the cause of
17 6

the action. On my view of the calm passions it may be

that all that is 'there' is an unactualized disposi-
tion, the non-occurrent fact, reported by the hypo-
thetical "If the agent were to think, etc. then he
would find, etc." How, it may be wondered, can such
an unactualized disposition act as a causal factor at
the time of action?
The answer in brief is that it probably can't.
At least not on its own, not without some occurrent
basis, e.g., some brain-state underlying it, which
accounts both for the feeling disposition, and for
actions motivated by that disposition at times when
that disposition is unactualized in awareness.
Whether reference to such an occurrent basis should be
included in the very analysis of desire is not clear
to me. I am inclined to think that there is no
contradiction in attributing an operative though
unactualized disposition to someone at a given time,
while leaving it open whether or not there exists some
underlying occurrent basis for it at that time." It
might then be regarded as a further empirical question
whether or not such unactualized dispositions are ever
causally operative in the absence of some underlying
occurrent basis.
If it were thought loqicallv impossible for an
unactualized disposition to act as a cause, or if it
were thought inconsistent with the concept of a
motivating desire, a neutral" reference to an under-
lying occurrent state could be incorporated into my
analysis of desire in a manner parallel to Stroud's
functional scheme. To have a desire for s would then
be to be in some state such that if one seriously
contemplates, etc., then one would experience, etc.
 177
What I now want to argue is that not only is
this non-reductionist account acceptable as a Humean
account of motivating desires but that i t also
provides a natural and defensible interpretation of
Hume's own remarks concerning the calm passions, an
interpretation which overcomes the objections that
Stroud raises against theory of the calm passions.
At the end of Book I 1 Section I11 of the
Treatise Hume says that the calm passions are of two
kinds : .
'I. .either certain instincts originally
implanted in our natures, such as benevolence and
resentment, the love of life, and kindness to
children; or the general appetite to good, and aver-
sion to evil, consider'd merely as such" (T 417). And
he continues, "When any of these passions are calm,
and cause no disorder in the soul they are very
readily taken for determinations of reason. . ." (T
417). Now what I suggest is that we interpret Hume's
words "when any of these passions are calm" as imply-
ing that the very same long-term desire (e.g., the
desire for self-preservation), that is to say, the
very same disposition to feel certain urges and
aversions, sometimes is calm and sometimes is not
calm: i.e., calm when it is unactualized, when, that
is, we are not actually contemplating the object of
the desire, but not calm when it is actualized, i.e.,
when we are seriously contemplating the object of the
desire. This interpretation is supported by a remark
that immediately follows. Hume writes "When I receive
any injury from another, [i.e., on the proposed inter-
pretation, when the object of my long-term desire to
retaliate against personal injury is brought forcibly
to my attention -- when, in other words, I a m made
seriously to contemplate that object] I often feel a
178
violent passion which makes me desire his evil and
punishment..." (T 418). Now against the proposed
dispositional interpretation of these remarks it might
be objected that Hume is not saying here that contem-
plating an injury to myself actualizes my pre-existing
desire to retaliate against all injuries to myself but
rather that it first gives rise to that sort of desire
on the occasion of being injured. But, first of all,
this objection is not supported by Hume's claim that
desires such as resentment -- the desire to punish
people who injure one -- are, as he puts it, origin-
ally implanted into our natures; that implies their
pre-existence. And secondly, and more importantly,
this objection is not supported by the passages which
immediately follow the above-quoted remark, and in
which Hume goes on to say: "When I am immediately
threaten'd with any grievous ill, my fears, appre-
hensions, and aversions rise to a great height, and
produce a sensible emotion" (T 418). It is plainly
logically impossible for 'my desire for self-
preservation to rise to a great height' if it were not
previously existing at some lower level. Once again
I would interpret Hume's remark as implying an
experiential-dispositional account of desire: When I
am not immediately threatened with injury and am
therefore not seriously contemplating the prospect of
being harmed, my desire for self-preservation remains
present in me as an unactualized disposition of mine,
but whenever I seriously think of being harmed my
desire-disposition becomes actualized and I feel an
introspectible aversion in connection with that
thought.
This experiential-dispositional interpretation
of Hume's account of desires avoids Stroud's two
 179
objections to the theory of the calm passions that 1
mentioned ear 1 ier .
Stroud's first objection was that Hume has no
independent grounds €or believing in the distinct
existence of the calm passions, i.e., no grounds
independent of their alleged effects upon behaviour.
But the experiential-dispositional account of desire
does provide an independent way of knowing of the
existence of a calm passion, namely by contemplating
the object of the desire in question and discovering
by introspection one's favourable attitude towards its
object, and/or one's aversion towards its opposite.
Stroud's second objection was that the
doctrine of the calm passions, which implies that we
sometimes fail to recognise a calm passion for what it
is, directly conflicts with Hume's incorrigibility
thesis, his claim that we can never be mistaken about
the contents of our conscious minds at any given time.
On the experiential -dispositional inter-
pretation of Hume's account of desire it is quite
possible that in the case of conscious desires, the
only reason why we sometimes do not identify a calm
passion for what it is, is not that we have tried to
do so and got it wrong; but rather that in these cases
we do not happen to think about or to seriously
contemplate the object of the desire at the time of
acting; i.e.. at that particular moment we are not
seriously asking ourselves whether we do or do not
desire it and therefore have not, at that particular
moment, actualized our feelings towards it. This kind
of case is not uncommon. For example, if I hail a
taxi because I am late for a dentist's appointment, I
do not necessarily think about the object of my moti-
vating desire (e.g., the attainment of dental health)
 180

