WHAT IS MOTIVATION?

It's ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and to my surprise I just had a really interesting seminar on Meta-ethics. Meta-ethics asks questions about ethics from 'above it', as if it was a birds eye view.

Today I want to ask 'what is motivation', what does it mean when I say I am motivated to do something. On intuition it seems that when I am motivated to do something I have a want or a desire to do it. I have set my self the target for example to finish of this blog post, because I have the desire to do it. But is this all it requires to have a motivation? Simply to have a desire to do it?

A Humean account of motivation states that motivation is made up of a belief and an appropriate relevant desire, yet the two are distinct mental states and so don't necessarily entail each other. What this means for example, is that when I have the motivation to go to my seminar I have the belief that it is right for me to go, and the appropriate desire (that say I want to go) and this gives me the necessary motivation to get up and go.

But surely there are counter examples to this where I am motivated to do something yet I dont have the desire to do it? For example lets use the example that my module convenor used:

You have an evil stepmother that you promise to her if she ever gets ill and goes to hospital you will visit her. Much to your dissapointment she does get ill and taken to hospital. You hate the woman, yet because you made the promise to her, do go (and are motivated) to go to the hospital.

In this case surely you only have a belief and not a relevant desire? For how could I have the desire to go and see my step mother when I hate her.

I do not believe however that this is a successful counterexample to the Humean account, and this is due to my belief that just because there is no desire in the front of my mind to go to the hospital. In other words, no desire that I am aware of, there is a desire that I may not be fully aware of, perhaps a subconscious desire, or the general desire to do what is right.

It may be that my desire is linked to the fact that I made a promise: my belief in the thought experiment is that I have made a promise and it is right to keep promises, but perhaps my desire then is just the general desire to do what is right, and in this case keeping my promise is what is right and therefore this is my desire.

To conclude, I believe that there always appears to be a desire present in our motivations, and this is necessary for it to be a motivation.

Another time I may write another blog on motivation, I want to ask for later whether I can be motivated to do something that is not possible. What do you think?