Professor Anscombe has written in her short but influential book Intention, "As for the importance of considering the motives of an action, as opposed to considering the intention, I am very glad not to be writing either ethics or literary criticism, to which this question belongs." 1 To be a little more precise, a consideration of the relevance of motives to literary criticism belongs to aesthetics, and to literary criticism, a study of a different order, belongs the application of claims about motives (if determined relevant) to an interpretation or evaluation of a literary work of art. R.S. Peters, Anthony Kenny, and many others have explored the relevance of motives to ethical judgments of a person or a person's behavior, but I am not aware of any exploration of the relationship between motives and literary criticism. I shall argue that there is no reason for thinking that motives, as distinguished from intentions, are relevant to the criticism of literature. There is no reason to describe a work produced from given motives (not intentions) as a separate class of entities since there is no special aesthetic interest associated with that class, and hence there are no evaluational criteria associated with it. So the presence of given motives is not relevant to the decision to apply any given description to a literary work, but not because one cannot tell 'just by looking' whether an action has been performed, or its product produced, from a given motive. It is also true that one cannot distinguish whether an action or its product has been produced with a given intention 'just by looking '2, yet there are descriptions which mark off chsses of actions and products of actions at least in part because they are produced with given intentions, and these descriptions are associated with particular aesthetic interests and hence evaluative criteria.
There are many contexts in which one is tempted to introduce motives to explain the nature or significance of what an artist has done. Negative judgments, especially of contemporary works, are often supported by challenging the artist's motives: he's just out to make money, hoodwink the public,