at the moment of acting. At that moment I'm probably

too busy hailing the taxi to think about that. It is
open to the Humean who adopts the proposed account of
desire to claim that if at any particular time we do
bother to introspect upon any of our conscious
desires, i.e., i f we do contemplate the object of out
desire and seriously consult our feelings towards it,
then it is impossible for us at that time to mis-
identify our feeling of inclination, indifference, or
aversion towards it, (though, of course, we may mis-
remember it afterwards). This would seem to be a
sufficiently strong version of the incorrigibility
thesis to serve Humean purposes" while meeting
Stroud's second criticism.
i Let me briefly sumnarize the advantages of my
proposed interpretation of Hume's theory of motiva-
tion:
1) By retaining a distinct desire-factor as an
indispensable ingredient in all motivated action it
avoids the objection which I raised earlier against
Stroud's and Nagel's rationalist accounts.
2) By allowing that a c a l m passion may be an
unactualized feeling disposition (or some state under-
lying such a disposition) it avoids the implausible
standard interpretation of them as very faint or
imperceptible feelings.
3) It reconciles the doctrine of the calm passions
with a plausible version of the incorrigibility
thesis: the version that claims that if we introspect
carefully upon our conscious desires at any moment we
cannot be mistaken about them, or at least, that we
ourselves are in a better position to know what we
consciously desire at any given moment, than anyone
else is.
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This I think is a reasonable view. From time
to time we may be willing to defer to the opinion of
others, e.g., impartial observers, friends, psycho-
analysts, etc., concerning the nature of our uncon-
scious desires or even concerning the nature of our
conscious desires at times when we are not closely
attending to them. But do we ever seriously believe
that someone else may be a better judge than we are of
our own carefully considered conscious desires?

Daniel Shaw
University of Aberdeen

1. In calling my theory a Humean one I do not wish

to defend everything that Hume says about motiva-
tion. In particular I do not think that Hume's
account does justice to the full variety of ways
in which reason enters into motivation. Nor do
I believe that Hume establishes that reason
always is (or should be) subservient to desire.
My view is Humean in that I do defend what I take
to be Hume's two main contentions about motiva-
tion: 1) His anti-rationalist claim that reason
alone cannot motivate action and 2) his 'senti-
mentalist' claim that feeling is always
essentially involved.
2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A.
Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., revised by P.H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 414. Further
references will be cited as 'T' followed by the
relevant page number(s).
3. In typical cases of habit-action more in the
background than in cases of deliberation.
4. Expressible in words though often not actually
verbalized at the time of action.
5. B. Stroud, H l i , Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.
6. Stroud's reference to being 'moved' to perform
that action raises the question what in his view
does being moved consist in over and above the
acquisition of the relevant belief's producing
182
the overt (i. e., purely physical ) behaviour?
Stroud might reply that in such cases that just
is what being moved consists in -- i.e., rational
belief leading to overt behaviour. Alter-
natively, Stroud might give a further non-intro-
spectionist account of intentional action,
(perhaps a 'teleological' account such as that
proposed by Charles Taylor in The Explanation of
Behaviour, New York, Humanities Press, 1964). I
believe that all such accounts which deny an
essential connection between motives and intro-
spectible desire-experiences or pro-attitudinal
experiences are open to the sort of argument set
out earlier in this paper. For further criticism
of teleological theories of motivated action see
A.J. Ayer, "Man as a Subject for Science," pp.
14-15, in PhilosoPhv. Politics and Societt, third
series, ed. by Peter taslett and W.G. Runciman,
Basil Blackwell, 1967, and J. Shaffer, PhilosoPhv
of Hind, Foundations of Philosophy Series,
Prentice Ball.
7. T. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1970. Nagel's theory is not quite the
same as Stroud's. Whereas Nagel thinks there may
be some cases in which the motive is nothing over
and above purely rational (e.g., prudential)
beliefs operative in behaviour (which in virtue
of their operativeness we call 'desire'), Stroud
thinks that motives always involve some distinct
dispositional state (though not necessarily a
feeling or additional mental item of any kind) -
- i.e., whatever state explains the difference
between agents who have a set of beliefs and- act
(e.g., prudently) and agents who have the same
beliefs and don't.
As the following argument is directed against any
account of motivating desires which denies the
necessity of the experiential component it should
apply equally to both Stroud's and Nagel's theor-
ies.
8. In certain kinds of choice situations.
9. This absence of relevant desire experience,
actual or dispositional in form.
10. See Nagel, OD. cit., p. 29.
 183
11. Without any reference to actual or potential
introspectible sentiments of aversion or
preference.

12. In order to rule out cases in which A_ does not

actually desire s at t but is merely disposed at
t to acquire a desire for a, the following
-
condition must be added to the above account:
"Either at t or at some time prior to t, & has
(at least) once actually experienced an intro-
spectible pro-attitude towards the prospect of
-
9."

13. See, e.g., S. Freud, An Outline of Psycho-

analysis, chapter VI, London, Hogarth Press,
1949.
14. -
Ibid., pp. 43, 48.

15. For a discussion of non-occurrent causal factors

see A.J. Ayer's ''Man as a Subject for Science,"
pp. 17-18, in PhilosoDhv. Politics and Society,
third series, ed. by Peter Laslett and W.G.
Runciman, Basil Blackwell, 1967, as well as
Ayer's book Probability and Evidence, pp- 134-
135.

16. That is, neutral regarding the specific nature of

the state.
17. That is, to ensure that motivating desires are
accessible to introspection -- in the case of
conscious desire, accessible in practice; i n the
case of unconscious desire, accessible in
principle.