Alan H. Goldman

Huckleberry Finn is not irrational in being unmotivated to follow his explicit judgments of rightness and wrongness. Philosophers have previously judged Huck to be irrational, subject to weakness of will, in being unable to act on his moral judgment. But their interpretation rests on incorrect analyses of weak will and of the emotions on which Huck does act. I also argue that such emotion based motivation is not of the kind that could be rationally required. The character of Huckleberry Finn therefore implies that rational agents need not be morally motivated.

In an article on whether desires generate practical reasons, Ruth Chang points out that philosophers have gravitated to extreme positions in their answers to this question. Internalists argue that all reasons derive from desires, while externalists argue that none, or virtually none, do. She, by contrast, holds that some reasons derive from desires and some from objective values. According to her, single desires in themselves can provide reasons for actions based simply on the desires' affective nature. But in her view the fact that one feels like doing something, while sometimes relevant to what one rationally ought to do, is not always so, and other reasons are provided by the values of the objects desired and not by the desires themselves

Internalists hold that all reasons derive from existing motivations. They also hold that agents act irrationally when they fail to act on the strongest reasons they have. Emotions can make one act irrationally. But depression as an emotion tends to remove the motivation to act at the same time as it causes irrational inaction. If depression can cause irrationality, then the reasons to act must remain. Hence the internalist must explain how reasons can remain if depression removes motivation. This paper does so by arguing that the cognitive, evaluative aspect of motivation remains when the dispositional and affective aspects are removed.