hypotheses such as Descartes' Evil Genius is to lead us to see that there is no guarantee
that we get the truth even when our epistemic behavior is impeccable. There are
analogues of skepticism in ethics because we have moral as well as epistemic ends, and it
is possible that we are radical failures in our moral lives and have no way to discover our
failure. Of course, if moral beliefs have truth values, one way we can fail morally is to
have false moral beliefs. But we can fail not only at the level of belief, but at the level of
motivation.^7 There are at least two ways in which the moral analogue of epistemological
skepticism arises at the level of motivation. One is skepticism about the motivational
state itself; the other is skepticism about the point of the ensuing action.
First, skepticism can arise about motives, whether motives are understood as emotions or
as desires. In my theory of emotion, a motive is an emotion that initiates and directs
action toward an end. Emotions are not beliefs and they do not include beliefs, but they
have a cognitive component because in an emotional state the intentional object of the
emotion is construed a particular way (e.g., as fearful, lovable, contemptible, pitiful, etc.).
In an emotion of fear, something is construed as fearful; in an emotion of love something
is construed as lovable, and so on. In each case, the cognitive construal is internally
connected to a feeling that accompanies it. Skepticism about emotion threatens as long as
there is a sense in which the intentional object of an emotion can be construed correctly
or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately. This follows from the above point that
there is a threat of radical skepticism in some area of human life whenever there is a
possibility of failure in that area of life that is in principle undiscoverable.
But it does not matter for the argument of this chapter that emotions can succeed or fail.
What matters is that motives can succeed or fail, and that is widely
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accepted, for most philosophers think of motives as desires rather than as emotions. If
motives are desires, we get an immediate analogy with epistemological skepticism. There
is a gap between the desired and the desirable, just as there is a gap between justified or
rational belief and the truth. Skepticism in its extreme form is the fear that the gap is
never or almost never closed. So just as almost all of our beliefs may be false, so too,
almost all of what we desire may be undesirable. And if that is the case, it is possible that
we would be incapable of discovering it, perhaps because the human race is infected with
a systematic moral blindness. Less extreme forms of skepticism about emotion or desire,
like less extreme forms of skepticism about beliefs, are more persuasive but still
threatening. If many of our beliefs and motives are unsuccessful, then even if there are
also many that are successful, as long as we cannot tell the difference between the
successful and the unsuccessful, the entire set of beliefs and the entire set of motives are
in peril.
A second kind of motivation skepticism is skepticism about the point of our acts. The
point of most acts is an end in the sense of a state of affairs that the act aims to bring
about, but even acts without an end in this sense have a point in that they have a meaning
within the context in which they occur. An act can miss its point, whether or not its point
is an intended consequence. For example, an act expressing an emotion or the agent's
principles may fail to express the emotion or principles in the way intended. The most
straightforward way an act can fail in its point, however, is by failing to produce the state