Why motives

Why should you be concerned with your motives? If you do the right things with the wrong motives, you get zero blessing. One of the possible reasons could be motives. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. He says the His disciples must not do good things before others with the motivation to be seen by others. If you have this wrong motivation, you will get no blessing or reward from God. Matthew NIV In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

In Matthew 5, the motivation in doing good deeds before people is so that God is praised. In Matthew 6, Jesus warns us to not do our good deeds before men in order to be seen or praised by them. Jesus is warning us against the hypocrisy of the religious leaders who had wrong motives. The above explanation for the natural law exception may at best be a partial justification for the rule. Certainly, judges need not be acting out of the concerns I have raised.

Nevertheless, even if the explanation I have offered here fails as a positive account of why we have the patent regime that we do, it represents an original normative insight into the natural law restriction, one that gains in plausibility when we fully reflect on the importance of preserving and promoting the intellectual virtues. The unenforceability of a promise to gift that has not been relied upon by the promisee represents one of the foundational principles of contract law.

The standard analysis of the doctrine derives from the law and economics tradition. The consideration requirement thus creates a procedural convenience for courts, which renders gratuitous promises to gift unenforceable.

The law and economics tradition has been critiqued in the literature for ignoring the way in which gifts are a valuable social good, and recent scholarship has developed an alternative explanation for the rule.

The analysis of these modern writers is essentially synchronic , which is to say that it focuses on the single time-slice of the gift-giving act. The law, they point out, changes the reasons why the gift-giver complies with the promise, when it forces compliance. One potentially devastating objection to their view proceeds from the observation that the law merely changes the reason why the gift-promisor ultimately complies with the gift-promise. The initial promise may well remain grounded in motivations like love and affection; those original motivations might be all that the beneficiary cares about, or else may be sufficient to preserve some of the value that resides in the gift-transaction.

The law, this line of thought goes, only binds the hands of those who have a change of heart, and by doing so may even enhance the meaning and value of the initial gift-promise, considering that under an enforceability regime, a gift-promise reveals even more affection and kindness in virtue of the fact that it legally binds the promisor.

The considerations that have been advanced in this Note can reinforce modern views that analyze how the motivation-changing effect of enforcement undermines gift giving, and also protect these views from the line of response developed above. A diachronic , rather than synchronic, focus on the effects of an enforceability regime on the gift-transaction, that is to say, a focus on the effect of legal incentives on the motivations of gift givers over time , further emphasizes how legal enforcement undermines the value of gift-giving.

If people routinely comply with gift-promises out of legal considerations, this not only changes the motives that govern those particular instances of compliance, but can also be expected to, over time, crowd out the norms and motivations that make gifts valuable.

In this way, the current regime forces promisors to exercise the motivations that we care about. Quite apart from the fact that delivering on a gift promise out of a fear of legal sanction partially changes the meaning of that particular transaction between the gift giver and beneficiary—a dimension that theorists have explored—the routine influence of legal incentives on gift giving behavior may altogether shift our personalities in a direction we would later regret; a direction that undermines ways of relating amongst individuals that ought to be preserved.

The breach of a promise to marry was once a prominent quasi-contract, quasi-tort cause of action, created by the English ecclesiastical courts and absorbed into English and American common law, through which a breaching party could be liable for punitive damages.

In the twentieth century, the cause of action fell into disfavor. Concerns about economic coercion may well be the principal reason underlying the discomfort of contemporary lawmakers. But heart-balm laws appear even less justified when one considers the fact that the way that freedom of choice is exercised when marriage occurs in the ideal—through motives of love and affection—is itself valuable, and that it is less than desirable for the law to crowd out motives and ways of relating in the marital domain that are worth reinforcing by allowing them their free and unrestricted exercise.

Even though individuals typically have a complex set of reasons for marrying, and often marriage is entered into for reasons of convenience, it seems quite natural to think that marriage in the ideal is an association between two people characterized by love and affection.

