October 9, 2007
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Ulterior Motives
Something I read last week got me to wanting to write something about the nature of motives. But to be honest I couldn’t really think of anything much interesting to say. However, there’s just two common mistakes people make about motives though that I think are worth talking a little about.
One is to not take someone’s stated motives seriously enough. That is to say that you make the mistake of thinking that each person always has some deep seated ulterior motives that are more important and of deeper significance than the ones that they themselves state and care about.
The other mistake that is often made is to not look for alternative reasons for our actions. That is to say, that once you hit upon something as the reason why a person is doing X, you assume that there really isn’t anything else to it. It is to ignore other factors and extraneous details that may have influences someone’s decision. Most commonly this mistake is made when evaluating our own decisions. We never like to think of ourselves as having anything behind our choices that might be perceived as ulterior motives.
The problem with both mistakes is the presumption that choices are such simple matters that your exploration of them is just a struggle to find the one “real” reason behind the action. The one that matters. But choices aren’t that way at all. There is a great gigantic web of experiences and events that lead up to any particular choice of the moment. Often we *can’t* fully understand why we are making any particular choice right here and right now and we may well never fully be able to. But we are each individually aware of some of our reasons and some of our explanations and life is a constant struggle to try and understand more of them. You see, the process of understanding why you made a particular choice is really a process of understanding exactly who you were at the exact moment in which you made that choice. An impossible proposition to be sure, but we can and should always try to approach it as best we can.
Usually though as we examine our reasons for our decisions we do come up with something of what can really be called our “motive” for the choice that we will give in our defense when asked why we did that particular thing. No, this is virtually never the *only* factor that went into our making our choice, but it does hold a very special significance for us that it would be foolhardy for others to ignore. This motive is often the primary thing that was going through our mind as we made the choice, and it is often the thing that matters to us the most when we discuss the choice. It is the thing that we want others to remember about us when they think about how and why we made this choice. It is the thing that we really do feel right now is the most important reason we made our choice, the thing that is both necessary and sufficient to explain our action. And perhaps even more importantly, this is the explanation for our choice that we feel best defines how we want to think about ourselves; who we want to see ourselves as. This is the nature of our stated motives.
Of course our opinion could change over time. At some point we might look back at all our actions and see only cynicism in our decisions. We might start to doubt ourselves and think that we weren’t really doing things for the good of ourselves or the good of others but for more sinister seeming reasons, like to be loved or to be respected or whatever. That happens sometimes. Similarly, our perspective can change the other way. We may have always thought that we were doing something primarily for ourselves only later to find that there was more altruism in our choice than we were willing to admit. We could have been acting for the sake of others all along, we just didn’t realize how important they were to our decision making process.
Anyway, so basically these two mistakes are problematic because they aren’t realistic attitudes about choices. If you don’t treat someone’s stated motives as having special significance, you are basically not trusting or respecting that person’s judgments about the kind of person they are. And if you don’t look for additional explanations for any choice, you are basically limiting your perspective to a clouded vision of half truths and false realities. Usually, in that case you are ignoring the reality as it is in favor of only believing in the reality as you want it to be.
I think that by understanding these mistakes we can all learn to make better choices with regards to understanding the motives behind each others choices.
