Valuing and Caring

Abstract

Abstract What is it to “value” something, in the semi‐technical sense of the term that Gary Watson establishes? I argue that valuing something consists incaringabout it. Caring involves not only emotional dispositions of the sort that Agnieszka Jaworska has elaborated, but also a distinctivecognitivedisposition – namely, a (defeasible) disposition to believe the object cared about to be a source of agent‐relative reasons for action and for emotion. Understood in this way, an agent's carings have a stronger claim to “speak for” her as her values than do other attitudes that have been proposed for this role. In particular, an agent's carings establish more robust psychological continuities and cross‐temporal connections than do self‐governing policies of the sort that Michael Bratman has described; and they forge diachronic coherence not just in her deliberation and action, as self‐governing policies do, but also in her cognitive and emotional life. An agent's carings thus help to constitute her identity as a temporally persistingsubject. Self‐governing policies are at bestersatz‐values, which an agent may choose to adopt when she finds that her proper values – her cares – leave her course underdetermined.

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