A legal system that undermines the possibility of that ideal association, or distorts away from the ideal, is regrettable. We care about why people enter into marriage, and if legal incentives to fulfill a promise to marry distract from or altogether substitute for the motivations we care about—the motivations that constitute the good of marriage—then they may not be worth it.

The preceding discussion demonstrates that an appreciation of how our motives matter generates insights into features of the law of patents, contracts, and torts. Doctrinal rules can be rationalized by appeal to the idea that the crowding out effect of incentives militates against their application in spheres of human activity that are governed by valued non-legal norms and motivations.

To further demonstrate the benefits of being attentive to the intrinsic value of norms, I consider a question of law with trans-substantive significance. The general lesson of this Section is that the intrinsic value of norms can inform the selection of the form that legal directives take.

Even where legal incentives are in play, there are ways of mitigating the morally regrettable effect on valued motivations, and that is where the choice between rules and standards becomes relevant. In clarifying what the law requires, judges and legislators often have to decide whether to couch legal directives in the language of standards or rules.

Standards have the feature of being open-ended and abstract. They give clear instructions about how individuals are to act to stay within the bounds of the law, and their interpretation does not require the elaborate application of normatively thick concepts.

Undoubtedly, there are difficult cases that share features of both rules and standards, but the two categories are nevertheless a helpful means for distinguishing legal directives according to their form.

The comparative performance of rules versus standards has been extensively discussed in recent scholarship. Moreover, rules limit the risk of abusive exercise of judicial discretion. On the other hand, rules are often criticized for being excessively conservative and for leading to the wrong result when unanticipated circumstances arise, because rule-makers cannot foresee all the various situations in which their rules will be applied. My purpose here is not to evaluate the merits and demerits that have already been identified in the literature, but to illuminate a new dimension to the comparison.

Standards have an ignored advantage over rules in certain contexts, one that is tied to the intrinsic importance of the character of our motivations. The substitution effect of motivations undermines character and ways of relating with each other that we care about. Normatively rich legal standards have the virtue of mitigating the crowding out effect, and that is one powerful reason for their use in contexts where we think that non-legal motives are especially worth preserving.

Standards, recall, have the feature of often incorporating moral concepts into the legal directive, so that interpreters have to engage in normative reflection in order to determine what the law requires. To determine what the law requires, the interpreter must engage in normative deliberation. This feature of standards, I contend, makes them reinforce the norms we care about, or at least mitigate the crowding out effect, by forcing actors to think about non-legal reasons for refraining from or engaging in a particular action.

In contexts where the relevant non-legal reasons generate wellsprings of action that we think are worth preserving, an argument emerges for their application over rules. To explain the thought by way of example, consider a rule developed by courts that interprets the Fourth Amendment—which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—in the context of police detention of a subject incident to a search of his home. Such a rule might be distinguished from a more open-ended standard that states, for instance, that a suspect can only be detained incident to a search of his home if the detention takes place as soon as is reasonably practicable.

In deciding how long to delay before approaching a suspect departing from his or her home, officers must ensure that their conduct is governed by reasonable considerations.

Reasonable considerations might include a genuine fear of confronting the suspect in full view of neighbors. On the other hand, officers would likely be prevented from delaying merely to make the situation uncomfortable for the suspect.

The standard forces officers to reflect on the reasonableness of their decisions in the field and cultivate positive habits. The bright-line rule short-circuits the cultivation of habitual reasonableness by telling officers exactly what they can or cannot do.

My proposal, here, is that the standard reinforces norms we care about—moral norms of behaving reasonably —and thereby mitigates the crowding out effect of the legal incentive. Unlike other forms of intellectual property law, trade secret law imposes liability only for improper acquisition of secrets. Considering the acknowledged importance of preserving ethical conduct in the commercial sphere, one might wonder whether the presence of legal incentives undermines the policy goal of trade secret law—after all, if competitors refrain from stealing hard-earned secrets simply out of a fear of damages, then the evidence suggests that whatever uniquely ethical motivations they might have for competing fairly may be crowded out.

