Date of Graduation
9-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Philosophy (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Philosophy
Advisor/Mentor
Donohue, Jenna
Committee Member
Ashley Purdy
Second Committee Member
Eric Funkhouser
Keywords
moral worth; motives; praise
Abstract
It has become a philosophical commonplace to distinguish actions that are merely right from actions that possess moral worth. To be right, an action needs only to accord with the demands of morality. To possess moral worth, an action needs not only to be right, but to be non-accidentally so. While this much is uncontroversial, what is involved in this sense of non-accidentality is a matter of ongoing debate. This thesis lies at the heart of that debate. Many parties to this debate agree that actions with moral worth must be properly motivated. Suppose someone speaks respectfully to a colleague only to serve their professional interests. Had their interests been served by doing something disrespectful, they would have gladly done so. Given their motives, it was only accidental that they did the right thing. Throughout this thesis, I focus on what sort of motives render actions relevantly non-accidental. After defining key terms in the introduction, I devote the second chapter duty-based views. According to these views, an action has moral worth if and only if the agent who performs it is motivated by the fact that it is right. This view enjoys an advantage regarding reliability: if I am motivated by rightness itself, this motive will never lead me to act wrongly. But this view makes moral worth too hard to come by for agents with imperfect moral understanding, and it leads us to deem praiseworthy some actions that do not reflect well on their performers. Thus, duty-based views are extensionally inadequate. Chapter three concerns feature-based views. On these views, an action has moral worth if and only if the agent is motivated by the feature(s) that make the action right. These views direct our attention toward morally important features and make moral worth obtainable for people who are mistaken about whether their actions are right. But without certain specifications, these views cannot secure the reliability an account of moral worth needs. Even well-placed concerns can come in the wrong degree, leading to wrongful actions. Therefore, some actions motivated by relevant right-making features are only accidentally right. In chapter four, I present my own care-based view: an action has moral worth if and only if the agent is motivated by an appropriate distribution of care among all their action’s morally relevant features, while being independently praiseworthy. This view inherits the best parts of other views. It ensures reliability by requiring motives to be appropriate in content and degree, and it still requires attention to what is morally important. It also makes moral worth obtainable for those with mistaken moral beliefs. Avoiding accidental rightness matters because we often care not only what people do, but what they would do in different situations. By centering what agents care about, my view classifies as morally worthy only those actions stemming from an appropriately deep commitment to what matters. This is no accident.
Citation
Heitman, S. (2025). Moral Worth and Motivational Demands. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5844
