Motivational Facts in Normative Political Theory: A Methodological Defence

In this paper I approach the methodological question of motivational facts in normative political theory, and more specifically, whether they could constrain normative ideals at the level of justification, and not merely at the stage of implementation. In the first section, I discuss three prominent methodological accounts that argue for the exclusion of motivational facts from normative theorising: (1) Cohen’s fact-insensitivity approach, which rejects motivational facts as a special case of rejecting all facts; (2) David Estlund’s rejection of ‘bad’ facts about human nature; (3) Gilabert and Lawford-Smith’s Feasibility framework, which sees motivational facts as only relevant to questions of accessibility. I argue that these accounts fail to sustain the general case against motivational facts. In the second section, I criticise of existing accounts for including motivational facts as constraints on normative political theory. Finally, I advance an original argument about the role of motivation in the justification of a normative theory: I argue that political theorists should take into account the way in which people could be motivated to act as their theory prescribes as part of the justification of this theory. If people could only be motivated to behave in certain ways through objectionable means, the theory is not fully justified.