GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

290
ETHICS
obtain money to feed a starving family, than we should do,
if the forger's object were merely to obtain increased
opportunities for the gratification of his senses and appetites.
Considerations of motive, then, affect our judgments
of actions.
What, then, is a motive? A motive may plausibly be
analysed into an act of will coupled with a judgment of
expected consequences. I will, in other words, to do so and
so because I expect such and such consequences to result
from my doing so and so, and wish to bring these conse-
quences about. Now the act of will, the expectation
and the wish are all psychological events; they all occur
in my mind. How events in the mind are transformed into
bodily acts we do not know, since the nature of the relation
between mind and body is itself unknown. Unless,
however, we adopt a materialist philosophy, in which
case, as I tried to show in the last chapter, the study of
ethics may be dismissed as irrelevant, 1 we shall be justified
in saying that acts of will do in some sense cause bodily
movements. It is because, to take an example, I have first
resolved to raise my left arm, that certain movements occur
in the nerve cells ofmy brain; these cause other movements
in the motor nervous system wtych governs the movements
ofmy limbs and, as a consequence, my left arm raises itself
in the air.
Willing and acting, therefore, are not two separate
events; they resolve themselves on analysis into a chain of
causally linked movements, each movement in the chain
being die effect of the preceding movement and the cause
of the succeeding, the earlier movements in the chain being
called psychological and the later physiological. Now the
earlier movements in the chain were those which we identi-
fied with what is commonly called motive. The conclusion
seems to be as follows: the attempt to draw a line at some
point across the chain with the object of consigning the
events that fall on one side of the line to the category of
what is called the motive, and those upon the other to the
1 See Chapter VII, p. 297.