internalism

The first of these, often referred to as internalism, holds that reasons for action must be grounded in an agent's prior motivations

Practical Reason

The classic case for this kind of internalism in the contemporary literature is made by Bernard Williams in his 1980 paper “Internal and External Reasons”.

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

These claims we could call respectively normative and moral judgement internalism.

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

More recently Williams 'internalism is attacked by Derek Parfit who places a heavy emphasis on a distinction between motivating reasons and normative reasons and urges that the credibility of internalism depends on confusing the two (Parfit 1997, 2007).

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

If internalism in its various guises fails to generate an adequate account of the justification of memory belief, then we should consider externalism.

Epistemological Problems of Memory

Here we could speak of moral existence internalism and externalism.

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

Because sophisticated consequentialists agree that motivation out of friendship must be personal, they must reject the idea that the ultimate moral reasons for acting in these cases are your motives, thereby rejecting the relatively weak motivational internalism that is implicit in the friendship critique (for weak motivational internalism, see the entry on moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, and in particular the section on motivational internalism and the action-guiding character of moral judgements).

Friendship

An early critic of Williams is E.J. Bond in his book Reason and Value (1983) where he urges, echoing Frankena's earlier critique of internalism, that Williams 'argument is undermined if we distinguish clearly between what he calls motivating reasons and grounding reasons.

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

The Long Shot uses short, sharp, direct sentences that hit you like a flurry of unending jabs that effectively strikes a perfect balance between external action and internalism.

The Long Shot by Katie Kitamura review

Sometimes “internalism” is used in a somewhat different sense to mean that facts about moral obligation are tied essentially to the motivational condition of those supposedly obligated and externalism as the denial of this claim.

Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation