empathy, shared intentionality, and motivation by moral reasons

Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivationby Moral Reasons

Marion Hourdequin

Accepted: 17 May 2011 /Published online: 12 June 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to countas a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make arational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true,but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires,interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moralreasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops an argument along these lines.Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to,and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires.More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy andshared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasonsgrounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moralreasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moralagents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to theirown pre-existing ends.

Keywords Empathy . Shared intentionality . Moral reasons . Moralmotivation . Internalism .

Externalism

The debate between internalists and externalists about normative reasons centers on thequestion of motivation. Internalists generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is tocount as a genuine normative reason for an agent, A, to do something, then R mustmake a rational connection with some element of the agent’s “subjective motivationalset” (Williams 1981). Put in other words, if R is a reason for A to φ, then A must have

Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2012) 15:403–419DOI 10.1007/s10677-011-9288-5

M. Hourdequin (*)Department of Philosophy, Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903,USAe-mail: [email protected]

“some motive which will be served or furthered by his φ -ing” (Williams 1981).Externalists disagree. They hold that the existence of normative reasons is independent ofthe conative particularities of individual agents. Normative reasons need not be tied tomotivational sets of the agents to whom they are addressed. The appeal of internalism isthat it helps to explain how normative reasons motivate, while externalism seems to leavethis a mystery. The appeal of externalism is that it avoids relativizing normative reasonsto particular agents, while internalism’s agent-relativism seems to leave no room fornormative reasons—such as moral reasons—that apply to agents regardless of theirparticular ends.

Debates about internal and external reasons have deep significance in understanding thenature of morality. In particular, if internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply toagents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, thenwe may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent: such reasons presupposeconditions of applicability that simply make no sense. Richard Joyce (2001) develops anargument along these lines, concluding, in the end, that morality as we know it is “a myth.”Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply toagents independently of their pre-existing ends, and at the same time, have the potential tomotivate. The trick in squaring these two aspects of moral reasons—their applicability tomoral agents independently of those agents’ ends (what one might call “the intersubjectivityof reasons”) and the potential for these reasons to motivate (or what I shall call “themotivational constraint on reasons”)—is to explain how it is that moral agents can bemotivated by normative reasons that fail to connect to the pre-existing ends that each ofthem has.

My view is that an instrumentalist conception of motivation by reasons—wherereasons can motivate only if they properly link up with a pre-existing desire or goalof the agent in question—is too narrow. In particular, it is too narrow because itexcludes the possibility that the desires and goals of others can provide normativereasons for agents to act while meeting the motivational constraint. What I aim to show isthat moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy (understood as a particularkind of attunement and responsiveness to others’ emotions) and shared intentionality(understood as a particular kind of attunement and responsiveness to others’ goals), aresensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. Morespecifically, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in thedesires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests1 of others. Moral reasons are asubset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents canbe motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends.

1 An Argument Against Moral Reasons

To see what is at stake here, it is helpful to consider Richard Joyce’s (2001) argument fromthe instrumentality of normative reasons to the non-existence of moral reasons. Joyce holdsthat normative reasons must have the potential to motivate the agent(s) to whom they apply:that is, they must meet the motivational constraint on normative reasons (Joyce 2001;

1 I shall use “ends” as shorthand to refer to such desires, concerns, interests, and commitments. I intend“ends” broadly so as to include the desires and interests of sentient, non-human organisms.

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Williams 1981). He further argues that moral reasons fail to meet this constraint. Theargument goes as follows2:

1. Moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of their pre-existing ends.2. To count as legitimate or genuine normative reasons, reasons must have the potential to

motivate those to whom they apply (the motivational constraint).3

3. A normative reason has the potential to motivate only if it rationally connects to somepre-existing end(s) of the agent to whom it applies (the instrumentality of normativereasons).

4. A normative reason rationally connects to an agent’s end(s) only if acting on thatreason would further one of A’s ends.

5. Not all moral reasons point to actions that would further some end(s) of the agent(s) towhom they purport to apply.

6. Not all agents have ends to which moral reasons rationally connect.7. Therefore, not all agents have the potential to be motivated by moral reasons.8. Hence, moral reasons (qua reasons that apply to agents independently of their pre-

existing ends) are not legitimate or genuine normative reasons.

For the sake of argument, I grant premises 1 and 2. My argument in this paper centers onrejection of the third premise, the instrumentality of normative reasons. My central aim is toprovide an account that shows how agents can be motivated by reasons grounded in others’ends, not merely by reasons grounded in their own, pre-existing ends. In doing so, I showhow agents can be motivated by moral reasons, which, I have suggested, are a subset ofreasons grounded in the ends of valuing subjects.

2 Motivation by Reasons

It is worth noting at the outset that in order to show that agents can be motivated by reasonsgrounded in others’ ends, it won’t be sufficient to show that agents who lack the requisiterationally-connected end(s) are sometimes motivated to φ as a result of being offered aputative reason to do it. For this phenomenon might be explained by the fact that undercertain circumstances an agent might feel coerced, threatened, or pressured to act inaccordance with a putative reason even though s/he was not compelled by the reason itself.What we want, then, is an account that shows how agents can be motivated by reasons thatdo not further any of their ends, and this account in turn will depend on some conception ofwhat it is to be motivated by a reason.

I cannot give here a full account of what it is to be motivated by a reason, but I willproceed under the assumption that being motivated by a reason requires that the agent take

3 Joyce distinguishes between subjective rational reasons and objective rational reasons, where the formercount as reasons from the agent’s limited epistemic perspective (e.g., if the agent is hungry, and believes thatthe food she’s been offered will satisfy her hunger, then she has a subjective rational reason to eat the food,even if she lacks an objective rational reason to eat it, because the “food” she’s been offered is actually madeof plastic.) Moral reasons are presumably reasons of the latter—i.e., objective—kind. To meet themotivational constraint, it must therefore be the case that an agent could be motivated by a moral reason R,assuming she had the relevant true background beliefs. An agent’s failure to be motivated by a moral reasondue to certain false beliefs is not sufficient to disqualify the reason: if the agent, rational and fully informed,could be motivated by the reason in question, the reason meets the motivational constraint.

