Man Is Not A Machine Summary

Exploring Conscience and Motive: Man is NOT a Machine

Many philosophers believe that all human action stems from desire or motive or urge or some such thing. On this view, if men ever do the good or the right it is because in some sense they desire to. Perhaps the desire to do the right is sometimes nothing more than the pressures of past societal or parental training, or conceivably it might stem from some sort of social instinct planted deep within us, or more likely it stems from the realization that it is in the long-term interest of the agent. But in any case it is supposed that men do not act independently of some kind of desire. Consider the stark expression of this view from an important ethical theorist, Richard Brandt:

. . . action-tendencies are a multiplicative function of valences (occurrent desires and aversions), and hence . . . an action-tendency is always zero in magnitude if there is no valence attached to the contemplated action itself or its expected outcome . . . no intentional action will occur without desire or aversion directed at it or its outcome, and hence no rational, ideally criticized action will take place without desire or aversion. (If some philosophers have thought, as some seem to have done, that a person can do his duty even if so doing is not positively valenced for him . . . , perhaps 'out of respect' for duty in some sense, they were wrong;

That something is the sense of obligation. One may not like a course of action, may not want to do it, may refrain from doing it without great trouble of mind or spirit, and yet recognize that it ought to be done. The awareness of the moral ought is as unique and indefinable and irreducible as any other of our basic capacities. It gives us no want or desire, but rather an authoritative guide or awareness of what ought to be wanted or desired, of what our motives ought to