Abstract
Caring is a complex attitude. At first look, it appears very complex: it seems to involve a wide range of emotional and other dispositions, all focused on the object cared about. What ties these dispositions together, so that they jointly comprise a single attitude? I offer a theory of caring, the Attentional Theory, that answers this question. According to the Attentional Theory, caring consists of just two, logically distinct dispositions: a disposition to attend to an object and hence to considerations pertaining to it, and a disposition to respond to the real or apparent reasons those considerations provide. The emotional and other attitudes involved in caring are instantiations of these two, more general dispositions; and these apparently diverse emotional and other dispositions are connected because the real or apparent reasons to which they are dispositions to respond are connected, in structured “packages.” The fact that the reasons to which a caring agent responds are connected in this way provides the basis for an error theory, explaining why it appears as if the emotions involved in caring are governed by rational coherence requirements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For the claim that caring constitutively involves cognitive dispositions, cf. Seidman (2008, 2009, 2010); for the claim that it involves deliberative dispositions, cf. Seidman (2008, 2010). The current piece focuses on the (more widely recognized) emotional dispositions involved in caring, but the argument applies to cognitive and deliberative dispositions as well.
Many theories of emotion treat the individual emotions involved in caring as themselves complex (involving, for instance, cognitive and affective components). Such theories raise a question about the unity of emotions analogous to the question I am asking about caring. For attempts to address this question with regard to emotions, cf. Prinz (2004) and Dancy (2014).
Jaworska (2007a, p. 560).
We can add: whatever the structure of her desires, this tells conclusively against the claim that she cares about him. Someone might desire another person’s wellbeing, and desire that her desire should “not be extinguished or abandoned” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 161), so that she is “disposed to support and sustain” her first-order desire (ibid., p. 160); but if she has no disposition to feel distress at his suffering (and a range of other emotions directed at his wellbeing or ill-being), then she does not care about his wellbeing, or about him. So, Frankfurtian hierarchy is at least not sufficient for caring. I think that it not necessary, either, but I will not attempt to argue that point here. Similar considerations show that valuing, as Michael Bratman seeks to understand it in the essays of his (Bratman 2007) (as a second-order policy of treating first-order desires as reason-giving), is not sufficient for caring.
In his (2001), Helm does not raise the problem in the terms in which I have raised it, and so does not frame his account as a solution to this problem; but it is clear that he takes his account to explain the unity of caring. Jaworska (2007a), on the other hand, explicitly raises this problem and turns to Helm’s account as a solution.
On Helm’s account, these other attitudes include both desires and judgments.
This clause is vital to the plausibility of Helm’s requirements. I will come back to it in Sect. 4.
Helm (ibid., esp. chapter 3).
In Helm’s helpful terms, an emotion may have an object as its “focus,” even though the emotion is not an attitude toward that object (the object is not its “target”). To borrow and adapt an example of Helm’s that I will use throughout: Mia may be afraid of the earthquake, and later relieved at the passing of the earthquake, because she cares about her prized Ming vase. The vase is the focus of these two emotions, but neither emotion is directed at the vase. (The example is adopted with modification from Helm (ibid., pp. 69ff).)
Helm calls the pattern of emotions organized by these requirements one of “positive coherence” (ibid, p. 61).
My characterization of these requirements as “formal” might be objected to: on Helm’s account, an emotion is a “felt evaluation” of its target as instantiating the emotion’s formal object. If I am afraid of the bear, my fear is only appropriate if the bear in fact instantiates the formal object of fear, namely dangerousness; and in fearing the bear, I am committed to feel relief only when that danger has passed. So, it might be argued that Helm’s requirements presuppose, and only make sense against the background of, substantive requirements such as: feel fear at dangerous things, feel relief at the passing of danger, etc. But this misses a crucial point recognized by Helm’s account: while the instantiation of the formal object of some emotion by some target might be a necessary condition for a rational requirement to feel that emotion directed at that target, it is never sufficient. Fear directed at a dangerous bear is only intelligible, Helm argues, if the thing which the bear threatens is something (the “focus” of my fear) that I care about (or, equivalently, that has “import” for me): my own life and limb, or someone or something else that the bear threatens. And caring about something, on Helm’s account, just is having a projectable pattern of emotions, connected by coherence requirements, focused upon it. So, there is no requirement, on Helm’s account, with the content “fear dangerous animals;” rather, there are requirements of the form:
(For any Y and any X, such that Y is dangerous to X) don’t: [fail to fear that Y will harm X, and have the rest of the care-constituting pattern of emotions focused on X].
And a particular transitional requirement has the form:
(For any Y and any X, such that Y is dangerous to X) don’t: [fear that Y will harm X, and then fail to feel relief when it is no longer probable that Y will harm X].
This is the sense in which Helm’s requirements are formal.
For the idea that the patterns of others’ emotions focused upon some object is rationally relevant, cf. Helm (2010).
While Helm’s account predates recent debates over the scope of rational requirements, I think that it is natural to understand his requirements as having wide scope. It may seem as if this reading of Helm cannot be right, however, because Helm seeks to detach normative conclusions from his requirements. He argues, for instance, that the fact that a subject has a care-constituting pattern of emotions focused on some object can make it “unwarranted” for that subject to fail to have some further emotion that conforms to that pattern (2001, p. 70). Moreover, he does not suppose that a subject’s failure to have some single emotion focused on some object can make it unwarranted for the subject to have a broader, care-constituting pattern of emotions focused on that object. This (asymmetric) detaching may, however, be compatible with wide scope, because the sets of attitudes that his requirements govern extend across time (e.g., in the case of transitional requirements) and across possible worlds (e.g., in the case of tonal requirements). And it is defensible to argue that from a wide-scope requirement governing a conditional, the antecedent of which concerns an emotion that the subject has already had, it is possible to detach a normative conclusion. E.g., from the wide-scope requirement,
You ought [if you feared the bear when it threatened your child, to feel relief, now that the bear has gone away],
together with the fact that you did fear the bear when it threatened your child, it may be possible to detach the conclusion, “you ought to feel relief, now that the bear has gone away”—since the truth of the antecedent cannot now be altered. For this point, cf. Greenspan (1975) and Setiya (2007).
Raz does not label his theory an error theory, as Kolodny does, but its ambitions are those of an error theory: to explain the nearly universal belief among philosophers that intentions are governed by requirements of means-end coherence, while maintaining that that belief is false.
(Kolodny 2008a).
Kolodny in some places restricts his use of “rational” to conformity to (wide-scope or narrow-scope) formal requirements connecting attitudes (cf. esp. Kolodny (2005), and, for a similar usage, Scanlon (2007)). I am here using the term in a much broader (and thus more ordinary) sense to refer to the sort of appropriate functioning that includes, at its center, appropriate responsiveness to reasons. (For a similar use, cf. Raz (2011a).)
This is only a greatly simplified version of one part of the error theory that Kolodny offers. (In particular, Kolodny recognizes that an error theory also needs to explain why it appears that a subject who exchanges an incoherent pattern of attitudes for a coherent pattern does something that, in some respect, she ought to do—even if this brings her no closer to having the set of attitudes that reason requires.) My aim here is to present only enough of Kolodny’s theory to see the challenge that it poses, and the general shape of the alternative that it offers, to the idea that attitudes are governed by formal coherence requirements.
Raz (2011b).
Perhaps our judgments about patterns of epistemic or practical reasons are similarly malleable. But if they are, the error theories offered by Raz and Kolodny do not make use of this fact.
Only a consideration which is true (a fact) can provide a genuine reason. I refer to “considerations” rather than “facts” to make room for considerations which a subject takes to be true, and which, if true, would provide reasons.
The idea that there are reasons for emotion is often associated with judgmentalist (or “quasi-judgmentalist”), or perceptualist accounts of the emotions, according to which fearing a bear, for instance, constitutively involves having some attitude (a kind of judgment, or perception, or something else) that has an evaluative property (the dangerousness of the bear) as part of its content. But the idea is equally at home with accounts of the emotions such as the “attitudinal theory” offered by Deonna and Teroni (2012), according to which different emotions are individuated, not by their contents, but by their correctness conditions. On this attractive view, fear of the bear need not involve a judgment or perception that the bear is dangerous. Rather, fear of the bear is a (bodily) attitude toward the bear; and the bear’s instantiating the formal object of that attitude, dangerousness, is among the correctness conditions for having that attitude toward the bear. For a somewhat similar view, cf. D’Arms (2013).
