Reasons, Causes, and Inclinations*

What is it to be inclined or disposed to do something? What is it to incline, dispose, or incite the will? Do things that incline or incite the will do so by providing reasons for acting? Do they influence the will by serving as efficient causes of acts of will? Both? Neither? In this essay I will conduct a preliminary exploration into various medieval and early modern accounts of being inclined to do something and of inclining the will in the attempt to get an understanding of these notions. My original motivation for turning to medieval and early modern discussions of inclinations derived from my dissatisfaction with the accounts of human action by two twentieth-century philosophers. In his paper “Motives, Reasons and Causes,” my colleague Mark Wrathall attributes to Maurice Merleau-Ponty a theory that originally struck me as troubling. According to this theory, something fundamental is left out by Cartesians who try to explain our thought and behavior by appealing only to reasons or to causes. Instead we also need to include motives. As characterized by Wrathall, Merleau-Ponty holds what sounds very much like a Davidsonian distinction between reasons and causes. Something counts as a reason only if it is propositionally articulated (Wrathall, 117) and is capable of justifying or supporting a thought (Wrathall, 122–3). Causal relationships are extensional “in the sense that the relationship holds between the relata regardless of the mode by which the relata are presented to us” (Wrathall, 119), or alternatively, that causal relationships are independent of the meaning or significance of those relata, that is, they are blind (Wrathall, 111). The underlying explanation for the extensionality of causation is that “causal relations are relations between events or states of affairs in the world” (Wrathall, 120). In contrast with Davidson, however, Merleau-Ponty thinks that basic sorts of human actions cannot be explained adequately if our only options are to appeal to reason-governed behavior or to mechanistic causes. Motives (or at least some motives) are said to have meaning or significance that is not conceptually articulated (Wrathall, 118), and it is this failure to be conceptually articulated that takes them out of the space of reasons. The fact that