According to a popular contemporary contractualist account of moral motivation, the most plausible explanation for why those who are concerned with morality take moral reasons seriously — why these reasons strike those who are moved by them with a particular inescapability — is that they stem from, and are grounded by, a desire to be able to justify one's actions to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject. My belief that an action is immoral, on this account, triggers this desire, this source of my moral motivation, and consequently I am moved to refrain from such an action by the fundamental desire that my actions be adequately justifiable. Furthermore, it is this desire to which contractualism appeals in its account of the wrong-making feature of certain actions: an action is wrong if it would violate a set of rules which no one could reasonably reject.

There seem, however, to be two general worries about this picture: one, that the range of its application is too extensive; the other, that the range of its application is too limited.

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than (say) respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources (such as sensory perceptions, activities in the corporeal imagination, or written notes) only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it.

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will” (450). After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will” (116). God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically (since volitions are intentional states) on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.

The plan of this paper is this:

• (I) to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained;

• (II) to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion;

According to cultural nationalism, members of groups sharing a common history and societal culture have a fundamental, morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. Moreover, this interest should be protected by states. I shall examine three theses included in this statement. The first, the adherence thesis, relates to the basic interest people have in adhering to their national culture. The second thesis is historical. It concerns the basic interest people have in recognizing and protecting the multigenerational dimension of their culture. The third thesis, a political one, holds that the interests people have in living their lives within their culture and in sustaining this culture for generations should be protected politically. Some contemporary writers who support a liberal version of cultural nationalism do so by arguing that people have an interest in culture mainly because it is a prerequisite for their freedom and also because it is a component of their identity.