What can we learn from the role of normative and evaluative attitudes in decision-making?

Abstract:

I want to explore consequences for moral psychology and metaethics of a unified framework I am developing to understand the role of para-motivational attitudes, mental states which we have reasons to believe are not (part of) motives but nevertheless have a role to play in decision-making (intentions and policies, for example). Para-motives help cognitively limited and motivationally unstable agents act in ways that are more coherent and more satisfactory (by the lights of their own motives). They respond to the agent’s motives — we form intentions on the basis of our motivation —, and they, in turn, contribute to future decision-making — intentions (hopefully) somehow prevent us from doing things incompatible with their fulfillment. I think the best account appeals to the para-motives’ effects on the agent’s attention. I try here to extend the same approach to normative and evaluative attitudes. I argue that, properly understood, the role of these attitudes is para-motivational, and that this sheds some new light on their nature. First, their para-motivational rather than directly motivational role undercuts an important argument in favor of a non-cognitivist view of normative and evaluative attitudes. Second, some of the details of their psychological role points, on the contrary, to a cognitive conception of these attitudes. In particular, whereas intentions and policies are memoryless para-motives, there are some reasons to suspect that normative and evaluative attitudes do not just respond to the agent’s present motives, but also to her past ones.

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