2 For sake of clarity and contextualization, I have reconstructed the argument Joyce (2001, p. 77) offers,filling in some key premises from earlier in the text and rephrasing the argument to emphasize Joyce’s claimsabout reasons (while omitting his related claims about ‘ought’ statements and moral obligations).

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the putative reason as a consideration that counts in favor of a particular action for her andnot just a consideration that counts in favor of a particular action from the perspective ofsomeone else who (for example) has power over her in ways that give her reason to act inaccordance with that person’s wishes or reasons.4 My claim, then, is this: even if an agentlacks pre-existing ends to which moral reasons rationally connect, that agent can havemoral reasons to do things, and (as required by the motivational constraint) potentially bemotivated by those reasons.

My position is one that straddles the divide between internal and external reasons. Onthe one hand, I am sympathetic to the concern, expressed by internalists, that externalreasons are “spooky” or metaphysically queer (Mackie 1991). If there are external reasons,internalists ask, then how do these reasons get their motivational grip? Though this islegitimate worry, I am dissatisfied with the internalist conclusion that normative reasonsmust be relativized to the ends of the agent(s) to whom they apply in order to meet themotivational contraint.

The strategy I favor is to relativize reasons to ends,5 while at the same time insisting thatit is not just an agent’s own ends that can be reason-giving, but anyone’s ends.6 Thisstraddles the divide between internalism and externalism, because normative reasons areinternal in the sense that all reasons are grounded in the desires and interests of valuingsubjects, and also in the sense that they have the potential to motivate moral agents, butexternal in the sense that they can apply to and motivate agents who lack pre-existing endsthat would be promoted by acting on these reasons.7

If we relativize reasons to ends in the broad sense I have suggested, then moral reasonswill have to be grounded in a subset of the ends that valuing subjects have, because clearlyothers’ nefarious ends do not give us moral reasons to promote them. However, myargument does not depend on the specification of this subset; we need only a rough sense ofwhat such a specification might involve. One way of going is to say that others’ endsprovide prima facie reasons for us to promote them, but since there are innumerable ends ofthis kind, and because the promotion of some ends would compromise the realization ofothers, we need to disqualify some ends as reason giving and somehow prioritize the rest. Ileave open for now the criterion one might employ here, though my own view is that a

4 On my view, being motivated by a reason doesn’t require conscious awareness of the reason on which oneacts. On this point, I find Nomy Arpaly’s (2003, ch. 2) arguments particularly convincing.5 For simplicity, I allow that ‘ends’ can include subjective ends (desires and subjective interests) and—ifthere are any—“objective ends,” such as survival, that count as ends independently of whether the subjectdesires them or not. This broad account of ends can accommodate cases in which a person lacks the desire/end of preserving her health, although it is in her interest to do so. Interesting and difficult issues arisesurrounding cases where subjective and objective ends come apart. The inclusive view I adopt here can helpmake sense of cases where an individual lacks “ends” in a robust sense or lacks the capability to form ends,but nevertheless has interests, the promotion of which might enable her to gain or regain the capacity to formand act on her own (and others’) ends. The overall point about the possibility of motivation by others’ endscan stand, however, even if one denies the existence of objective ends.6 This strategy is not new; many philosophers have tried to highlight the symmetry among agents to suggestthat if one’s own ends are the source of reasons, then others’ ends must be too. Kant’s ethics is the seminalsource for arguments of this kind; influential twentieth century works include Thomas Nagel’s ThePossibility of Altruism (1970) and Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (1978). In recent work, StephenFinlay (2006) defends an “end-relational” theory of normative reasons, which grounds reasons in ends (andnot necessarily in the ends of the agent to whom they are addressed) and allows for the existence of externalreasons. However, Finlay maintains a broadly internalist model of moral motivation, where external reasonsfail to motivate.7 David Wong (2006, ch. 7) makes a related claim. Wong “[affirms] externalism with respect to theindividual’s motivation, but…affirms internalism with respect to human motivation” (183).

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naturalistically-informed account of morality that specifies the function of morality inhuman life might provide some clue.8

So let us suppose that all normative reasons, including moral reasons, are reasonsgrounded in ends, broadly construed, and therefore that there are no reasons built into thefabric of the world, independent of beings that have ends (Goldman 2005). Now, to counterthe internalist, I need not deny that reasons can and often do motivate by rationallyconnecting to an end of the agent(s) to whom they are addressed. However, as I argue in thenext section, reasons can also motivate by connecting with a general human capacity torecognize and be motivated by the ends of others, and to see others’ ends as providingreasons to act. The next section defends this claim by outlining two key psychologicalmechanisms that undergird this capacity. Although I am not the first to argue that others’ends can be reason giving, the provision of a psychologically realistic account ofmotivation by such reasons advances the case by indicating more clearly how suchmotivation might work.

3 The Capacity to be Motivated by Reasons Based in Others’ Ends

One way to defend the view that an agent can be motivated by reasons that are independentof her own ends is, as I have suggested, to appeal to the relevant phenomenology. When weteach a young child to share, for example, we are not only teaching him that sharingadvances some standing desire of his (e.g., to be treated well by other children), we are alsopointing out that the desires, wants, and needs of other children are things that can andshould count as reasons for him, regardless of his own subjective desires. In our moralteaching and conversation, we frequently presuppose that others’ desires and interests canbe sources of reasons. When we tell a person that they owe us the truth, we are not, ingeneral, appealing exclusively to that person’s interests or pointing out how telling the truthwill best satisfy certain ends that person already holds. Instead we are pointing out that ourends count—or should count—in their decisions about what to say and do.

Now, if we accept as a working hypothesis the proposal that all normative reasons aregrounded in ends (though not necessarily the ends of the agents to whom they apply)—thenthe critical question is this: how can and do such reasons motivate? Here, we mightconsider the possibility that each of us has, as one of our ends, a standing desire to promoteothers’ ends. Yet this is implausible: there are surely many people who lack such a desire.9

8 A number of authors have developed naturalistic accounts of morality tied to the function of morality inhuman life. Allan Gibbard (1990, 26) , for example, understands morality as growing out of humans’ evolvedsocial nature and emphasizes the role of morality in coordination and cooperation. David Wong (2007, 39–44 and ch. 2 more generally) describes the interpersonal function of morality as “facilitating socialcooperation” and the intrapersonal function as “promoting a psychological order within the individual” by“specifying what is worthwhile for the individual to become and pursue.” Wong argues that these functionsdeveloped through the course of human biological and cultural evolution and that these functions constrainthe content of moralities and moral reasons, yet allow for a plurality of acceptable moral systems. I haveargued that the central function of morality is to harmonize the diverse ends people hold (Hourdequin 2005).Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the function of morality is to facilitate cooperation, suppressselfishness, and make social life possible (according to Haidt and Kesebir 2010, 800); this function bearssignificant resemblance to those articulated by Gibbard, Wong, and myself, and to the extent that thisfunction is accepted as authoritative, it will constrain hat count as legitimate moral reasons.9 On this point, I agree with Joyce (2001). Joyce actually puts this in terms of a desire for the good of thecommunity; but the general point holds. The question of whether a standing desire of this kind can groundmoral reasons is discussed further below.


Fortunately, there is an alternative explanation: the capacity to be motivated by reasonsgrounded in others’ ends does not require a standing desire, because there is a generalhuman capacity to recognize and be motivated by the ends of others, and to see others’ends as reasons to act, and this can and frequently does underpin moral motivation.10

The critical challenge is to defend the existence and explain the workings of this capacity.I do this by identifying two key elements that undergird it: attunement to others’ emotionsthrough empathy, and attunement to others’ ends through joint attention and sharedintentionality.

4 Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Intersubjective Perspective Taking

In this section, I argue that attunement to others’ emotions through empathy, andattunement to others’ goals through shared intentionality, or what I call shared conation,are crucial to motivation by reasons grounded in others’ ends. Empirical work indevelopmental psychology indicates that both kinds of attunement develop early andconsistently in infancy and early childhood. While they are elaborated in different ways,these basic capacities are present in almost all human beings. Many authors have suggestedthat emotional and conative attunement have an important role to play in morality, howevertheir relevance to questions of moral agency, moral motivation, and moral reasons has notbeen fully elucidated. Nevertheless, others have proposed that empathy is a necessarycondition for moral agency (e.g., Blair 1995), that empathy is foundational for morality(Slote 2007), and that “shared intentionality”—which involves a kind of intersubjective,conative perspective-taking—is critical to language learning (Tomasello 2001, 2008),theory of mind (Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003; Tomasello et al. 2005), and the “skills andmotivations for reacting to and even internalizing various kinds of social norms, collectivebeliefs, and cultural institutions” (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007, 124). This work suggeststhat empathy and shared intentionality, which I discuss below in turn, play a critical role inmoral life.

A. Shared Emotion and Emotional Perspective Taking: Empathy

Empathy, in the most basic sense, involves the capacity to share emotions with others, eitherby sharing another individual’s actual emotions or by anticipating the way an individual wouldbe likely to feel in a particular situation (Hoffman 2000).11 In recent work, Frans de Waal(2008, 281) defines empathy as “the capacity to (a) be affected by and share the emotionalstate of another, (b) assess the reasons for the other’s state, and (c) identify with the other,adopting his or her perspective.” Thus, empathy typically involves shared emotionalexperience, but in all but its most basic forms, it goes beyond emotional mirroring. Empathy

10 In this regard, my view resembles that of David Wong (2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009). The key features ourviews share in common are these: 1) Both allow that moral reasons can motivate without connecting with astanding desire of the agent, and 2) the existence of a moral reason for an agent to do some action X is notdependent on the particular motivations of the agent in question, though 3) there is a sense in which (asWong 2009, 345 puts it) “moral reasons are constrained by human psychology.” Insofar as internalism aboutreasons holds that the existence of a reason for A to Φ depends on the presence of some desire, interest, orend of A’s that would be served or furthered by Φ-ing, neither my view nor Wong’s counts as internalist.11 Although ‘empathy’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘sympathy,’ it is helpful to distinguish thetwo: empathy necessarily involves feeling what the other feels or what one might expect that he or she feels,it is a kind of “feeling with”; whereas sympathy involves “feeling for” another person—e.g., feeling badly foranother’s misfortune—without necessarily sharing the feelings of that person.

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involves a particular orientation toward the other, in which agents are attuned and responsiveto the affective states of those with whom they empathize.

The capacity to share emotions through empathy appears early in infancy. Empathy atthis stage often works through emotional contagion; empathic responses are “primitive,automatic, and…involuntary” and involve the triggering of an emotional response in theobserver that mirrors that of the observed, or is a response to the situation of the observed(Hoffman 2000, 36). One baby’s cries, for example, can trigger an empathic response inanother through mirroring, or what Hoffman calls “mimicry.”

More advanced modes of empathy involve sophisticated cognitive and verbal abilities.In mediated association, an individual can be prompted to feel empathy on the basis of awritten or verbal description of another person’s situation. In such cases, “language is themediator or link between the model’s feeling and the observer’s experience” (Hoffman2000, 49). In role taking, empathy is still more complex, because it requires that theobserver take the perspective of another, imagining the emotions appropriate to the other’ssituation.

There is an important feature of empathetic arousal that all modes—primitive andadvanced—share in common. Although advanced modes may involve greater consciouscontrol, the empathic reaction, in general, reflects responsiveness to others’ emotions andneeds.12 Once children are old enough to differentiate self from other, empathetic arousaltypically initiates sympathetic concern and motivation to alleviate the other’s distress(Hoffman 2000, 87).

