MORAL WORTH AND MORAL HOBBIES

This paper argues that one promising recent account of moral worth, Julia Markovits's Coincident Reasons Thesis, does not afford us the ability to draw a traditional distinction between actions that are performed from immediate inclination and actions that possess genuine moral worth ("Kant's distinction"). I argue that a right-making reasons account of moral worth such as Markovits's can in fact accommodate Kant's distinction. To make this possible, we must go beyond the consideration of instrumental reasons and equip a right-making reasons account with a new, more general, sort of reason: a conditional reason. After introducing the notion of a conditional reason, I argue that one class of these reasons, hedonically conditional reasons, are crucial for understanding the reasons for which we pursue hobbies. Kant's figure who pursues morally right action from immediate inclination might be understood as a moral hobbyist whose actions plausibly lack moral worth. This grounds an objection to Markovits's own account as a sufficient condition on morally worthy action.