Caring, Identification, and Agency

Ethics 114 (October 2003): 88–118� 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2004/11401-0001$10.00

88

Caring, Identification, and Agency*

David W. Shoemaker

Any robust theory of free agency must account for its two centralfeatures, namely, the availability of alternative possibilities and self-determination (i.e., autonomy).1 I here wish to focus on this latter fea-ture, specifically with respect to its treatment by compatibilists. For bothclassical (e.g., Hobbes or Hume) and contemporary compatibilists, freeagency involves a dependence relation between a person’s actions and,roughly, that person’s wants. Where the two differ, however, is in theirexplication of the genuine wants of a person and the relation of thosewants to self-determination. For the classical compatibilist, one’s will—one’s effective desire—just is one’s self. Thus, to be self-determined isto be determined by one’s will. The only possible impediments, then,to free action are external impediments, obstacles to the will of the selffrom forces outside the physical boundaries of the self. But this con-ception of free agency is recognized by contemporary compatibilists tobe incomplete, for even though one’s externally unimpeded actionsmay depend on one’s will (one’s effective desire) in one sense, thereis another crucial sense in which one’s actions may conflict with, or beindependent of, what one really wants, a state of affairs illustrated moststarkly by examples of compulsion or addiction. These are cases in whichwhat moves one to action is not what one genuinely wants to be movedby, cases in which one’s autonomy is impeded not by anything externalbut by one’s own effective desires to the contrary.

* For extremely helpful comments and insights on earlier drafts of the present work,I am grateful to Eric Cave, John Martin Fischer, Josh Glasgow, George Graham, TerryHorgan, Roderick Long, Hugh Marlowe, Doug Portmore, Mark Timmons, Gary Watson,and the readers and editors of Ethics. I am also grateful to the audience members inattendance for my presentations of various parts of the present material at the Universityof California, Riverside, the 2000 Mid-South Conference, the 2001 meeting of the SouthernSociety for Philosophy and Psychology, California State University, Northridge, and Cali-fornia State University, Long Beach. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Marie Lantz for allowingmy repeated pumping of her untainted intuitions.

1. I borrow this way of conceptualizing the matter from Gary Watson, in “Free Actionand Free Will,” Mind 96 (1987): 145–72, p. 145.

Shoemaker Caring, Identification, and Agency 89

Of course, these desires remain external in a sense as well. Specif-ically, they are external to the self—external not to the physical bound-aries of the self but to the psychic elements with which the self identifies.But if self-determination is not always equivalent to determination byone’s effective desires, then what precisely does it involve? What doesit mean to regard a particular motivating psychic element as external,as an element with which one does not identify? This is the problemfaced by contemporary compatibilists, and their response has generallybeen to construct complex divisional models of the self in which free-dom is a matter of a special kind of harmony—a harmony stemmingfrom critical self-reflection—between the psychic elements of the variousdivisions. Thus Harry Frankfurt, for example, lays out a model of a selfdivided horizontally, according to which certain of one’s desires havelower-order desires as their objects, and a person’s will is free to theextent that it depends on her second-order volitions (second-order de-sires about which first-order desire is to be effective).2 In contrast, GaryWatson has sketched a model of the self divided vertically, according towhich a person has both a set of considerations moving him to actionand a set of considerations yielding judgments about the relative worthor value of various possible actions, and a person is free to the extentthat these motivational and valuational systems coincide.3

Unfortunately, both approaches are problematic for well-knownreasons. Specifically, neither model can plausibly account for the notionof identification, for what precisely it is that provides the special au-thority required in self-determination (specifically with respect to ex-ternality). Frankfurt’s model, for example, yields the view that whatmakes a certain motivationally efficacious first-order desire mine (i.e.,one with which I identify) is that I form a higher-order volition to haveit be my will. And what renders a desire external to me is that I havea contrary higher-order volition about it. But of course higher-ordervolitions are just desires themselves, so what could it be about theirhigher-order status that lends them any special authority whatsoeverwith respect to self-determination and externality?4 And Watson’s modelsuffers from a similar problem. On his view, it is only evaluations (judg-ments about worth or value) that provide one with reasons to rendercertain desires external, and it is “only when agents’ behaviour expressestheir evaluations [that they are] sources and ‘authors’ of (because they

2. Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in his TheImportance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 11–25.

3. Gary Watson, “Free Agency,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1982), pp. 96–110.

4. See Watson, “Free Agency,” pp. 108–9, and “Free Action and Free Will,” pp. 148–49.

90 Ethics October 2003

‘authorized’) their behaviour.”5 Nevertheless, as Watson himself nowrecognizes, clear-thinking, rational persons may not always identify, ina particular case, with those things they generally judge best. One may,after all, upon due deliberation and reflection, judge that in certaincircumstances one course of action would be best and yet still pursueand embrace as one’s own a different course of action when one findsoneself in those circumstances, a course of action that is, perhaps, simplymore fun or stress free.6 Things that I judge to be external to my selffrom the evaluational standpoint may nonetheless be fully embraced byme as my own in particular circumstances without, it seems, undermin-ing my freedom in any way. Consequently, contemporary compatibilists“are left with a rather elusive notion of identification and thereby anelusive notion of self-determination.”7

