Moral Testimony and Motivation

When a person asserts a moral claim with the intention that her audience will believe it on trust, she is giving moral testimony. Described cases in which an agent forms a moral belief on the basis of testimony strike many people as intuitively puzzling or unsatisfactory. Two explanations for this response are prominent in recent literature. First, it is suggested that believing moral testimony strikes us as epistemically inappropriate because we have no way of identifying moral experts. Second, it is held that moral testimony cannot provide moral understanding. I defend a different explanation. Belief in moral testimony puzzles us because intuitively plausible psychological principles tell us that it should not be possible. According to motivational internalism, to believe a moral claim one must have some motivation to act upon it. If we are to believe moral testimony we must be motivated by moral testimony. Yet the intuitive Humean thesis that cognitive states are motivationally inert seems to rule out the possibility that merely comprehending a moral assertion may cause one to be motivated by it.

***Warning: This is a talk on metaethics, not on social or political theory.***