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
Humes 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 dont 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 agents 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 doesnt 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
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

3
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 Humes actual account of motivation

wasnt 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 wont by itself move anyone to do
anything at all. The question for him is then what more is needed to move someone to 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,

4
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 Humes 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 dont 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 dont always think of desires as
utterly outside the scope of reason. (Ill 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 agents reason must
always involve a desire of some sort.

Both Humeans and non-Humeans are trying to answer Davidsons question:

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

5
by giving the agents reason for doing what he did?5 The disagreement is over how to
understand what an agents reasons essentially are, that is, over what things or sorts of
things the phrase the agents 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 agents 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 agents reasons for her action by looking at her
actual or possible practical deliberation. So lets look at the first problem.

1.
The Humean Theory is well summed up by Michael Smith, following Davidson,
in a principle Smith calls P1:

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

6
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
Davidsons original question) would be called the agents reason (or one of the agents
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. Davidsons 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
Davidsons version of this principle.8

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

7
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.

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 Smiths phrase, the various premises, that is,
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 dont entail or even support them. In Smiths terminology this is to say that
we sometimes put together things in ways we shouldnt.

To return to the two principles quoted above, this is what the phrase
appropriately related in Smiths principle adds to Davidsons claim. (Of course, in
Davidsons defense, if we are only making claims about the necessary conditions of
explaining someones 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
premises as beliefs even if it is also a necessary condition that she put them together.)
In theoretical reasoning we can explain the agents 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

9
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 doesnt 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
sisters office, which is only a short walk off the bus route, to see if I could borrow her
car.

If this putting-together point about explanations of actions in terms of the agents

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,

10
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 wont 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
wont be explained even if in fact I believe some premises that entail q.

So Smiths 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
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

11
in the practical syllogism.11

Though I dont want to commit myself to the thought that the practical syllogism is the
correct account of practical reasoning, this doesnt 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 contribute
to realizing phi;
Conclusion the practical judgment: I should A.12

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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 Audis words, A-ing would contribute
to realizing phi, say getting to my sisters 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 sisters office, not toward it. The bus doesnt actually have
to go toward my sisters 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 couldnt happen to the major premise of my
reasoning. I might believe that I want phi, to get to my sisters office for instance, but in
fact I do not. One might think that I cant 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
unjustified faith in human cognitive powers. I may be better aware of my own desires

13
and other mental states than anyone else but that hardly makes me infallible. So perhaps
what I really want is to get to my sisters house, not her office, since that is where she
will be today. Or perhaps I really want to get to my brothers 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 sisters 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 Smiths 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 agents 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
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

14
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 ones 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
couldnt 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 isnt only the agents representations of her desires (that
is, her beliefs about what she wants) that need to be present for these explanations to
work.17 In that case the desires themselves would have no actual role in these
explanations.

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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

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 wouldnt
be enough to show that we can act only on the basis of what we believe we want, without
actually having the desire itself.

16
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.

Consider again the exciting example of my bus trip to my sisters 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 sisters 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 sisters
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
conclude from my answer that the bus really goes by my sisters office.

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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 sisters office
was what led me to get on this bus, it follows that I wanted to go to my sisters office.
And that certainly looks like it flatly contradicts our assumption that I was mistaken in
thinking that I wanted to go to my sisters 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 sisters 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
seems to show that I cant, 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).

18
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 wont 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 sisters 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 sisters 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:

I have a class today. So I need to get to campus. But my %$&# car wont start.
So I need to borrow someone elses 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

19
getting on this bus. So Ill get on this bus.

Here the part of the reasoning which was earlier implicitly rendered as I want to
get to my sisters office appears as It would be a good idea to go to her office. I cant
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
sisters office. The point is that getting to my sisters 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 sisters 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 sisters 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 sisters
office wont 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 sisters office.

What this shows, I think, is that it is simply a mistake to conclude that I cant be
wrong in my belief that I want to go to (it would be a good idea to go to) my sisters
office just because the fact that I got on the bus in order to go to my sisters office entails
that I wanted to go to my sisters office,. What Nagels point shows is not that I cant 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

20
my sisters office that, in that sense, I wanted to get to my sisters office. The thought
that getting on this bus would be a good way to get to my sisters 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 sisters 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
sisters office is based on a confusion wont 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 doesnt by itself refute the Humean Theory of Motivation. It merely shows
that the theory wont work without supposing that the agent who has the desire and belief
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
someones 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

21
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
couldnt happen. Why couldnt 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
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 agents own desires. No doubt all of us occasionally

22
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
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 agents own desires,
needs, cares and preferences. That is, the first premise in the agents practical reasoning,
if made explicit, would not refer to something the agent wants but to something he or she

23
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 Smiths
principle P1), while the agent has to have it, does not occur in the agents 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 agents 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
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 Smiths putting-together point then the claim that the
desires that motivate actions are ever, let alone usually or always, completely in the

24
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 Smiths 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
in the background. The explanatory mechanism that the Humean Theory makes use of
requires enough awareness of ones 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 Smiths 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.

25

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
different chemicals might interact whether or not anyone is aware of them. That would
be analogous to thinking that ones 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

26
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
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 someones 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 persons 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 agents.
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

27
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, doesnt 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
her own desires, differ only in their level of awareness of their motives. The former
agent simply doesnt 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 doesnt 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 wouldnt a desire to benefit needy relatives also work? Or why

28
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 doesnt in the end deal with the putting-together point. The
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 agents motivating reason and
distinguishing it sharply from her normative or justifying reasons doesnt 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.

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

29
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.

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.

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 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.

Davidson, p. 5.

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.

10

As Lewis Carrolls 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].

11

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

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

12

13

Audi, R.: Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (Abington, Routledge, 2006), p. 96.
This is Derek Parfits way of putting it. See Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Motivation, Aristotelian

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

14

15

Nagel, T.: The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 29.
Of course a desire, such as the one being represented by my belief that I want to get to my sisters

office, is itself a representational state.

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.
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.

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.
20

Nagel, 1970, pp. 29-30.

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.

23

Again, see the example in note 16.

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.
25

Pettit and Smith, p. 568.

26

They refer to this as the intentional conception.

27

Pettit and Smith, pp. 572-573.

28

This is roughly Pettit and Smiths 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

One of Al Meles 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.
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.