One way to understand Helm’s account is as providing a reductive theory of reasons. On this theory, facts about the “import” of an object, and hence facts about reasons that the object provides for particular emotions and other attitudes, are reducible to facts about the pattern of rationally connected emotions and other attitudes directed at the object. (In correspondence, Helm has resisted this understanding of his view.) Connected Reasons challenges this form of reductivism. But it is compatible with other forms of reductivism that do not depend on the existence of putative rational requirements like those that Helm suggests.
Talk of “reasons” for emotion is, of course, stilted, and doesn’t play much role in ordinary discourse at all. But ordinary discourse is full of judgments that some emotion is appropriate, or makes sense—or, more commonly, that some emotion fails to make sense, is inappropriate, or even irrational. It is natural to understand these judgments as, or as implying, judgments about reasons for emotion.
As I will use the term, “responding” to a reason requires doing what it is a reason to do. In the case of a reason for emotion, “what it is reason to do” is typically not merely having some emotion, but having it to some degree. So, responding to a reason for emotion requires having the emotion to the degree that there is reason to have it—e.g., being only little bit upset at something that there is reason to find mildly upsetting.
In Sect. 3, I will introduce a factor which complicates the aspiration to base an error theory in these claims: many of the reasons for emotion which objects give us are only sufficient reasons for emotion, not requiring reasons; a subject may fail to respond to such reasons, and her failure may be rationally unexceptionable. In Sect. 4, I will consider the objection that this undermines the adequacy of the error theory, because it means that a rationally unexceptionable subject may respond to some reasons, and fail to respond to others, and so may not, after all, conform to Helmian requirements.
Much of the time. In Sect. 4, I will consider some cases in which the emotions of a rational subject might not exhibit these patterns after all.
The example is borrowed from Jaworska (2007b).
Jaworska (2007a). Even if, as I think, more is involved in the caring of rational adults than of small children or animals, the caring of small children clearly involves diverse emotional responses (as Jaworska shows), and so raises the problem of unity. Since it is implausible to suppose that the various attitudes involved in caring are tied together in an entirely different way in adults from the way they are tied together in small children, we need a solution to the problem of unity that works for both.
For discussion of some of the difficulties with existing attempts, and a proposal of his own, cf. Sylvan (2015).
Cf. Anscombe (1957), 5.
For an arresting description of the grief of an adult chimpanzee at the death of her offspring, cf. Goodall (1990), p. 49.
As Raz points out in his (1999), this idea is open to different interpretations. On one, which Raz rejects, some reasons are “enticing reasons,” and these differ in kind from requiring reasons. (For a defense of a modified version of this idea, cf. Dancy (2004).) On Raz’s view, there is no difference in kind. Whether some consideration entices or requires depends on the context—and in particular, on the other reasons that the subject faces. Thus, on this view, if (incredibly) Mia lived in a world with so little of value besides the Ming vase that she would care about nothing if she did not care about it, or if this were all that Mia was capable of caring about, or if it were the only remaining thing of beauty in an ugly world, perhaps she would be required to care about it.
The picture is made more plausible if the reasons to care about different valuable objects are incommensurable. Cf. Raz (1999).
One corollary of this view is that the babies of others may also be sources of reasons for emotion: one may not be required to be emotionally vulnerable to the flourishing of another’s child; but when one takes joy in the flourishing of another’s child, or is pained by her suffering, one is responding to reasons nonetheless—considerations that make joy or pain rationally intelligible and appropriate, in a way that considerations about the well-being of a saucer of mud, for instance, would not. The view here on offer is thus compatible with Velleman’s claim that “respect and love… [are] the required minimum and optional maximum responses to one and the same value” (1999, p. 366). (I do not mean to endorse his view that the relevant value is rational nature.) For related views, cf. Jollimore (2011) and Setiya (2014). The view on offer is compatible with the thought that, in the case of children for whom one has taken responsibility and in whom one has generated expectations, love ceases to be optional.
If one thinks that parents do have requiring reasons to feel at least certain emotions focused on their own child, such as fear at danger it is in, then the case that they are responding to reasons is even stronger.
What if one’s attention is captured by a person, institution, social or political arrangement, habit of mind, or something else, but the considerations that one notices and to which one responds are mostly reasons for negative emotions and attitudes, such as indignation, loathing, and the desire to eliminate? I see no reason not to follow ordinary English and say that a person who hates racism in this way cares about racism.
Could she care about the child momentarily? Caring seems, conceptually, to require some degree of temporal extension.