What I wish to do is offer a way out of this morass for the interestedcompatibilist. In so doing, I intend to defend five theses, culminatingin the conclusion that identification is, for the most part, a passiveprocess, garnering its authority for self-determination from one’s nexusof cares. I will offer these theses as inductively derived phenomenolog-ical claims that I hope will resonate powerfully with the reader, andthen I will attempt to defend them from various possible objections. Inproceeding in this way, I intend to co-opt what libertarians often employas a powerful methodological tool for their own cause, namely, gatheringevidence about agency “from the inside.”8 If this methodology actuallyyields significant evidence for compatibilism, and if by the end we havearticulated a compatibilist view that can dissolve the crucial problem ofidentification, then the plausibility of compatibilism itself should begreatly increased. I begin with the thesis requiring the most expositionand defense.

Thesis 1: What we typically, upon reflection, are motivated to do, in anygiven situation, depends ultimately on what we care most about, with respect tothat situation. There is much to explain here, and I begin by phenome-nological reportage. When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,it seems that nearly everything I find that has, or has had, some moti-vational effect on me is dependent in some way or other on things I care,or have cared, about. Consider some of the variety of psychic elementsthat may be motivationally efficacious. It seems that, when they move meto action, my desires, aversions, and evaluational judgments are all typi-

5. Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” p. 149.6. Ibid., p. 150.7. Ibid., pp. 150–51.8. For a paradigm example of this method at work on behalf of libertarianism, see

C. A. Campbell, “Has the Self ‘Free Will’?” in his On Selfhood and Godhood (London: Allen& Unwin, 1957), pp. 158–79. For a very recent example, see John Searle, Rationality inAction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), esp. pp. 61–96.


cally dependent in some way on cares that I have. To speak rather loosely,my motivationally efficacious desire to F is typically derived from mycaring about something which my Fing would help promote or preserve.My motivationally efficacious aversion to Fing is typically derived frommy caring about something which my Fing would betray or undermine.And my motivationally efficacious evaluational judgments are, when theymake reference to things I in fact value, simply judgments about a propersubset of things I care about. Furthermore, when I turn outward frommyself to try and motivate others, I do so by tapping into things they careabout, for example, “If you truly care about X, you ought to F.” Caringseems to be the great motivator.

But what does it mean, precisely, to care about something, as op-posed to desiring it or judging it valuable? What exactly are the objectsof care? What is the nature of the dependence relation between desiring,evaluating, and caring? Furthermore, what does it feel like to care, asopposed to wanting or to judging valuable? And finally, just how sweep-ing is this thesis intended to be: is it in fact supposed to be true for allmotivated actions? These are essential questions, of course, and I needto take some time to address them.

First of all, what is caring? Caring involves emotional, desiderative,and evaluative elements, but the relation between the three is quite com-plex. First of all, in caring for X, I am rendered vulnerable to gains andlosses—to emotional ups and downs—corresponding to the up-and-downfortunes of X. I have an emotional investment in what happens to thecared-for object, so that there is a cost I incur, such as disappointmentor sadness, when what I care about is negatively affected (when I amaware of this negative effect, of course).9 When I care about something,I am tied to it, as it were, by an emotional tether, such that my feelingsare tugged this way and that in accordance with the way that—negativelyor positively—it is affected by various events. Caring about somethingthus often involves a kind of nervous (and occasionally exhilarating)vulnerability: I am always the potential subject of hurt, disappointment,or frustration, and these feelings are dependent on forces affecting thethings I care about that are, for the most part, beyond my control. Butof course I am also the potential subject of joy, depending on whetherthose forces beyond my control affect the cared-for object in a positive

9. Frankfurt suggests something like this in “On Caring,” in his Necessity, Volition, andLove (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 155–80, esp. pp. 159–61. In whatfollows, however, I construct a detailed account of the nature of caring, as well as itsrelation to desires and evaluative judgments, that may differ from Frankfurt’s account insignificant ways. I will note this divergence where it occurs.


way.10 Second, and as a direct result of such vulnerability, certain de-pendent desires crop up, desires to act on behalf of the cared-for object,for example, to protect it or contribute positively to its maintenance ordevelopment. Third, in many cases, my caring for something will alsoinvolve a judgment of its value: I will judge it to be something worthprotecting, maintaining, or developing. In what follows I hope to fleshout these remarks in some detail.

