Ultimate motives work backward to justify immediate actions.

Evidence

It is not, for example, your ultimate desire to read this book. Very likely you don’t even “want” to read it; you’d rather be sleeping or jogging or making love. But your ultimate goal is, say, to be a rich, respected, and famous writer. In order to attain this goal, you reason, you must know as much about the craft as you can learn. To do this, you would like to take a graduate degree at the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa. To do that, you must take an undergraduate degree in ________, where you now find yourself, and must get an A in Ms. or Mr. ________‘s creative writing course. To do that, you must produce a character sketch from one of the prompts at the end of this chapter by a week from Tuesday. To do so, you must sit here reading this chapter now instead of sleeping, jogging, or making love. Your ultimate motive has led you logically backward to a deliberate “moral” decision on the action you can take at this minor crossroad. In fact, it turns out that you want to be reading after all. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 252

Categorization

• SEED: This backward-reasoning structure is a usable pedagogical device for illustrating character motivation and goal chains.
• XREF: connects to: Stating a reason creates a presumptive commitment to follow it later — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 325; Character is defined by desire and backward reasoning toward action. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide…, 251; Rationality of the actor and of the action can diverge, making reason self-destructive. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 423

Related

• Character is defined by desire and backward reasoning toward action. (similarity 0.79)