Motivation, Decision, and Action: Some Reflections on Christian Smith’s To Flourish or Destruct
Christian Smith takes issue with sociological theories that explain away human actions as entirely motivated by outside forces, or explainable through simple motivations—but he fails to go quite far enough in his explanation of what causes human beings to act.
Review by Christopher Hauser
Sociological theory has conceptually centered nearly everything imaginable—nearly everything, that is, except human persons… And that explains, I suggest, why sociological theory has never quite worked… [I]f we want to understand and explain human social life well, we have to come to grip with persons.” —Christian Smith
This diagnosis of sociology’s ailments provides the backdrop to University of Notre Dame sociologist’s Christian Smith’s book To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil. Traversing paths which cross into philosophy, political theory, and psychology before doubling back into discussions of both the history and contemporary state of sociology, this book—a further development of Smith’s 2010 book What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up—is meant to advance “a personalist account of human beings to help us better understand and explain human persons, motivations, interests, and the social life to which they give rise.” Center stage in this new book is Smith’s effort to provide “a better account of human motivations and interests that give rise to actions and practices.” Smith argues that other sociological theories either discount human motivations or define them much too simply. A core task of To Flourish or Destruct is to develop this criticism and, in light of it, uncover a richer, more accurate description of the motivations which explain our human actions.
Smith’s criticism of other sociological theories is two-fold: first, he rejects the belief that all actions can be explained by social forces acting from outside of us, arguing that social forces are filtered through personal motivation. Social realities cannot directly cause us to do anything: social realities do influence behavior, but they do so only by influencing the motivations—or, more carefully, the beliefs and desires—on which we act. Second, he challenges social theorists who do explain the actions of human persons by reference to their internal motivations but who operate with inadequate accounts of these motivations. Smith observes that social scientists have frequently used a single motivation to explain all or most of human actions, such as “the human desire to follow social norms or make meanings” or the desire to “increase… wealth, power, security, and status.” Smith argues that all such “monomotivational theories” are inadequate. In reality, the motivations which explain our actions are “irreducibly multiple and often incommensurate.” Focusing on just one kind of motivation at best yields an accurate explanation of only some part of our social lives. More often, however, the result of such monomotivational focus is an inaccurate explanation of even the relevant part of our social lives, since, in all parts of our personal and social lives, our actions are not simply brought about by isolated motives but rather involve “actively managing, balancing, and adjudicating the multiple, complex, incommensurate, often-conflicting motivations” with which we find ourselves.
Throughout his book, Smith describes our motivations as causing our actions.
This willingness to embrace the ineliminable multiplicity of motivations gives context to the complexity in Smith’s own account of the basic motivations behind all human behavior. Influenced by a tradition ranging from Aristotle to Aquinas and beyond, Smith argues that sociological theory needs to recognize that “Human persons come to social life equipped with a definable set of natural interests, by virtue of their natural ontological constitution and place in the totality of reality and the goods that involves.” Synthesizing the work of a number of recent psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and economists, Smith organizes our natural interests, and the basic motivations to which these interests give rise, into six categories.
Smith argues that these six kinds of natural interests not only give rise to the basic motivations for all of our activities (social or otherwise) but also reflect the six kinds of basic goods for human persons, the ongoing realization of which is constitutive of our flourishing as human persons. What we seek, and what constitutes a life well-lived, is a life characterized by (1) bodily survival, security, and pleasure; (2) knowledge of reality; (3) identity coherence and affirmation; (4) the exercise of purposive agency; (5) moral affirmation; and (6) social belonging and love. Careful analysis of whether Smith’s proposed list is accurate is beyond the scope of this review. I do note though that while Smith defends the inclusion of each of these six kinds in a list of basic goods, he says little to defend the claim that the list is complete. In any case, rather than evaluating Smith’s list, I conclude by offering what I see as a crucial revision to Smith’s account of how our motivations explain our activity.
Throughout his book, Smith describes our motivations as causing our actions. This theory reflects what contemporary philosophers call “the causal theory of action,” i.e., a theory according to which our actions are caused by the psychological states (beliefs, desires, emotions) which motivate those actions. Indeed, in the footnotes to his discussion of this issue, Smith cites several philosophers, all prominent proponents of the causal theory of action. But other philosophers (myself among them) reject the causal theory of action in favor of an agent-causal theory of human action. According to agent-causal theorists, we ourselves are the causes of our actions. The psychological states which motivate a person to act explain their action without causing that action; what causes the action—what determines that the person does this (rather than something else)—is the person herself.
In short, the personalist would do well abandon the claim that the motivations of human persons cause these persons to perform certain actions and instead claim that the actions human persons undertake need to be explained by reference to those persons’ motivations.
At stake here is not some abstruse philosophical contention but a point crucial to our understanding of ourselves. It concerns the extent of our power to control, and hence be responsible for, what we do, a power which I contend is crucial to our understanding of our dignity and individuality. The core issue is this: the causal theory of action adopted (perhaps unwittingly) by Smith implies that what we do isn’t really up to us and hence isn’t something for which we could be deeply responsible. To see this, consider a scenario in which I am confronted with multiple, competing motivations; such scenarios are pervasive in our lives, as we have seen Smith emphasize in his criticism of monomotivational sociological theories. Consider, for example, a scenario in which I am confronted with a decision whether to lie so as to protect a friend or tell the truth so as to aid a stranger. According to the causal theory of action, whatever I do, it is caused by one of the motivations which I have. Whether the causation in question is deterministic (i.e., such that it is inevitable that I act on the motivation that I do) or indeterministic (i.e., such that it is not inevitable that I act on one motivation rather than the other), either way the causal theory of action implies that it is not I, the acting person, who brings it about that I act on one motivation rather than the other; rather it is my having the motivation in question which causes my action, bringing it about that I acted on it rather than the other.
The agent-causal theory offers an alternative account of the relationship between motivations and actions, an alternative which assigns to us the control and responsibility for our actions which, I contend, our lived experience indicates we do indeed have. Any adequate explanation—whether sociological or otherwise—of why a person acted as she did will cite the motivations on which she acted. However, according to the agent-causal theory, such motivations are invoked not to provide the cause of a person’s action—she, the agent, is what caused, produced, brought about her action—but rather to provide the rationale or purpose of her action, her reason for determining and bringing it about that she act in this way.
In short, the personalist would do well abandon the claim that the motivations of human persons cause these persons to perform certain actions and instead claim that the actions human persons undertake need to be explained by reference to those persons’ motivations, which provide the rationale or purpose behind those actions. This in turn will provide a better foundation for understanding how social realities indirectly influence our behavior through the medium of our motivations, as Smith claims they do. Social realities don’t cause us to have certain motivations which then cause us to act in certain ways. Rather, social realities in various way constrain or contribute to our having the psychological states that we do, most notably the beliefs that we have—about ourselves, about others, about what can be achieved in what ways, etc. Our beliefs in turn don’t serve as causes, or partial causes, of our acting in certain ways but rather delimit our understanding of the possible actions which we may undertake and the goals or purposes achievable through them. It is in this way, I contend, that social realities influence what we do.
Christopher Hauser is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton, a small Jesuit university located in northeastern Pennsylvania. He teaches courses on philosophy of religion, ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, and metaphysics and has published scholarly journal articles in Faith and Philosophy and Metaphysics.
To Flourish or Destruct was published by The University of Chicago Press in March 2015. The paperback edition will be released in February 2021. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy on the publisher’s website here.