How, then, should we understand empathy in relation to the question of whetherindividuals can be motivated by reasons independent of their particular ends? Research onempathy generally, and Hoffman’s work in particular, indicate that empathic responsesgenerate motivation to alleviate others’ distress, and such motivation is typically triggerednot by the individual’s own pre-existing desires, but rather as a response to somethingexternal: encounters with others and their emotional states. Empathy allows us to seeothers’ distress as a reason to act to alleviate it, and we need not have a standing desire toalleviate others’ distress in order to be moved by the distress of others that we happen toencounter in the world.

In its more mature forms, empathy involves a general orientation of concern for others,or what one might classify as an affective attitude. Yet even in this mature form, empathyitself is not a desire, goal, commitment, or project. Empathy is not an end. That is, empathyis not a desire to alleviate the suffering of others; it is an orientation toward others’emotions that makes these emotions salient and enables others’ distress to get a grip on us,to matter or to count.13

12 Following Martin Hoffman (2000), I am understanding empathy as involving both cognitive and emotionalelements. Some authors (e.g., Blair 2008) distinguish “cognitive empathy” (involving the ability to discern/know what others are feeling) from “emotional empathy” (involving concern for what others are feeling), and itappears that “cognitive empathy” can function in the absence of the kind of responsiveness described here—i.e.,some individuals (e.g., those with antisocial personality disorders) appear to have normal capacities forcognitive empathy paired with significant deficiencies in emotional empathy. For details, see Blair 2008.13 Empathy can perhaps be helpfully be understood as grounding an attitude or way of seeing others that isanalogous in important ways to the attitude toward or way of seeing ourselves that gives internal reasonstheir motivational grip. On this view, my own desires ground reasons for me to act in virtue of a generalorientation of concern for myself. One way of understanding the failure to be motivated by one’s own desiresis thus through a kind of alienation that weakens self-concern: in such cases, it no longer matters to me that Ihave certain ends, the reason-giving power of my ends is attenuated. My own distress, even, may cease to bestrongly reason-giving in certain circumstances.


Stephen Darwall (1983) offers a particularly instructive case that illustrates howemotional engagement with the plight of others can allow us to see their suffering as areason to act, in the absence of a relevant prior desire.14 The case is that of Roberta, acollege student who has led a relatively comfortable and sheltered life. While at college,however, she sees a film that vividly portrays the abysmal treatment of textile workers inthe U.S. South. As a result, she is motivated to engage in activism—specifically, a boycott—to assist the workers in securing better working conditions and a greater voice. AsDarwall (1983, 41) explains:

Roberta may have had no desire prior to viewing the film that explains her decision tojoin the boycott. And whatever desire she does have after the film seems itself to bethe result of her becoming aware, in a particularly vivid way, of considerations thatmotivate here desire and that she takes as reasons for her decision: the unjustifiablesuffering of the workers.

Darwall’s key point here is that prior to seeing the film, it need not have been the casethat Roberta had a general desire to relieve suffering “or even a sensitivity to suffering inthe sense that she was likely to notice it without its being brought to her attention” (1983,40). Roberta’s response to the film, her perception of a reason to act, need not be explainedby reference to a standing desire of hers. My view of the case is that it was Roberta’sempathic response to the textile workers that enabled her to see their suffering as a reason toact.

So empathy itself is not a desire, though it may trigger desires. For example, seeingpictures of victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the 2011 earthquake and tsunamiJapan may trigger a desire to help not only those particular individuals, but those affectedby these crises more generally. Further, exposure to humanitarian crises may prompt thedevelopment of a desire to promote emergency preparedness and to change the social,institutional, and infrastructural conditions that exacerbate the effects of natural disasters. Inthis way, experiences of empathy may reveal to us conditions in the world that we thendesire to change.

However, although empathy may lead us to develop other-directed desires, such desiresaren’t required for others’ ends to provide reasons for us to act. Through empathy, theemotions of others point to reasons for action: reasons to alleviate distress and to attend toothers’ desires, interests, and ends, whose frustration generates distress. Empathically-shared emotions thus provide a motivational link to others’ ends.

B. “Shared Intentionality,” Shared Conation, and Conative Perspective-Taking

One of the crucial features of empathy, with respect to moral motivation, is that itenables us to see others’ emotions—particularly others’ distress—as reason giving. Ourcapacity to share conations with others can work analogously: in this case, we see others’goals as reason giving. The literature that most closely explores this possibility is work indevelopmental psychology on joint attention and “shared intentionality.” I describe thiswork below, explaining how what I call “conative perspective-taking” provides a secondmeans by which agents’ can be motivated by reasons based in others’ ends.

Some of the most interesting and relevant work on shared intentionality is that ofMichael Tomasello. According to Tomasello, shared intentionality, or “we” intentionality,

14 I thank David Wong for helping me appreciate the salience of this case. Wong (2006, ch. 7) also discussesDarwall’s example.

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involves “collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states withone another” (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007; see also Gilbert 1989; Searle 1995).15 Sharedintentionality begins to develop during the first year of life. It involves responding to andsharing others’ emotions, identifying the objects of others’ attention, discerning and sharingothers’ goals, cooperative communication, and coordinated social interaction. Jointattention is a key element of shared intentionality and involves two individuals intentionallylooking at the same thing (object, scene, person, etc.) with a shared awareness of oneanother’s attention to that thing (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007). Non-human primatesseem to lack this capacity for joint attention. Chimpanzees, for example, will followanother’s gaze to an object or location, however, they don’t seem to engage in jointattention (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007). In contrast, human infants not only follow thegaze of others, but “attempt to share attention with others”: before one year of age, humanchildren not only share similar experiences (in virtue of attending to the same object, forexample) with an adult, but are aware of and motivated to seek these shared experiences(Tomasello and Carpenter 2007). Tomasello and Carpenter (2007) identify a number ofdomains in which human children seek to “[share] psychological states with others,” incontrast to non-human primates, who remain focused on individual goals. For example,young human beings share information with others by pointing and gesturing, and thisinformation sharing occurs in cases where the child is not trying to “get something” fromanother person, but simply seeking “to share experiences and information with others”(Tomasello and Carpenter 2007, 122).

