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In order to show that an anti-psychological account of motivating reasons is superior to Humeanism, it is necessary to first outline what Humeanism takes reasons to be. Since Smith's sophisticated Humean position is similar in key respects to the position that I am going to develop (in that it is cognitivist as well), I am treating his position as the best Humean alternative to the position I am putting forward. According to Humeanism, motivating reasons are motivating states, and motivating states are conjunctions of a belief and a desire. Smith articulates the central claim of Humeanism as follows:

P1: R at t constitutes a motivating reason of agent A to Φ iff there is some Ψ such that R at t consists of an appropriately related desire of A to Ψ and a belief that were she to Φ she would Ψ.” (1994: 92)

To put it more plainly, according to P1 a motivating reason (R) for some action (the action Φ, whatever action that is) is the conjunction of a desire for some end (Ψ) and a belief that action Φ will bring about (or help to bring about) that end. According to Smith, then, motivating reasons are psychological states, in that motivating reasons just are a conjunction of a belief and a desire – they are constituted solely by the mental states of the agent (96).

Since the presence of a relevant desire is a necessary component for motivation under a Humean account, it is not possible for a motivating reason to be solely cognitive – to be just a belief. Desires necessarily have non-cognitive content. However, a moral

cognitivist position is the position that moral judgements are wholly cognitive in nature. Consequently, cognitive moral judgements cannot systematically be motivating reasons under the Humean position. Cognitive moral judgements and Humean motivation will come apart modally, as the agent making the judgement may lack the necessary desire to be motivated.

Smith contends that normative reasons are “best thought of as truths: that is,

propositions” (95). Normative reasons, then, are the objects of belief. Normative reasons with a moral dimension will be the products of moral judgements. If Smith is right, motivating reasons cannot be normative reasons, since motivating reasons are

psychological states, and normative reasons are propositions (96), and more generally because motivating reasons are necessarily composed of both a belief and a desire, while normative reasons, according to Humeanism, bear no necessary relation to desires. The combination of Humeanism with respect to motivation and moral cognitivism therefore implies that our normative reasons cannot be our motivating reasons.

An additional feature of Smith's Humeanism about motivating reasons is that he takes the aim of the theory to be providing a teleological explanation of action – which is to say that, “explanations that explain by making what they explain intelligible in terms of the pursuit of a goal” (104). He develops this position through a discussion of McDowell's

complaint that the Humean theory of motivation is 'quasi-hydrolic'24 (which Smith understands as criticising the Humean theory for assuming reason explanations are causal) (McDowell, 1982) and Davidson's argument to the effect that reasons

explanations are causal (Davidson, 2001). Smith argues that, contrary to both Davidson and McDowell, reasons explanations are necessarily teleological in nature, and that whether they are causal is a side issue. In the present context, a causal explanation asserts something about certain psychological states – mainly, that they have the causal power to produce some behaviour. Smith points out that this is going to be an equal possibility for any (psychologistic) theory of motivating reasons, be it Humean or anti-Humean. Instead, Humeanism (or any theory of motivation, for that matter) will stand or fall depending on how well it can “make sense of motivation as the pursuit of a goal” (104). Reasons explanations, be they casual or non-casual, are necessarily teleological, and a reasons explanation is a good explanation to the extent that it provides the best teleological explanation of action.

In summary, according to Smith, motivating reasons are conjunctions of beliefs and desires, and thus are psychological. Because desires are oriented towards the achievement of a goal, Smith argues that explanations of why agents act are teleological, in that they explain actions by what end the agent was trying to achieve, which is done by reference to the agent's desire. Normative reasons are propositions (and are anti-psychological). Normative reasons are the objects of beliefs, but are not the beliefs themselves. Since motivating reasons, being made up in part by a desire, always have non-cognitive content, there is a significant difference between motivating reasons, which are psychological states, and normative reasons, which are truths.

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The meaning of McDowell's use of the phrase 'quasi-hydrolic' is unclear and is obviously

metaphorical. The idea seems to be that there is an originating force that is transmitted in a manner in some sense similar to hydraulics, to result in an action. Smith takes this to be a criticism of Humeanism as being necessarily committed to a causal theory of mind, and rightly points out that Humeanism has no such commitment. Wallace, however, argues that the impression that McDowell is being critical of Humean commitments to a causal theory of mind is accidental, and that McDowell is intending to criticize, as he does elsewhere, is the requirement that the source of motivation is desire, which is taken by Humeanism to provide the force for deliberation and motivation (1991: 475).