The standard forces participants in business to reflect on what is or is not fair in order to determine what the law requires of them. Let me defend my hypothesis by appeal to some recent empirical research. Yuval Feldman and Doron Teichman show that when the law raises the costs of undesirable activity in a probabilistic way, the crowding out effect diminishes. In the latter regime, the crowding out effect is attenuated. Feldman and Teichman offer their own hypothesis for why we observe this attenuation.

They think that uncertain costs make the payment seem more like a punishment, which makes the morality of the act salient. In contrast, certain and upfront payments induce in agents the belief that they can purchase the right to engage in socially undesirable behavior. My interpretation of the results is subtly different.

I suspect that in a regime in which the legal consequences of undesirable behavior remain somewhat uncertain, the actor is offered an opportunity to think about non-legal reasons that bear on the act. In other words, the crowding out effect diminishes because the uncertainty gives non-legal reasons and motives a chance to operate. The virtue that I claim standards possess derives precisely from their open-textured and indeterminate nature, and, in particular, from the indeterminacy generated by engrafting normative concepts into their core.

Even if standards have the potential for facilitating normative deliberation in the way that I suggest, the concern might be raised that private actors are unlikely to engage in private deliberation about the meaning of standards because they defer to interpretations of the law espoused by superiors or counsel—interpretations that are based entirely on the anticipated construal by courtsof what standards permit.

In particular, my suggestion that officers are likely to reflect on what is and is not reasonable regarding the detention of suspects when a standard exhorts them to behave reasonably might seem especially oblivious to the realities of how police internalize the law.

There are several things to say in response to this worry about outsourcing of standard-interpretation. First, it is not at all obvious that the operative determination by private and institutional actors of what the law requires of them always occurs after the involvement of counsel. Second, legal advice cannot eliminate the necessary uncertaintythat standards generate with respect to what the law specifically requires.

There will undoubtedly be exigencies where guiding precedent is radically under-determinative, and where all that is known about the law is that courts will apply a standard of reasonableness or fairness.

Counsel may well communicate that residual uncertainty to private actors, which might be enough to allow for the exercise of valued non-legal norms and motivations. Private actors may find it more efficient to simply cultivate the relevant virtues instead of always trying to act based on predictions of what a court will interpret the law to specifically require.

Third, even if it is presently true that involvement of counsel precludes the benefits that I claim standards possess, this is, after all, an artifact of existing lawyering norms. My analysis, at the very minimum, suggests a possible state of affairs that may be harnessed with the cooperation of lawyers and other legal actors. It is hardly idle fantasy to think that lawyers can advise their clients while fostering in them a sense of responsibility for internalizing legal standards.

Consider the example of the tax bar during the s and s, a period in which the marginal tax rate was above ninety percent for the highest income bracket.

Experience suggests, therefore, that lawyers can very much play an active role in helping private and institutional actors internalize the normative attitudes—habits of reasonableness and fairness—that the law, by announcing a standard, expects those subject to its demands to cultivate. Finally, the concern that deference to counsel prevents legal standards from promoting virtuous modes of motivational concern can be avoided altogether if we consider cases where standard interpretation cannot be outsourced.

The most obvious example of such a case involves the enforcement of lawyering ethics by way of Rule 11 sanctions. The example provides further opportunity to emphasize the broader point. It seems especially appropriate for lawyers to be motivated by a sense of professional responsibility for its own sake wholly apart from the instrumental ends this mode of motivation enables, such as the avoidance of Rule 11 sanctions, and the efficient administration of the legal system.

The privilege to practice law requires attorneys to conduct themselves in a manner compatible with the administration of justice, which may well involve adopting an attitude towards their work that reflects appropriate respect for the legal system. The extent to which standards facilitate the inculcation of appropriate values amongst lawyers thus militates in favor of their application over rules. The insight that the incentive-driven undermining of norms is often inherently bad can thus inform the selection of legal form.