Young children, therefore, unlike non-human primates, have general propensities toshare interest, attention, and goals with others. These pro-social propensities begin inearly infancy with “protoconversations” between human infants and their caregivers, inwhich the adult and infant often exchange expressions of similar emotions in dyadic,face-to-face interaction (Tomasello et al. 2005). Later, 9–12 month olds employ jointattentional capacities in triadic engagement: for example, an adult and child may taketurns in an effort to accomplish together a joint task, such as building a tower of blocks(Tomasello et al. 2005). As children pass the one year mark, their involvement in thesekinds of joint activities grows more sophisticated, as they begin to identify and take updistinct roles in joint tasks, and even assist or prompt others to take up their roles(Tomasello et al. 2005). In contrast, ape infants do not engage in protoconversations withtheir mothers, nor do they participate in triadic interactions with conspecifics with ashared goal (Tomasello et al. 2005).

Work by Tomasello and others thus suggests that from a very young age, humans guideone another’s attention—through gaze following as well as through more directed meanssuch as pointing. Furthermore, young children are able to discern not only what someoneelse is looking at, but also the nature of another person’s interest the objects to which theyare attending and with which they interact. In other words, human beings seem oriented tointerpret others’ behavior as goal directed, and to use attentional, cognitive, and affectiveskills to discern the nature of others’ goals.

Tomasello frequently suggests that shared intentionality involves not just discernment ofothers’ goals, but adoption of those goals, and the philosophical literature on shared

15 Elsewhere, Tomasello et al. (2005, 680) describe shared intentionality as “collaborative interactions inwhich participants have a shared goal…and coordinated action roles for pursuing that shared goal”, but thisdefinition is too narrow to capture the range of phenomena described in Tomasello’s work on sharedintentionality. In addition, for reasons described below, I don’t believe that the attention to and motivation byothers’ ends requires goal sharing per se.


intentionality emphasizes joint intentions and joint goals.16 Tomasello’s view is supportedby his finding that young children are eager to join in goal-oriented games and tasks withothers, such that once involved, they prompt the initiator of the game or task to continue ifthey begin to withdraw from the game. In such cases, it appears that children adopt a jointgoal with their partner, and persist in their allegiance to that goal even when the partner’scommitment to it wavers.

However, although Tomasello is often unclear about how we should understand “sharedintentionality” and whether shared intentionality necessarily involves the adoption of ajoint, or shared, goal, the evidence suggests that shared conation—averted to inTomasello’s description of “[shared] psychological states”—is possible in the absence ofa joint goal. To understand how this is possible requires a distinction analogous to one wecan make in relation to empathy. With empathy, it is possible to share emotions withanother while also continuing to mark a difference between one’s own emotions and thoseof others. This distinction is important, because it allows the empathizing individual todistinguish her own distress—marking, for example, the frustration of some goal or aresponse to injury of hers—from empathic distress, which draws her attention to thesituation of the other. Conative perspective-taking seems to allow something quite similar,with respect to goals: one can “share goals” through conative perspective-taking in the sameway one shares emotions through empathy, while maintaining a distinction between thosegoals (or emotions) that belong to oneself and those that one experiences vicariously onbehalf of others. Of course, this is not to say that conative-perspective taking never involvesthe adoption of another’s goals as one’s own: one can be moved to adopt the goals of othersas one’s own goals in this way, but this doesn’t seem to be a necessary consequence ofconative perspective-taking. One might, instead, simply see others’ goals as providingreasons to promote them, independently of whether one adopts such goals as one’s own.This is important, because I want to argue that adoption of joint goal is not necessary toenable a person to be motivated by reasons grounded in others’ ends. Instead, the kind ofconative perspective-taking described above will suffice.

Further support for the idea that we can recognize and identify with others’ goals withoutadopting them as our own individual goals, or even as a joint goal, is provided by AmartyaSen’s discussion of self-goal choice.17 Self-goal choice, according to Sen, stipulates that“[a] person’s choices must be based on the pursuit of his or her own goals, which rules outbeing restrained by the recognition of other people’s goals, except to the extent that thesegoals shape the person’s own goals” (Sen 2005, 6, emphasis in original). Self-goal choicecan thus accommodate the kind of shared intentionality in which recognition of another’sgoals prompts the modification of the agent’s own goals, but it cannot accommodate casesin which an agent’s choices are shaped directly by others’ goals (without the intermediarystep of adjustment in the agent’s own goals). Sen (2005, 7), however, argues against self-goal choice, holding that commitment “can…alter the person’s reasoned choice through arecognition of other people’s goals beyond the extent to which other people’s goals getincorporated within one’s own goals.” Although I am not interested in the structure ofcommitment per se, Sen’s basic point resonates with the one for which I have arguedabove: rational choices can be guided not only by one’s own goals, but by the goals ofothers. The crucial question is how. Sen suggests that people who choose in ways thatviolate self-goal choice act “as if” they had different preferences. However, although this

16 See, for example, the work of Raimo Tuomela, Margaret Gilbert, and Michael Bratman.17 I am indebted to Schmid (2005) for offering a very helpful interpretation and commentary on Sen’s viewsof self-goal choice, which has informed the discussion below.

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may facilitate formal modeling of choices inconsistent with self-goal choice, it is notsufficient to explain the phenomenon as Sen himself notes:

The as if preference…is, of course, a devised construction and need not have anyintuitive plausibility seen as preference. A morally exacting choice constraint canlead to an outcome that the person does not, in any sense, “desire,” but which simplymimics the effect of his self-restraining constraint…To illustrate, there has been agood deal of discussion recently on the alleged tendency of many Japanese workersto work extraordinarily hard… The tendency to do one’s “duty” to the point ofseverely damaging one’s health…is easier to explain as the consequence of adheringto a deontological obligation rather than as an outcome that is actually “preferred” bythe hapless worker. Social psychology can be important here. The as if preferenceworks well enough formally, but the sociology of the phenomenon calls forsomething more than the establishment of formal equivalences. (Sen 1997, 770,emphases in original)

In other work, Sen (1985, 348) goes on to explain rational choices that are inconsistentwith self-goal choice in terms of the agent’s sense of identity:

A person’s concept of his own welfare can be influenced by the position of others inways that may go well beyond “sympathizing” with others and may actually involveidentifying with them… [P]erhaps most important in the context of the presentdiscussion, the pursuit of private goals may well be compromised by theconsideration of the goals of others in the group with whom the person has somesense of identity.

