Abstract

In its most distinctive formulation, ethical internalism is defined by the claim that part of what it means to be bound by a moral obligation is that one has sufficient motive for acting so as to fulfill it. It is a response to some of our most firmly held commonsense moral intuitions; including, for example, that there is something odd about someone asking for a reason to do what she knows she morally ought to do, and that being bound by a moral obligation entails some constraint on how one may choose to act. Internalism accords so well with these intuitions that it is widely held not only to be an attractive view about the relationship between obligation and motivation, but to be a conceptual truth--deniable on pain of incoherence or moral skepticism. ;Ethical internalism is most often criticized for requiring that one deny commonsense moral intuitions that are at least as firmly held as those that motivate internalism. In particular, it is charged that claiming that obligation and motivation are necessarily linked commits one to some form of moral relativism or skepticism. ;Despite the wide awareness of these apparently devastating criticisms, ethical internalism continues to be considered an attractive position about the relationship between obligation and motivation, even by those who will not entertain the possibility of moral relativism. At the same time, the charge against internalism has seldom received more than cursory attention from either internalists or externalists. Given that the charge is generally taken as obvious and devastating, the absence is puzzling. It is this observation that serves as the starting point for this dissertation. The aim of this dissertation is to determine how it is possible to accept internalism and to sustain anti-relativistic moral intuitions, given the radical challenge internalism is commonly supposed to present to our intuitions about the scope of moral constraints