s famous dictum that "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (2.3.3) has inspired a wide variety of theories concerning motivation. 1 The version of the Humean theory of motivation that I will defend here stands among them and consists of two propositions:The Desire-Belief Theory of Action [DBTA]: Desire is necessary for action, and no mental states other than a desire and a means-end belief are necessary for action. 2 Desire Out? Desire In! [DODI]: Desires can be changed as the conclusion of reasoning only if a desire is among the premises of the reasoning.

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Rightness and wrongness come in degrees that vary on a continuous scale. After demonstrating this with examples, I'll consider how to develop a consequentialist theory that accounts for ordinary thought about right and wrong, and present problems that some deontological theories face in doing so.Scalar properties can vary on a continuous scale. We often refer to them with gradable adjectives like "good", comparative forms like "better", and superlative forms like "best". Scalar properties differ from discrete properties, which don't vary on a continuous scale. We often refer to discrete properties with non-gradable adjectives including "right", "wrong", "permissible", and "obligatory", which lack such comparative and superlative forms.I'll argue that rightness is scalar, even though non-gradable adjectives apply to it in English. (The same holds for wrongness. For brevity, I'll frequently omit mention of wrongness.) "Righter" isn't a grammatical English expression, which might seem like evidence that rightness is discrete rather than scalar. In fact, "righter" expresses our moral thinking at least as well as "right". But we need not abandon unsuffixed "right". A variety of linguistic resources help us provide truth-conditions for claims including "right". This suggests new ways of developing scalar consequentialism, which was pioneered by Alastair Norcross (1997, 2006a, 2006b, 2008).Section 1 argues that we ordinarily judge the rightness of action to be a scalar property. Section 2 considers linguistic resources that scalar consequentialists can use to understand unsuffixed "right". Section 3 presents an advantage scalar consequentialism has over some agentcentered deontological theories in accounting for scalar rightness. Rightness and wrongness come in degreesOrdinary cases of action demonstrate that rightness and wrongness are scalar, as this section shows. Consider the following case: Betsy promised to see a documentary about Stalin's purges with her friend Daniel. It's time to go, but she doesn't feel up for anything so emotionally draining. So she texts Daniel to say that she isn't coming, puts her phone away, and plays video games while Daniel sits by himself at the movie. Daniel watches the movie unhappily, not only because of the grim events on the screen, but because Betsy broke her promise and didn't come. Their friendship suffers as a result.We see that rightness and wrongness are scalar when we consider other things Betsy could have done. It was wrong to break her promise and play video games, but she could've done worse. She could've burglarized Daniel's house while he was at the movie. She could've run around on the street merrily assaulting people until someone forced her to stop. She even could have fulfilled her promise in an awful way, wearing a suicide bomb vest under her jacket and detonating it at the end of the movie to kill everyone in the theater. (For those who prefer more mundane possibilities: she could've stayed home without sending a message to let him know that she wouldn't be comi...

Propositionalism is the view that the contents of intentional attitudes have a propositional structure. Objectualism opposes propositionalism in allowing the contents of these attitudes to be ordinary objects or properties. Philosophers including Talbot Brewer, Paul Thagard, Michelle Montague, and Alex Grzankowski attack propositionalism about such attitudes as desire, liking, and fearing. This article defends propositionalism, mainly on grounds that it better supports psychological explanations.

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I argue against this view with counterexamples showing that applying the norm of truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for distinguishing believing from imagining and assuming. Then I argue that the different functional properties of these mental states are enough to distinguish them, and that norm-application doesn't help us draw the functional distinctions.Believing that p, imagining that p, and assuming that p are ways of representing that p. What distinguishes believing from imagining and assuming? On one view, for a representation to be a belief requires that it be the object of another attitude which applies a norm of truth to it. Imagining and assuming differ from believing in that these representations aren't the object of any further attitude applying a norm of truth to them. We could call this the further-attitude truth-norm-application theory of belief (I'll call it the 'norm-application theory' for brevity). John Urmson, Lloyd Humberstone, Nishi Shah, and David Velleman defend versions of the norm-application theory.It is not hard to see why some philosophers are attracted to the normapplication theory. It's widely agreed that truth is the norm of belief. Also, most people have attitudes according to which true beliefs are better than false ones. Neither of these things hold for imagining or assuming. So it seems attractive to use this distinction between the norms we apply to distinguish believing from imagining and assuming. I agree that truth is the norm of belief, that most people have attitudes favoring true belief, and that imagining and assuming differ in these normative and Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2013) 152-165