Moral Judgments, Emotions, and some Expectations from Moral Motivation

Abstract

I first provide an analysis of the main premises involved in the core of the metaethical debate about the acceptance of an emotional or a cognitive nature of moral judgments and its implications in relation to moral motivation. In order to accomplish this, I start by sketching the main points of the argumentation of Linda Zagzebski (2003) and Kyle Swan (2004). Secondly I suggest that one of the main problematic points of the paradox detected by those authors lays in the assumption of emotions as intrinsically motivating and I develop a critic of a reduced conceptualization of motivation as well as I try to redefine the processes involved in moral motivation, as emotion and cognition, by showing the converging points of view from moral philosophy and psychology. Eventually, I conclude proposing an integral and noncompartmentalized conceptualization of moral motivation and its relation to emotions and cognition, for it could shed some light on the metaethical debate about the nature of moral judgments, externalism and internalism.