Wanting to Do What's Right
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grant-ljg-phd-24-2023-thesis.pdf
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Thesis PDF
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1.11 MB
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Author(s)
Grant, Lyndal Jennifer
Advisor(s)
Setiya, Kieran
Date Issued
February 2023
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
It may seem obvious that good people want to do what is right. But moral philosophers disagree about whether it is virtuous to be motivated to do what is right as such. Some, inspired by Kant, argue that wanting to do what is right as such is always morally praiseworthy. Others claim that such a desire amounts to a kind of moral fetishism.
This dissertation lays out the groundwork for a new way of thinking about what it is to want to do what is right as such. The central task (which is the topic of chapter 1) is to provide a new account of moral fetishism that allows us to maintain what I take to be the natural view: it is not always wrong to want to do what is right as such (though it sometimes is). I argue that whether wanting to do what is right as such is virtuous or morally fetishistic depends on the deeper structure of the agent’s motivations. What makes the fetishist a fetishist, I argue, is that they want to do what is right whatever rightness might be. By contrast, the good person’s desire to do what is right is conditional on their substantive conception of right action being at least approximately correct. This account allows us to resolve seemingly conflicting intuitions about cases of wanting to do what is right, and also suggests a more general account of how the contents of our desires depend on our beliefs together with further features of our underlying motivational states.
Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into the nature of desire contents, providing an independent, disposition-based argument for a thesis on which my account of moral fetishism depends: that two people can both want p, but in wanting p, nonetheless have desires with different contents. Chapter 3 then shows how my account of moral fetishism creates trouble for prominent theories of moral worth. The upshot is that any adequate account of moral worth will need to place additional constraints on the content of the desires that ultimately explain why the agent acts as she does.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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