Virtue, Knowledge and Wickedness: Ronald Milo on McDowell's internalist moral realism

“Is it possible for a person to understand that what he proposes to do is morally wrong and yet prefer to do it nonetheless?”

Ronald D. Milo opens his 1998 paper “Virtue, Knowledge and Wickedness” with this question, to which a diversity of answers appeal to a similarly diverse slew of (in several cases, incompatible) intuitions about moral phenomenology.

John McDowell’s internalist moral realist commitments—which are at the brunt of most of Milo’s critical attention—lead him (McDowell) to answer the question in the negative. Milo thinks that this response is mistaken and suggests that a flaw in McDowell’s thinking lies, in part, in McDowell’s obfuscation of moral convictions being intrinsically motivating and necessarily motivating.

First, though, I think it is important to try to get clear on what the premises are on which John McDowell relies in reaching this conclusion. Milo characterizes McDowell’s position as subscribing to the following claims (the first two representing the internalist realist framework within which he addresses the question posed at the outset):

McDowell’s internalist realist assumptions:
• The motivational force of beliefs is internal to them
• Moral properties are real, as opposed to merely “projected”


(1) A morally virtuous person exhibits two important capacities:
a. For all situations that call for a response of feeling or action on the part of the agent, the agent is able to recognize what is morally called for in that situation (Virtue and Vice, ed. Paul, Miller, Paul, p. 197).
b. The recognition in (a) provides the agent, in and of itself, with motivation sufficient to ensure that she acts accordingly (197) [(It follows from 3b that) no corresponding desire is required to motivate action; such desires might exist as upshots of the agent’s “acknowledging that her recognition that a certain act is morally called for is sufficient to motivate her”(198) whilst themselves not being necessary to motivate action.
(2) If a person is not morally virtuous, then a person cannot recognize what is morally called for in a given situation. (From 1)
(3) Those who are morally wicked cannot recognize what is morally called for in a given situation. (From 1 and 2)

The particularly strong claim in McDowell’s argument is 1b, which maintains that a virtuous person, upon recognizing some act θ to be morally required, is guaranteed to θ; this is, McDowell thinks, because this recognition will silence any competing desires. McDowell is, then, more in line with Aristotle than Kant in the sense that McDowell precludes the possibility of a morally virtuous meeting morality’s demands whilst desiring to do otherwise (while Kant finds such actions to merit the highest of praise). The recognition by a virtuous person that an action is morally required, by virtue of silencing competing desires, becomes what McDowell brands “intrinsically” motivating. This sort of move must be made for cognitivists like McDowell who must explain moral motivation without recourse to desires.

Milo, though attracted to some features of McDowell’s account, finds it unconvincing. Specifically, Milo’s problem is that McDowell (he thinks) gives no good reason to think that a conclusion about the recognition of a fact being intrinsically motivating for all people would follow from the recognition of a moral requirement’s being intrinsically motivating for a decisively virtuous person. (Indeed, McDowell does think that, for all agents, if a given agent recognizes that an action is morally required, then she is guaranteed to act accordingly. Wicked individuals, ipso facto, must have not really recognized what is morally required as such--otherwise, McDowell would offer, they would have met morality’s demands)

Milo rebuts McDowell’s reasoning with a counterexample of the following form: it depicts the recognition of something’s being the case as intrinsically motivating for a subject S, given antecedent facts about S, but not intrinsically motivating for Z, given antecedent facts about Z. Milo writes:

“Thus, one might explain a person’s desire for sweets as consisting simply int eh fact that, for this person, the conception of, e.g., candy as sweet is sufficient to motivate him to eat it. If this is so, then we can explain the difference between someone who likes the taste of bananas and someone who does not as follows: for the former, the thought that the object being offered to him is a banana is sufficient to motivate him to eat it, other things being equal, whereas for the latter this same thought fails to be motivating. For the person who likes the taste of bananas, the thought of eating one is intrinsically motivating. We need not conclude from this, however, that this thought is also necessarily motivating, in the sense that anyone who has the same thought must be motivated by it. Why not explain the difference between the virtuous person and the wicked person in the same way?” (201)

And so, Milo’s argument seems to be:

1. If the conclusion that bananas are necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire bananas, the thought of bananas is intrinsically motivating, then the conclusion that the recognition of an action as being morally required is necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire to act morally, the recognition of an act’s being morally required is intrinsically motivation.
2. The conclusion that bananas are necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire bananas, the thought of bananas is intrinsically motivating,
3. Therefore, the conclusion that the recognition of an action as being morally required is necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire to act morally, the recognition of an act’s being morally required is intrinsically motivating.

If Milo’s argument is sound, then 1b of McDowell’s argument must be rejected. Milo anticipates some responses that McDowell could give to the conclusion reached in the “banana argument.” He mentions a response by David McNaughton, who defends a breed of McDowellian internalist realism, which proffers the question: “there is something odd in the idea that an agent might recognize that he is morally required to do something and yet not believe that he has good reason to do it…for in what sense could he be said to recognize it as a requirement” (202). If the oddness of that supposition is “sufficiently odd”, then we are perhaps on our way to isolating some relevant difference about recognition of moral requirements and recognition about (say) what a banana smells like that justifies claiming that the former recognition is necessarily motivating and the latter not. Milo, however, isn’t swayed by the force of McNaughton’s appeal to oddness. “I must confess that I myself find nothing odd about this. Why should we think it odd if a wholly self-centered person sees no reason at all not to do something the he recognizes to be unjust but to his advantage?” (202)

Milo proceeds to address quite a few interesting features of McDowell’s position, all the while stressing that we have no good reason to think that a morally wicked individual could not recognize an action as morally required whilst preferring not to do it.

Milo finally won me over, but not until he pulled out the “depression” card. Milo “sneaks this card” into the deck not all at once, but by first discussing a form of temporary depression that Jonathan Dancy has called “accidie.” Dancy writes: “People who suffer from accidie are those who just don’t’ care for a while about things which would normally seem to them to be perfectly good reasons for action.” (210). Dancy adds there might, in cases of accidie, effect a loss of the normal motivational force of one’s beliefs; these are cases in which “the depressive is not deprived of the relevant beliefs by his depression, they just leave him indifferent” (210).

Milo (I think appropriately) pushes Dancy’s accidie a step further and suggests that any position is dogmatically unfounded if it rules out, a priori, the possibility of accidie being permanent. The permanency of accidie would land such a person an “amoralist” in the sense of being capable of recognizing conduct to be morally required but not caring (or at least, not caring enough to act accordingly).

Let us return now to the initial question:

“Is it possible for a person to understand that what he proposes to do is morally wrong and yet prefer to do it nonetheless?”

If there exist individuals in the state of permanent accidie (a state which, as I understand, would be a consequence of most sorts of clinical depression), then the answer to the question should be “yes.” And in answering the question “yes,” it follows that recognition of an action as being morally required is not intrinsically motivating for all. And so, in conclusion, we wouldn’t have a good reason to think that a wicked person is incapable of recognizing an action as being morally required.