In contexts where reinforcing ethical and intrinsic concern is important, standards have an advantage over bright-line rules. Standards may mitigate the regrettable effect on intrinsic motivation by enabling the exercise of non-legal reasons for acting. A research paradigm that explores the effect of incentives on inherently valuable motives can be fruitfully applied to other questions of law and policy.

I have not had occasion, in this Note, to discuss many other possible lines of practical application. I gesture in the direction of some of these possibilities in this final Subsection that I think deserve brief if not fully satisfying mention. Perhaps paradoxically, there may be cases in which extrinsically motivating agents, and triggering the crowding out of intrinsic or non-legal motivation, may be the right thing to do, and precisely in virtue of the motivational transfer.

This possibility only has the appearance of a paradox because the discussion so far has focused on the value of classically intrinsic forms of motivation, such as affection for others, or a love of knowledge.

There may be activities, however, that are most appropriately pursued out of a sense of legal obligation. Citizens extrinsically motivated to engage in those activities may undergo a normative improvement. Consider, for instance, laws that demand acts that are economically redistributive. One might worry that a tax regime that creates sanction-based incentives for the wealthy to support the poor crowds out charitable motivations in the rich. But, in fact, it is not entirely clear which way the crowding out effect cuts in this special case.

Getting citizens to view their financial contribution to the least well-off as a legal obligation may yet be preferable to having them view it merely as a means for satisfying their charitable urges. One couldargue—as some have —that the legal obligation would generate a more reliablepool of resources for the poor—but that would reflect the familiar line that extrinsic motives are often better at getting us the socially valued outcomes we care about.

I can only sketch here how that argument might go. Instead, the obligation likely derives from the fact that we choose to live together in society with each other and under terms of social ordering that treat all members as free and equal. Perhaps, the obligation is best experienced as a demand that other members of society can rightly place on us.

Suppose that some citizens learn to respect the law precisely because it represents the terms of social ordering necessary for fair communal living.

Certainly, when people act out of a sense of legal duty, they often do so not merely out of a fear of sanction by the state, but out of a sense that the law is worth respecting because of the normative ideals it represents—it enforces demands that members of society can justly place on one another. In those cases, individuals who are made to see their contributions to Social Securityas acts required by law rather than acts motivated by their sense of charity improve their way of regarding the act of financial giving; the motivational change—in this case, from intrinsic to extrinsic—represents anormative improvement on its own terms.

The law can thus be employed strategically to refine our sense of the grounds of our obligations to each other. Admittedly, the precise benefit I am identifying is captured only if the taxpayer complies with the law with the right attitude of respect for it. Those who begrudgingly pay their taxes out of fear of sanction may not experience a motivational improvement. If so, then the example is, perhaps, best understood as reinforcing the need to encourage compliance with the law out of respect for its ideals.

It seems worth noting, however, that insofar as expressions of charity have a patronizing component, one that portrays the poor in an undignified light, even sanction-based compliance might count as a normative improvement, given that it prevents the taxpayer, who would otherwise act on pity-based motivations, from taking a condescending attitude towards the economically deprived—an attitude we might believe for good reasons to be less than virtuous.

Incentives are undoubtedly a powerful instrument in the regulatory tool-kit. Attending to their neglected but morally significant effects on our motivational psychology is important precisely because of their pervasive use. In this Note, I have emphasized a neglected normative dimension to a fact about legal incentives—namely, the fact that incentives crowd out intrinsic and non-legal reasons for acting. The crowding out effect is often regrettable because our motives and non-legal reasons for doing things matter inherently.

Our motivations constitute who we are, and we have an interest in cultivating certain dispositions and habits for their own sake. Moreover, valued forms of caring—love, affection, reciprocal respect—enable valued ways of relating to others. In light of these considerations, the motivational transfer that occurs because of monetary incentives, and more generally when legal rules and regulations induce human behavior, often represents an inherently bad outcome.

