Cornell Realism - Motivational Externalism

Motivational Externalism

Moral judgements need not have any motivational force at all. A common way of explaining the thesis invokes the claim that amoralists are possible – that there could be someone who makes moral judgements without feeling the slightest corresponding motivation. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to Humean arguments against cognitivism: if moral judgements do not have motivational force in the first place, there is no reason to think they are non-cognitive states. Some, like Brink, add to this motivational externalism an externalism about normative reasons, which denies that there is any necessary connection or relation between what one has reason to do and what one is motivated to do (or would be motivated to do, if one were fully rational and knew all of the facts).