Ethics, Motivation, and Egoism

To show how this metaphysical machinery intersects with Spinoza’s ethics, chapter seven begins with a fresh account of what the author calls Spinoza’s psychological ethics, a series of descriptive claims about human desires that underwrites his metaethics. It is further argued that moral motivation for Spinoza is based on an agent’s intrinsic, appetite-based motivation for fundamental desire satisfaction. Most importantly, when this account of moral motivation is combined with his conceptualist metaphysics, Spinoza has a distinctive way of showing how moral agents can have self-interested, non-prudential moral motives to pursue the interests of others. This proposed reconciliation of Spinoza’s ethical egoism with other-regarding interests turns on his conceptualist account of how moral agents are individuated, thereby revealing just how deeply his ethics draws on his conceptualist metaphysics.