Sen’s suggestion that identification with others may be key to choices that respond toothers’ goals is consistent with the kind of conative perspective-taking described above.Though Sen provides limited details, and seems to tie this process of identification to asense of identity that encompasses membership in groups of various sizes anddescriptions,18 the central idea bears similarity to the view I defend. My own view differs,however, in that I believe that the ability to discern and see as reason-giving the goals ofothers is fairly basic: it is present in young children and requires no sophisticated sense ofidentity. Nevertheless, the idea that motivation by others’ ends is grounded in a kind ofidentification or perspective-taking seems to me exactly right. Work by Tomasello andothers shows that we engage in conative perspective taking—recognizing, understanding,and responding to the goals of others—just as we engage in affective perspective takingthrough empathy. What’s more, Sen too notes that there is an important distinction to bemade between acting in pursuit of one’s own goals and acting to promote the goals ofothers, even though both kinds of goals can directly motivate (or in Sen’s terms, guidechoice). On my view, conative and affective perspective-taking allow agents to identify

18 Bernhard Schmid, in a recent commentary on Sen’s work, emphasizes the importance of group identity ingrounding action motivated by the goals of others. Schmid (2005, 57–58), for example, argues, “Ifidentification with a group lies at the heart of the structure of commitment, and agent does not have toperform the paradoxical task of choosing someone else’s goal without making it his own in order to qualifyas truly committed…[I]n committed action, the goals in question are not individual goals, but shared goals.”Although this may be the right way to analyze certain kinds of commitment, Schmid’s analysis still seems torequire that an agent’s action be explained by a pre-existing goal—in this case, a shared or common goalrather than a private one. Schmid’s analysis is therefore inadequate to explain the phenomenon that concernsme here, in which others’ goals can ground reasons for action, even if the agent does not adopt those goals asher own. I thus disagree with Schmid in the sense that I try to show here how one can—unparadoxically—bemotivated by another’s goal without making it one’s own.


with the goals and emotions of others, and to see those goals and emotions as sources ofreasons to act, while at the same time maintaining a separation between self and other thatenables the agent to distinguish her own emotions from the empathically-shared emotionsand her own goals from those experienced through conative attunement with others.

C. Implications for Motivation by Reasons Grounded in Others’ Ends

Empathy and shared intentionality, individually and jointly, facilitate the interpersonalsharing of outlooks and standpoints, and in doing so, they generate responsiveness toreasons grounded in others’ interests and ends. Empathy emphasizes the sharing ofemotions, with particular attention to distress, and what I am suggesting is that empathy iswhat allows us to see another’s distress as a reason to act. Shared intentionality, on theother hand, emphasizes the sharing of perceptions, intentions, and goals. It grounds reasonsin a way analogous to empathy, but rather than emphasizing others’ distress, sharedintentionality allows us to see others’ goals and projects as reasons to act. Both empathyand shared intentionality involve motivational orientations that facilitate the recognition ofothers’ ends as reasons to act, and they often may work together, with empathy focusingparticular attention on reasons in favor of actions that alleviate the pain and suffering ofothers. That is, while shared intentionality, as described in the literature, appears to berelatively content-neutral19; empathy helps pick out others’ interests in avoiding sufferingand distress as grounding particularly strong reasons to act.

One might, at this point, wonder whether the model of motivation on offer depends onan agent’s coming to believe that she has certain reasons that she previously did not believeshe had. In fact, it does not. In offering an account of this kind, I am not claiming, as someexternalists about reasons do, that motivation by reasons grounded in others’ ends worksprimarily by the agent’s coming to believe that such reasons exist. The kind of motivationalcapacities I’ve discussed begin to work in early childhood and it is doubtful that theirworking depends on beliefs about reasons per se. The account is more pragmatic thandoxastic. There is, however, something to the claim that we can perceive external reasonsand be motivated accordingly (McDowell 1998). Recognizing another’s goal andperceiving that goal as a consideration that favors action to promote it does fit thephenomena involved with shared intentionality in early development. Thus, it may behelpful to understand the perspective taking capacities described above as propensities tosee or take others’ ends and others’ emotions (particularly others’ distress) as reason giving.

At this point, another objection may arise: Can’t the capacities I’ve described above beunderstood simply as species of desire? If so, the model of moral motivation described heremerely enlarges the set of desires that agents are assumed to possess, and my disagreementwith the internalist will turn on whether I am right that agents have these desires (topromote others’ goals and to alleviate others distress) or whether internalists are right thatthey do not.

As I have indicated already, however, empathy and shared intentionality are not desires.Their action-guidingness depends on features external to the agent’s own desires and ends,and this dependency does not fit a standard belief-desire model of motivation (where it is astanding desire that provides the motivational force for action, and world-guided beliefsmerely point to ways to realize that standing desire). Rather, in encountering the ends anddistress of others, our capacities for shared intentionality and empathy are not onlyactivated, but their intentional objects are given and shaped (Wong 2006, 2007). The

19 But see Vaish, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2010) for discussion of how children’s observation of an agent’sharmful intention reduces helping behavior toward that person.

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empathic or conatively-attuned agent is not simply someone who desires to alleviate thesuffering of others or to promote their ends; rather, he is someone who is responsive to thesuffering and ends of others. Empathy and shared intentionality thus enable a robustlyworld-guided kind of motivation by reasons. This motivation is world-guided in that thesource of reasons is external to the agent’s own desires. In the case of internal reasons,agents seek ways in which the world can conform to their interests; in the external case,agents are receptive and motivated to conform to the needs, interests, and desires of othervaluing subjects in the world.