Here and throughout I take “relief” to refer, not merely to the cessation of fear, but to a distinct, positively-valenced emotion occasioned by the cessation of fear. (A phenomenologicaly similar positive feeling would not count as relief it were not occasioned in this way.)
References
Anscombe, E. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Bratman, M. (2007). Structures of agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bratman, M. (2009). Intention, practical rationality, and self-governance. Ethics, 119(3), 411–443.
D’Arms, J. (2013). Value and the regulation of the sentiments. Philosophical Studies, 163(1), 3–13.
Dancy, J. (2004). Enticing Reasons. In R. Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, & M. Smith (Eds.), Reason and value: Themes from the philosophy of Joseph Raz (pp. 91–118). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dancy, J. (2014). Emotions as unitary states. In S. Roeser & C. Todd (Eds.), Emotion and value (pp. 72–89). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deonna, J., & Teroni, F. (2012). The emotions: A philosophical introduction. New York: Routledge.
Frankfurt, H. (1999). On caring. In Necessity, volition, and love (pp. 155–180). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Goodall, J. (1990). Through a window: My thirty years with the chimpanzees of Gombe. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A., & Kuhl, P. (1999). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York: Harper Collins.
Greenspan, P. (1975). Conditional oughts and hypothetical imperatives. Journal of Philosophy, 72(10), 259–276.
Helm, B. (2001). Emotional reason: Deliberation, motivation, and the nature of value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Helm, B. (2010). Love, friendship, and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaworska, A. (2007a). Caring and internality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74(3), 529–568.
Jaworska, A. (2007b). Caring and full moral standing. Ethics, 117(3), 460–497.
Jollimore, T. (2011). Love’s vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kolodny, N. (2005). Why be rational? Mind, 114(455), 509–563.
Kolodny, N. (2007). How does coherence matter? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 107(1pt3), 229–263.
Kolodny, N. (2008a). Why be disposed to be coherent? Ethics, 118(3), 437–463.
Kolodny, N. (2008b). The myth of practical consistency. European Journal of Philosophy, 16(3), 366–402.
Kraut, R. (1994). Desire and the human good. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 68(2), 39–54.
Prichard, H. (1912). Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake? Mind, 21(81), 21–37.
Prinz, J. (2004). Gut reactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raz, J. (1999). Engaging reason: On the theory of value and action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raz, J. (2001). Value, respect, and attachment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raz, J. (2011a). From normativity to responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raz, J. (2011b). The myth of instrumental rationality. In From normativity to responsibility (pp. 131–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rippon, S. (2011). In defense of the wide-scope instrumental principle. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 5(2), 1–21.
Scanlon, T. (1999). What we owe to each other. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, T. (2007). Structural Irrationality. In G. Brennan, R. Goodin, F. Jackson, & M. Smith (Eds.), Common minds: Essays in honor of Philip Pettit (pp. 84–103). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scheffler, S. (2011). Valuing. In J. Wallace, R. Kumar, & S. Freeman (Eds.), Reasons and recognition: Essays on the philosophy of T.M. Scanlon (pp. 23–42). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seidman, J. (2008). Caring and the boundary-driven structure of practical deliberation. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 3(1), 1–36. www.jesp.org.
Seidman, J. (2009). Valuing and caring. Theoria, 75(4), 272–303.
Seidman, J. (2010). Caring and incapacity. Philosophical Studies, 147(2), 301–322.
Setiya, K. (2007). Cognitivism about instrumental reason. Ethics, 117(4), 649–673.
Setiya, K. (2014). Love and the value of a life. Philosophical Review, 123(3), 251–280.
Southwood, N. (2008). Vindicating the normativity of rationality. Ethics, 119(1), 9–30.
Sylvan, K. (2015). What apparent reasons appear to be. Philosophical Studies, 172(3), 587–606.
Velleman, J. (1999). Love as a moral emotion. Ethics, 109(2), 338–374.
Way, J. (2010). Defending the wide-scope approach to instrumental reason. Philosophical Studies, 147(2), 213–233.
Acknowledgments
This article profited greatly, if insufficiently, from comments by Agnieszka Jaworska, Bennett Helm, Andrew Franklin-Hall, Julie Tannenbaum, Alex Madva, and an audience at the University of Richmond. Its writing was supported by the project on Love and Human Agency, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Seidman, J. The unity of caring and the rationality of emotion. Philos Stud 173, 2785–2801 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0637-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0637-z