Metaethics has always been tremendously confused about how to turn moral demands into psychological motivation, so I can see the appeal of dropping the whole paradigm and focusing on amoral motivations.
But I don’t see the strength of the argument against robust consequentialist motivations. I read Nakul’s piece, and of course it was useless, because it’s a witty journal entry rather than a work of moral philosophy and contains no rigorous argument. Williams’ point, to my understanding, is that consequentialism doesn’t provide a proper account of how people conceive of morality and think of it on a deep personal level. If that’s it, then I don’t see any reason to believe it, because I can think of no reason that we should expect coherence between intuitions and morality in the first place. Perhaps you could TL;DR what it was about the book that convinced you—I’ve been thinking of reading it for a while, but of course as a consequentialist I have other things to do.
Metaethics has always been tremendously confused about how to turn moral demands into psychological motivation, so I can see the appeal of dropping the whole paradigm and focusing on amoral motivations.
But I don’t see the strength of the argument against robust consequentialist motivations. I read Nakul’s piece, and of course it was useless, because it’s a witty journal entry rather than a work of moral philosophy and contains no rigorous argument. Williams’ point, to my understanding, is that consequentialism doesn’t provide a proper account of how people conceive of morality and think of it on a deep personal level. If that’s it, then I don’t see any reason to believe it, because I can think of no reason that we should expect coherence between intuitions and morality in the first place. Perhaps you could TL;DR what it was about the book that convinced you—I’ve been thinking of reading it for a while, but of course as a consequentialist I have other things to do.