In a related vein, and as I have already suggested above, it is not the case that the modeldeveloped here can be assimilated to an instrumentalist model of motivation by arguing thatempathy and shared intentionality promote the adoption of others’ ends, and that it is thesenewly-adopted ends that give the agent reasons to promote them. Empathy and sharedintentionality enable an agent to see others’ goals as reason-giving regardless of whether theyare adopted by her. If Sally observes a dog threatening Bill and sees the terror on his face,empathy allows her to see Bill’s terror as a reason to stop the dog from threatening Bill; sheneed not first adopt as one of her ends “alleviating Bill’s distress” or “preventing Bill’s terror”or any other end that stopping the dog from threatening Bill would promote. Similarly, theperspective-sharing dimensions of shared intentionality allow an agent to see others’ goals asreasonable or worthy, and hence as reason-giving, even without adopting these goals. Imaginethat a child comes to your door selling cookies to support a class trip to the local art museum.You aren’t especially interested in cookies, as you are trying to reduce the amount of sugar inyour diet. In addition, you have no particular interest in or appreciation for art. Yet yourecognize that art enriches many people’s lives (even if it does not enrich your own) and thatthe trip will likely enrich and expand the students’ understanding and appreciation for art,potentially enriching their lives. So you buy some cookies. You see the child’s project asworthy of support and as reason giving, even as you do not take on the promotion of the arts(or more generally, the enrichment of others’ lives) as one of your ends.

Although I cannot provide a full argument for it here, the orientation bequeathed to us byempathy and shared intentionality seems to be one in which the default position is to seeothers’ ends as reason-giving. Thus, we have to rationalize the decision not to give thesereasons weight. Imagine that you and I walk by a homeless person. Though we may haveno standing desire to help the homeless20 (by hypothesis, let us assume we do not), wenevertheless feel the pull of the person’s request for help: the default position is that thisperson’s desire for help counts for each of us as a reason to act. Our dismissal of the requesttherefore requires justification—we must try to rationalize, to provide some reason orexcuse for not helping, and this is typically what many of us do (sometimes rightly,sometimes wrongly). As this example suggests, it is not my claim that others’ ends arealways a source of overriding reasons, either normative or motivating. Nevertheless, theseexamples show that empathy and shared intentionality are the basis for human motivationalorientations in which others’ ends count as reasons for us to act, regardless of whether weadopt these ends as our own.

5 Moral Motivation and Moral Agency

If what I have argued thus far is correct, then there are at least two mechanisms by whichwe can come to see others’ ends as reasons for action, regardless of what our own

20 Or any other interest or desire that would be served by helping the homeless.


individual ends happen to be. This drives a wedge in Joyce’s argument from internalismabout reasons to the incoherence of moral reasons. If we allow that others’ ends are a sourceof reasons to promote them, and that empathy and shared intentionality enable us torecognize and potentially be motivated by these reasons, then it no longer seems reasonableto disqualify moral reasons as legitimate normative reasons on the grounds that they fail tomeet the motivational constraint.

Here, it is crucial to see that the argument I have given does not depend on a universalhuman concern for others to ground morality, some shared desire that every moral agentpossesses; instead, it depends only on the basic human capacity to be motivated by others’interests and ends, which appears extremely widespread.

The class of individuals who lack the capacity to be motivated by others’ interests andends (or in whom this capacity is severely impaired) is relatively small, and what’s more, itseems to correspond reasonably well to the class of individuals classified as havingantisocial personality disorders (ASPDs), in whom moral agency is compromised orlacking. Recent studies suggest that individuals with ASPDs lack not the ability to inferothers’ intentions or to understand others’ emotions cognitively, but rather the motivationaland emotional dimensions of empathy and shared intentionality.21 If this is right, then thoseto whom moral reasons do not appropriately apply according to my account of moralmotivation should correspond well with those with ASPDs, who often are treated asexamples of “amoralists” or as deficient or lacking in the capacities required for moralagency (for discussion, see Blair 1995; Kennett 2002; Krahn and Fenton 2009). So unlike atheory that makes moral motivation dependent on an “active concern” for the communityand risks classifying large numbers of individuals who lack such concern as sociopathic,my view preserves an alignment between those we typically think of as moral agents andthose to whom moral reasons apply.

My suggestion, then, is that empathy22 and shared intentionality are extremelywidespread in human beings and that these capacities are (among the) necessary conditionsfor moral agency. If this is right, then all moral agents, in virtue of having these capacities,have the potential to be motivated by moral reasons. Now, if the capacity for sharedintentionality is robust, and if, indeed, its development is essential to the development oflanguage in human beings—as Tomasello (2001, 2008) argues—then we may concludethat any competent human language speaker also possesses (at least to some extent)developed shared intentionality. And if this is right, then these individuals have the capacityto respond to reasons grounded in others’ interests and ends, and even in the absence of

21 Dolan and Fullam (2004), for example, found that subjects with ASPDs performed no worse than subjectsin the control group on standard theory of mind tasks, and they were not significantly impaired in theirdetection of social faux pas in a story they were told, but subjects in the ASPD group were less successful inunderstanding the feelings of the speaker and listener following the faux pas. Dolan and Fullam (2004, 1100)explain this finding as a possible result of a failure to “truly [empathize] with the characters in the stories oran indifference to the impact of the faux pas on the speaker or listener.” They therefore conclude that “thekey deficits [in APSDs] appear to relate more to their lack of concern about the impact on potential victimsthan the inability to take a victim perspective” (2004, 1093). Relatedly, James Blair (2008, 158) has arguedthat psychopaths “have no impairment in ‘cognitive’ empathy [or Theory of Mind] but marked, and selective,impairment in ‘emotional’ empathy.” Interestingly, Blair argues that autistic individuals have the reverseproblem: intact “emotional” empathy and deficient “cognitive” empathy. Although the precise relationshipbetween shared intentionality and empathy has not been well worked out, and the terminology can beunclear, these findings suggest that deficiencies on the motivational side of empathy and shared intentionalitymay be central in ASPDs.22 My claim here is that emotional empathy is a necessary condition for moral agency; cognitive empathyalone is insufficient.

