(The presumption that desires or more generally motivations explain action is plausibly a legacy of a theory of practical reasoning on which desires are reasons for actions — and therefore, it is concluded, their causes — but that theory is off-limits to Velleman's project, and should not be appealed to by it, however indirectly).
He not only emphasized the desire to remove the president as their motivation, but also cited the deaths this week as a reason for action.
There is another reason for action.
Theories of practical reasoning which identify reasons for action solely with desires and beliefs so characterized — so-called Humean theories — are directed towards choosing actions, yet incompatible with actions being chosen.
Madell's thinking there is that, while desires that will yield no pleasure at the time of their fulfillment fail to provide ultimate reasons for action, this will not be so with desires that are simultaneously satisfied.
Elijah Millgram (1996) suggests that just as new experiences can reveal to us hitherto unknown reasons for belief, so too new experiences (involving unexpected pleasures) can reveal to us reasons for action independent of our antecedent desires and dispositions.
What, indeed, are reasons for action and are they all grounded in our desires?
Reasons for action which are contingent in this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called hypothetical imperatives.
He argued that reasons for action are always internal – that is, they always boil down to desire.
Buss then considers a Humean moral psychology on which reasons for action are drawn from two mutually exclusive classes of psychological states, desires and beliefs, where beliefs are understood to have no properly evaluative content (e.g., Smith, 1987).
Reasons for belief are considerations that show that the belief is likely to be true, whereas reasons for action are considerations that show that the action would realize one's desires, or promote or respect something of value.
