Moral Motivation and Rich Representation

A popular view on moral worth, antifetishism, states that an action motivated by concern for moral rightness represented as such is not praiseworthy. This can be seen if we appreciate that whether someone is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good moral theorist, as good people can misrepresent moral rightness and not be motivated by their mistaken grasp of it. But then what does an action need to be motivated by in order to be praiseworthy? I argue that antifetishism’s key insights give us reasons to reject the positive answers provided to this question by antifetishists themselves. The source of the antifetishist insight is much broader than originally thought: whether someone is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good theorist in general, as good people can misrepresent many kinds of facts. This makes the question of praiseworthy motivation difficult and also reveals that certain types of morally relevant descriptive ignorance do not excuse wrongdoing. As a solution, I suggest that an action is praiseworthy if motivated by a set of representations the intuitive moral import of which is unaffected by our potential theoretical mistakes: phenomenal representations of others’ lives.