I’m reading a book on the psychology of evil in which it’s suggested in passing that judging actions primarily by intent is difficult because people’s “real motivations” are often unconscious, and their conscious motivations essentially rationalizations. The implicit premise here is that the conscious motivation C would not really be sufficient to move the actor, and the unconscious one U, is a necessary component of the action, and therefore the “real” motivation. But if the actor would not consciously act on U alone, without the rationalization C—say, he couldn’t bring himself to behave a certain way if he acknowledged to himself that he was really just acting out of spite—then this is equally true of both motivations. That is, they’re individually insufficient and jointly necessary to the action.
The obvious response is that C, the rationalization, is just whatever the actor cooked up to conceal U: It doesn’t actually matter what C is, and so it can’t be considered a genuine motivation in the same way. That is, the content of C is not important, only its function in obscuring U. That seems too quick, though. It’s an open question whether an appropriate rationalization will actually be available: A person’s acting badly may be contingent on the existence of a rationalization sufficiently compelling, sufficiently plausible as an independently sufficient motive, to serve the obscuring function. So maybe both motivations are, in a sense, “real motivations.”
4 responses so far ↓
1 Alex Knapp // Nov 2, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I feel compelled to point out that Orson Scott Card has basically written entire books centered around this very issue. See, e.g. The Worthing Saga, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Wyrms.
Also – did you ever end up making a TARDIS for your Dr. Who costume?
2 Julian Sanchez // Nov 2, 2007 at 12:50 pm
No, at the end of the day it seemed like a lot of work for something I’d basically have to leave at the door of whatever parties I attended.
3 Gil // Nov 2, 2007 at 1:49 pm
The obscuring explanation that you describe may be necessary and real, but I don’t think it qualifies as a motivation.
It’s an enabling factor, like a weapon, or an opportunity.
4 anon // Nov 3, 2007 at 3:30 pm
If C & U are both necessary, it sounds like they are necessary in different ways. The causal structure here seems to be that there are two “systems”, which we could call a Go system that impels action and a Stop system that overrides the Go system to prevent action. In this case, U is what’s driving the Go system, and C is what’s preventing the Stop system from intervening. In other words, some hidden motive U is making you want to do X. If you realized that X is wrong then you wouldn’t do X, but the rationalization C keeps this inhibition from happening and allows U to be translated into behavior. Processes like C which keep actions from being blocked can have important roles in human behavior (as Kurt Lewin argued back in the day), but I’m not sure if we should count them as “motivations”, a term that usually refers for those psychological processes that propel us to action.
The book’s original point seems to stand pretty solidly regardless of which way we go on this, since it is hard to judge people based on intent when important parts of their motivations (such as U) are hidden. Additionally, when you’re judging a person it generally seems more important whether or not they were able to come up with any rationalization C, and much less important which particular C they settled on, which would make judging the person based on C hardly different from judging them based on their action.