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robust empathic capacities, such individuals have the potential to respond to moral reasons,insofar as such reasons are tied to others’ ends.23

What’s more, even if Tomasello is wrong, and shared intentionality is not a prerequisitefor language learning, shared intentionality in humans does appear to be extremelywidespread, and the although the “self-centered person” may not have an altruisticorientation or altruistic ends, this in itself does not establish her insensitivity to moralreasons or the inappropriateness of directing moral reasons to her. “Self-centered” persons,so long as they possess the basic capacities for shared intentionality, have the potential to bemotivated by moral reasons—and there is good reason to think that the vast majority ofself-centered persons do have these capacities.

The argument for this point goes as follows: Even selfish individuals need to cooperatewith others to achieve their ends and to engage in joint projects, and success in theseendeavors requires shared intentionality, so we can reasonably infer that selfish individualswho successfully engage in cooperative projects have the capacity for shared intentionality,and indeed, that they frequently exercise this capacity. Take, for example, an opportunisticprofessional whose primary goal is to get ahead, with little concern for the broader socialgood. Such a person may give little weight to moral reasons, and for example, fail to seepoverty as a reason to help others. Nevertheless, this professional is good at what he does,in part because he possesses certain fundamental social capacities. To collaborateeffectively with his coworkers, colleagues, clients, and others, he must be capable ofdiscerning their ends (whether these ends are expressed explicitly or implicitly) and of (atleast sometimes) taking their ends as reasons to act. In contrast, imagine an individual whois completely unable to take others’ interests as reasons for action: this person, arguably, isnot merely a garden-variety self-centered individual. Rather, she is profoundly sociallydysfunctional: when she and her colleagues are working late and decide to order out forpizza, for example, her inability to see others’ desires as reasons leads her to insist on herown preferences despite the vociferous protests of her colleagues. Even if she eventuallyconcedes and compromises on the pizza toppings, she does so not because she sees theirpreferences as providing reasons, but rather because her own interests provide reasons toplacate her colleagues. (Perhaps she knows that if she does not placate them, they will treather badly in the coming weeks, that she will not be able to secure a promotion, or that shewill be passed over for a raise.) But I think that it is not hard to see that the person who failsto see others’ preferences in this case as themselves providing reasons (however weak) isnot only unusual, but worrisomely so: a person who simply cannot see others’ interests assources of reasons is, arguably, a person incapable of moral agency.

My point is not that individuals with the capacity for shared intentionality are necessarilymoral persons, in the robust, substantive sense that they regularly act on moral reasons orgive such reasons priority in their deliberations.24 Yet they are moral persons in a weakersense: individuals who have the basic ability to recognize and be motivated by others’ endsand interests have the capacity to be motivated by moral reasons, or at least to see the pull

23 This point raises some complex issues regarding the relationship between empathy and sharedintentionality. My (albeit speculative) view is that a lack of robust empathic capacities compromises moralagency in certain ways; but insofar as shared intentionality has built into it a pro-social orientation, such adeficiency does not undermine moral agency altogether.24 Because the motivational propensities involved in empathy and shared intentionality are very general, theymay not lead to specifically moral action: not all actions which promote the ends of others can be consideredmoral. Moral education is needed precisely because these diffuse propensities need to be given anappropriate shape: through moral education we learn which of others’ (many) ends provide moral reasons,which do not, which moral reasons deserve the greatest weight, and ultimately (perhaps), why.


of such reasons. Selfish agents may be criticized for selecting an overly narrow group ofpersons with whom to cooperate or whose ends are taken to be important reasons for action,or for putting too great a weight on their own narrow preferences and too little weight onthe preferences of others, but insofar as they possess the capacity to see others’ interests asreason giving, they have the potential to be motivated by moral reasons.

One virtue of this account is that it offers a way of explaining how an agent who wemight describe as “undermotivated” by moral reasons—i.e., a person who fails to give suchreasons sufficient weight—nevertheless can be understood as susceptible to such reasons,or as having the capacity to recognize and act on such reasons. The strong parallel betweenthe kinds of reasons the agent does recognize and moral reasons is the source of thissusceptibility. The account thus seems to allow for the right kind of distance between whata person does and what she should do; it gives moral reasons their normative bite byshowing how they have the potential to explain an agent’s actions even in cases where theydon’t in fact do so.

6 Conclusion

I conclude, then, that an instrumentalist model of motivation by reasons is inadequate, andthat shared intentionality and empathy enable agents to be motivated by others’ ends,independently of their prior motives. This expanded account of motivation underminesRichard Joyce’s argument against moral reasons by showing how an agent can have areason to act, even if that reason would not further any of her own interests and ends.Insofar as moral reasons are grounded in others’ ends, they can’t be rejected on the groundsthat they fail to meet the motivational constraint. Although not everyone has the capacity tobe motivated by reasons grounded in the ends of others’, those who are incapable of suchmotivation typically have deficits in empathy and shared intentionality, and it is thesedeficits that seem to impair moral agency.

There is, of course, more work to be done. Others’ ends aren’t always the source ofmoral reasons—as noted earlier—so moral reasons must be a subset of reasons grounded inthe ends that valuing subjects have. I am inclined toward a view that grounds moral reasonsin others’ ends, but constrains moral reasons through the recognition of the need toharmonize these ends in order to facilitate cooperation, suppress selfishness, and makesocial life possible (Haidt and Kesebir 2010, p. 800). A theory along these lines clearlyneeds fleshing out, but it should not be rejected on the basis of its commitment to normativereasons that apply to agents independently of their particular individual ends.

Acknowledgments Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Rick Furtak, Leonard Kahn, Ivan Mayerhofer, BillRottschaefer, David Wong, the Springs Philosophy Discussion Group, and an anonymous reviewer for thisjournal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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