Motive

A motive is something – often desire(s) or emotion(s) – that move us to action.  In many cases, the motivation behind one’s actions is narrowly self-interested.  Our motives are not, however, necessarily self-interested, nor are they always so.

In ethical contexts, perhaps more so than in other contexts, motivation and self-interest tend to diverge.  This is not to say that self-interest is absent from ethics.  Some accounts of moral motivation – ethical egoism, for example – hold that self-interest is the motivation for ethical behavior.

Varieties of ethics based on divine command, in contrast, hold that the motivation for ethical behavior should be, for example, love (of the divine) or obedience (to the laws handed down from the divine).

In mainstream normative ethics, the extent to which motives are taken to be morally relevant in the assessment of actions varies from one ethical theory to another.

Utilitarian theories of ethics, since they are concerned solely with the outcomes of actions, are indifferent to the motivations of actions.  According to utilitarianism, an action is right if it brings about good (or the best) outcomes and wrong if it brings about bad outcomes.  Thus, the motivation behind an action has no bearing on its rightness or wrongness, because rightness and wrongness are determined by the outcome of the action.

Theories of virtue ethics, in contrast, place considerable emphasis on the motivations for actions, because they reflect the good (or bad) character of the person who performed the action.  Virtue theorists will claim that a virtuous man is motivated by the right reasons – his generosity and magnanimity are not merely self-interested calculations.  Rather, they stem from his good character.  The virtue theorist would also claim that a man who happens to perform a good action (accidentally) is not virtuous.

Kantian deontological theories, finally, place motivation at the center of ethical life.  Kant claims that duty is the appropriate moral motivation, and that only those actions motivated by duty are moral actions.  Thus, on Kant’s account, the man who gives to a charity for self-interested reasons (he wants to appear generous, for example), is not genuinely performing a moral act because he lacks a sense of duty, that is, he is not motivated by a sense of duty.

Also of note is the following connection between moral motivations and moral judgments.  It is argued by some that moral motivations are entailed by moral judgments.  To put it another way, if a person reaches a moral judgment to perform (or not to perform) a given action, the person is thereby motivated to act in accordance with that judgment.