According to the desire model, emotions have a motivational force insofar as they can explain action: they provide the agent with reasons to act. However, emotions cannot be said to cause action as such. It is desire, instead, that ultimately moves agents to act. The desire model thus assumes a distinction between motives and motivations. Motives give reasons to act, motivations move to action. The motivational force of emotions should be understood, therefore, as emotions being motives, not motivations.
Jesse Prinz argues that motivations make agents cease or continue acting, they impel them to act. Emotions, however, are not motivations insofar as they are not simply action tendencies that directly result in action,
Being angry provides a reason, ceteris paribus, to flee. But emotions are not always motivations. They do not always succeed in impelling us. One can be angry, it seems, without being disposed to revenge, and one can be afraid without being disposed to flee. (…) The link between emotion and action tendencies is weaker than the link between motivations and action (Prinz, 2004, 193).
Prinz acknowledges that the physiological aspect of emotions disposes agents for action. However the bodily disposition to behave in certain ways that is set in motion by emotions does not imply that the agent has selected a course of action. Even when the emotional response disposes the agent to act in certain ways, it is up to her not only to decide the course of action, but to decide whether she will act at all. According to Prinze, acting on an emotion, therefore, is a choice made by the agent after feeding the emotion into the rest of her mental system (Prinz, 2004, 193-194).
The emotional response thus gives an agent a motive to search for an appropriate course of action. But it is not the emotional response that moves her to act. In Prinz's account, motivations are action commands that impel actions. And these motivations can indeed be affected by affective states. But, according to Prinz, "when emotions cause motivations, those motivations never count as constitutive parts of emotions. The two constructs are thus closely entwined but
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independent” (Prinz, 2004, 196). To move to action, the agent requires a motivational desire50,
an action command.
Peter Goldie seems to assume the same difference between motives and motivations. Emotions act as motives for action because they provide reasons for acting, but they are not really motivating in the sense that they don’t directly move to action. It is up to desire to move the agent to act. Goldie acknowledges that emotions are not just some added-on ingredient that helps explain some actions; he agrees that the motivational force of emotions causes the experience of action to be different (Goldie, 2000, 40). But this is not so because the emotions blindly move agents to act, but because emotions qualify certain desires. Some desires are what Goldie calls primitively intelligible if they "cannot be better explained in virtue of anything else other than the emotion of which it is a part" (Goldie, 2000, 128). Emotions carry a motivational force only inasmuch as the desires that actually move to action are primitively intelligible; that is, emotions are motives to act inasmuch as the desires that motivate to action can only be explained by the emotions. Actions, nevertheless, still depend on means-ends beliefs and desires. Moreover, even the desires that can only be explained by emotions are integrated into the agent's overall desire system. As such, emotions should not be understood as something disruptive. For an emotion to lead to a desire that moves action, the primitively intelligible desire must be consistent with the agent's actual long-term planned actions (Goldie, 2000, 49).
If the desire model is right, the motivational force of fictional emotions needs to be understood as providing reasons to act. These reasons to act, however, interact with the rest of the agent’s mental system. When imaginatively engaging with fictional scenarios, appreciators lack the relevant desires that could ultimately motivate them to act. Moreover, fictional emotions are subject to cognitive monitoring inasmuch as they are always being contextualised by the lack of the relevant existential beliefs. The reasons to act that might be presented by our emotional responses to fiction are revised precisely in light of our awareness of the fictional nature of the scenario, and, in the case of fictional immorality, the deviant character of the prescriptions. The desire model of the motivational force of emotions thus cannot help ground response moralism. Deviant emotional responses to fiction would lose all relevance as reasons to act inasmuch as these reasons would need to be integrated, as Goldie argues, into appreciators’
50 Prinz argues that the term ‘desire’ can be used both as an action command and as a description of an attitude
towards something. When it is the latter it has to be understood as an emotional desire that doesn’t drive to action; only the former, desire as motivation, drives agents to act.
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long-term action plans. If appreciators are aware of the deviant nature of the prescriptions, the rest of their mental system will override the deviant emotional responses, and they will cease to provide reasons to act. If, however, deviant emotional responses to fiction continued to be regarded by appreciators as reasons to act it would be because they fit with other desires that can ultimately move to action. And if this was the case, it seems clear to me that what should be ethically assessed are not the emotions toward fictional scenarios, but appreciators’ actual beliefs and desires that support the deviant emotions as reasons to act. The differences between particular desire accounts are irrelevant for my purposes because they accept that emotions function as motives for action that interact with other beliefs and desires. Since during the engagement with merely fictional immorality audiences lack the relevant beliefs and desires, we cannot say that the imaginative engagement is subject to ethical assessment in virtue of genuine emotional responses and their role in action.
If, on the other hand, audiences had the relevant deviant beliefs and desires that support deviant emotional responses as reasons to act, it would be necessary to say that what should be assessed are appreciators’ underlying immoral desires that act as motivations to act, but not the emotional responses to fiction themselves.