A Critical Analysis of Michael Smith`s Defense of EthicalInternalism

In our everyday moral lives, we experience a rather surprising phenomenon that good and strong-willed people tend to change their moral motivations whenever there is a change in their moral judgment. Michael Smith claims that there are only two possible answers that can explain this kind of reliable connection that exists between moral judgment and motivation. One is an internalist explanation according to which there is an internal or a necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation. The other alternative is an externalist explanation, which claims that there are no internal or necessary connections between moral judgments and moral motivations and that a moral judgment can motivate an agent only when there is a corresponding moral desire. Between these two explanations, Smith attempts to defend internalism by arguing that the externalist explanation of moral motivation cannot accommodate our commonsense intuition that a morally good and strong-willed person is somebody who cares about morally good things directly and non-derivatively. To this, I claim that there is a sense in which even the internalist explanation regards moral motivation to be derivative. I, then, argue that having direct and non-derivative moral motivation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a person to be morally good and strong-willed. Rather, I argue that a morally good and strong-willed person always derives his/her moral motivation from something else. And, once we allow derivativeness into our moral picture there is no point in arguing that a certain ethical stance is superior to another simply because it regards moral motivation to be less-derivative than another ethical stance.