This reframing of crowding out theory can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of legal doctrine, and to questions of legal design. I have shown that our reluctance to implement legal incentives in certain spheres of human conduct—the scientific enterprise, marital relations, and gift-giving—may be explained by appeal to our interest in preserving the non-legal motives and norms that govern in the absence of legal intervention.

I have also shown that in various contexts, standards, as a legal form, have a special advantage over bright-line rules, insofar as they counter the crowding out effect of legal directives. This advantage becomes apparent when we take seriously the notion that the preservation of non-legal motivation is both necessary and requires the routine exercise of our virtues.

I have briefly considered other legal insights that come from taking the phenomenon seriously. The combined effect, I hope, is to generate interest in a research paradigm that studies how a non-instrumental moral analysis of the crowding out effect can contribute to debates about what the law should be.

See sources cited infra note 5. See infra Section II. See, e. Law Sch. Even those authors who question the extent of the crowding out effect take the same instrumentalist perspective.

Health Pol. Michael Sandel, in a recent work, has appraised the crowding out effect of monetary incentives with a similar emphasis on the harm inherent in motivational change. See Michael J. See infra note Indeed, even scholars with a more general interest in the effect of law on norms have stayed true to the traditional approach: the interest in norms is motivated by an interest in their effectiveness at getting us more of the behavioral outcomes we care about. Solum, Virtue Jurisprudence: A Virtue-Centered Theory of Judging , 34 Metaphilosophy , analyses of legal standards of prudence and care, see, e.

More importantly, I draw attention in this Note to a feature of the effect that laws have that existing scholarship in the virtue-jurisprudential tradition has ignored despite the fact that this feature—namely, the motivational transfer that legal incentives cause—can be normatively evaluated out of a concern for character. I highlight new ways in which the law can promote traits associated with virtue by getting out of certain domains of human endeavor, by using standard-based legal directives, and by strategically crowding out motives that are less than virtuous.

See Gary S. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics 7 6th ed. Research, Working Paper No. Cr Economists have proposed increasingly sophisticated incentivizing devices.

Edward L. See supra note 25 and accompanying text. Legal Stud. See Bruno S. But see Robert Eisenberger, W. Bruno Frey and Reno Jegen find that the disconfirming studies by Eisenberger, Pierce, and Cameron have significant shortcomings. Thus, not only rewards, but also commands may crowd out intrinsic motivation. Ryan eds. See Richard D. See sources cited supra note 5. Psychologist 19, 19 Smith eds. Cass R. Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice 34 Sunstein, supra note 49 49 , at Bowles, supra note 11 11 , at Richard M.

Psychologist 68, 68 See id. Harry G. Mill, supra note 1 , at One way in which I motivate the idea that there are better or worse motivations is by observing that agents are capable of distinguishing, based on their own experiences, between preferred and less-preferred motivations, and there is considerable inter-subjective agreement about what motivations should be preferred.

The way in which particular motivations or, for that matter, particular pleasures become objectively superior in light of our considered preferences implicates difficult questions in the metaphysics of value; I offer my all-too-brief answers to such questions infra note Note that where Mill asks us to focus on the experiential quality of pleasures generally, I am instead drawing attention to the specific positive experience of having desires we reflectively endorse, distinct from the pleasure derived from sating desires.

See generally Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity discussing the way in which our identities are constituted by our basic evaluative commitments and identifications and the relationship between identity crises and normative skepticism ; Frankfurt, supra note 59 , at arguing that reflective self-evaluation, as manifested in the having of second-order desires, is partially constitutive of personhood and freedom of the will.

Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice and Value It is worth noting, at this juncture, the remarkable inter-subjective agreement that our normative evaluations routinely achieve. Motives are about what actually sets people in motion.

For example, are you more interested in autonomy and individual freedom or is it power and status that drive you? The following motives are commonly distinguished:. The professional work values test from test will give you an understanding of no less than 14 work-related motives summarised above. Thus enabling you to make a more informed decision on the type of working culture that would appeal to you most and the type of job that would best suit you.