From desire to subjective value

What neuroeconomics reveals about naturalism

Abstract

Philosophers now regularly appeal to data from neuroscience and psychology to settle longstanding disputes between competing philosophical theories, such as theories of moral decision-making and motivation. Such naturalistic projects typically aim to promote continuity between philosophy and the sciences by attending to the empirical constraints that the sciences impose on conceptual disputes in philosophy. This practice of checking philosophical theories of moral agency against the available empirical data is generally encouraging, yet it can leave unexamined crucial empirical assumptions that lie at the foundations of the traditional philosophical disputes. To illustrate this, I compare recent work in the neuroscience of decision to traditional philosophical theories of motivation and argue that the traditional theories are largely incompatible with empirical developments. This shows that genuine continuity between philosophy and science means that in some instances the conceptual foundations required to explain the phenomenon of interest be developed by the sciences themselves.