Motives
Edwin M. Hartman
You have a motive for performing an act if and only if there is something to be said for it from your point of view. You have a motive for doing anything that is in your interest, though in some cases you may have a stronger motive for not doing something of that kind. Motives can be causes of behavior even though we sometimes identify them through the behavior they cause, and usually cannot identify the law like regularities that link cause and effect.
Philosophers have long argued over whether one has any motivation to be moral. ‘‘Why should I be moral?’’ is a standard question in moral philosophy. Some philosophers who have posed it have thought moral behavior to be costly in itself – for example, to involve sacrifices and missed opportunities – and so to need some compensating justification. Religions have promised post mortem rewards: some people have held that honesty and other virtues, for organizations as well as individuals, constitute the best policy. Game theorists have demonstrated that universally selfish behavior may make everyone in a community worse off than all would be if all were unselfish (see game theory).
One assumption common to nearly all the philosophers of the Western tradition, with Aristotle as the most notable exception, is that narrow self interest is the motive behind all or most intentional actions, and the most comprehensible reason for acting. Psychological egoism, the doctrine that all intentional actions are that way, can defend itself finally only by retreating into tautology. There is no good reason to deny that many acts are motivated by charity, concern for one’s family and friends, patriotic sentiment, or compassion: in some instances it would be extraordinary for an agent to put personal convenience ahead of the chance to avert disaster for someone else.
Kant, much influenced by Christian pietism, suggests that moral action is a matter of goodness winning out over the agent’s natural selfishness. Some of Kant’s successors in business ethics have been read as arguing that moral action is necessarily unselfish, even if it must be opposed to one’s own best interests – to put it crudely, that being moral must hurt (see kantian ethics).
One’s interests are in fact primary motivators; in the sense that they may encompass the prosperity of one’s friends, the happiness of one’s children, the success of one’s organization or even one’s favorite charity. For some people, these are components of happiness. Aristotle states that the surest sign of character is what gives one pleasure: good people find pleasure in good deeds, bad ones in bad. The one who manages to resist temptations to be immoral is less praiseworthy and less reliable; the one who does the right thing in hope of some reward is worse yet. Worst is the agent for whom morality is no motivating consideration at all.
Among the philosophers who believe that morality can be a motive for acting are so called internalists, who argue that an agent has no moral obligation to do anything that he or she has no motive for doing. One assumption that supports internalism is that moral obligation is something one may accept or not. Internalism suggests a contract theory of morality, but not all contract theorists are internalists. The more common view is externalism, according to which whether an act is morally good is a matter of whether it meets moral standards that are separate from (external to) the agent. Moral realism, the view that there are actual moral facts that our moral theories seek to state or explain, implies externalism, but not the other way around.
One of the abiding questions of ethics is whether a good act is necessarily done out of good motives, as opposed to selfish ones, for example. Consequentialists like Mill answer negatively, deontologists like Kant affirmatively. Kant goes so far as to claim that only the good will really counts in morality, and that one is not in the fullest sense responsible for the consequences of one’s good intentions. Few moral philosophers and fewer managers would agree that it is enough to be well meaning (see consequentialism).
I may have a motive for an action and yet not do it. For example, I may find there is reason to fire an employee because of bad performance, but may refrain out of personal loyalty. Or I may fire the employee on account of both incompetence and dishonesty. A corporate decision to support a local charity may have multiple motives in a similar way. The two motives are then jointly sufficient conditions of the behavior, whether or not either by itself would suffice.
A manager who wants a moral organization might prefer that the employees do the right thing for the best possible reason, but would likely settle for one in which morally good behavior is the result of incentives carefully designed to motivate the selfish. To a manager who wants employees to be motivated by moral considerations a strong corporate culture is an attractive vehicle, for it can to some degree socialize employees to want to be honest, loyal, and so on – that is, to be people of good character in Aristotle’s sense.
It is a largely empirical question whether and when an appropriate corporate culture is a more effective device for ensuring moral behavior than are the incentives of money and status. The former may well be more effective and the latter less so for large, diversified organizations in turbulent environments: for in these, position descriptions and performance criteria will not form a valid or reliable basis for incentives, especially where teamwork is essential to production. There it is more effective to get employees to identify with the organization’s success, which will then be itself a motivator. In any case, if employees are as selfish as Kant suggests all people are, managers will have great difficulty in creating a moral organization, no matter what they do.
Bibliography
Aristotle (1985). Nichomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford. (Contains an influential defense of the view that reasons are causes of actions.)
Kant, I. (1959). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. L. W. Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press.
Mill, J. S. (1957). Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs- Merrill.
Sen, A. K. (1987). On Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. (Includes a critical analysis of psychological egoism.)