Consider first the relation between caring and emotional disposi-tions. Suppose I care a great deal for my dog. Such caring will disposeme to a variety of affective states. For example, when I come home fromwork and see his tail wagging and his mouth open in what I take to bea smile, my affection for him will come rushing to the forefront (pro-ducing dependent desires as a result: I will want to pet and play withhim and give him a treat for not tearing up the house while I was away).And when I see my dog limping or listless, I will be distressed (wanting,as a result, to get him to the vet and fix whatever the problem is).Indeed, caring requires such emotional vulnerability; I would, after all,reject any attempt to block the feelings of distress attached to seeingmy dog in pain. Suppose I took a drug that caused me to have nonegative emotions upon seeing my dog limping and the like, while Istill could experience the positive emotions upon seeing him healthyand happy. How could I genuinely be said to care anymore about mydog? I would be like the fair-weather fan, in this case, coming out tocheer on the local team only when they are winning. The complaint ofthe true fan, that these bandwagon jumpers don’t really care about theteam, then, carries significant weight. Genuine caring about somethinginvolves a package deal: one must, along with the possibility of joy (andother positive emotions), accept the possibility of distress (and othernegative emotions) when things are not going well with the cared-forobject in order for one truly to be said to care for it in the first place.To claim to love something only when things are going well for it seemsto be no love at all.11

10. Of course, there may be certain objects of care not vulnerable to the gains andlosses of other cared-for objects, in which case when I care about them I am not myselfvulnerable to any emotional ups and downs. Indeed, this may be a good reason to careabout such things. So, e.g., the Stoics and Spinoza recommend to us caring about therational order of the universe and our own reason as a part of that rational order. Indirecting our attention to this object, we know that it is invulnerable to changes in fortune,and so we know it will not constitute a source of emotional vulnerability in us. Of course,this possibility does not undermine the general point in the text, for if, say, the rationalorder were subject to gains and losses, I would still be tied to it in a way that would produceemotional ups and downs in me as well. I am grateful to Martha Nussbaum for this point.

11. There might be thought to be another alternative here, illustrated by the allegedexperiences of (successful) Buddhists and Stoics who perhaps claim to care about the livesof those around them but who experience no negative emotions upon their deaths. I


The relation between cares and affective states is extremely tight.We have just seen how the disposition to experience a range of emotionsseems necessary for care. But are emotional reactions sufficient to in-dicate the presence of a care, that is, are all experienced emotionsenough to guarantee that one cares about something related, or canone have certain affective reactions without their being tied to anythingone cares about? I believe that, for mature adults, emotional reactionsare sufficient in this way, and the reason is that our experiencing ofemotions makes sense only under an interpretation involving referenceto our cares. In other words, it is constitutive of emotional reactionsthat there ought to be—in the sense that there is expected to be—somecare thereby reflected or revealed. We articulate cares in light of ouremotional reactions—it is the only way to “rationalize” them—and soof course emotional reactions are sufficient as indicators of care. Whatmakes them emotional reactions—as opposed to mere physical reac-tions—is just that they are sensibly interpretable (and typically inter-preted) within a matrix of cares. An emotional reaction, in other words,must be a reaction to events affecting something that matters; otherwise,it just cannot be an emotional reaction.12

I take it to be an analytic truth, then, that creatures like us whoundergo emotional reactions care in ways that make sense of thosereactions. If one has emotional reaction X, the only way to render Xintelligible as an emotion is by reference to care Y. Furthermore (as wehave already seen), there is a tight expectability relation going in theother direction as well: if one actually cares about Y, one is expected tohave emotional reaction X, depending on what happens to Y. If onedoes not, then it seems that one’s claims of caring are disingenuous.13

would need to know much more than I do about both sorts of people to assess such claimsproperly; instead, I simply register here my deep skepticism that this is actually what isgoing on. My suspicion is either that they have somehow managed not to care or thatthey do experience emotions, albeit overtly unexpressed.

12. Two points; first, this in no way is meant to constitute a so-called reductive analysisof emotions. I am neutral on what emotions are, or consist in—whether, e.g., they arejust evaluative judgments, say, or just desires or some combination of the two (or somethingelse). Instead, I am simply concerned to point out what I take to be an analytic truthabout what makes an emotional reaction an emotional reaction. So even if emotions arejust desires, or just judgments, what makes those mental states emotions is just their beinginterpretable in light of cares. Second, I am here simply applying a somewhat familiarrecent normative view of the mind to caring and emotions. For more robust articulationsand defenses of such a view, however, see, e.g., Donald Davidson, in various of his essayscollected in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); DanielDennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); and Simon Blackburn,Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 52–59.

13. As already suggested in the text, I intend this claim to cover only mature adults.Infants (and some nonhuman animals) may experience rudimentary emotions, but theysurely lack the capacity to care about anything (see, e.g., Frankfurt, “On Caring,” pp.


What, then, does it feel like to care? If what I have suggested iscorrect—that caring is a kind of conceptual-linguistic structural frame-work we overlay upon emotional reactions to render them intelligible—then the question itself is a category mistake. Talk of caring is simply away of referring to the range of emotional reactions one is expected tohave with respect to the fortunes of the cared-for object. To care is thusto have the disposition to feel, but it involves no—and could involveno—feeling in and of itself.

What, then, are the objects of care? Given the connection betweencaring and emotions, and given the very wide and diverse range of eventsto which we may have emotional reactions, the range of potential objectsof care is itself extremely wide and diverse. One may care about oneself,other people (or simply the plight of other people), animals (or simplythe plight of animals), the environment, how one is treated, peace onearth, works of art (and beautiful things in general), God, fictionalcharacters, morality, one’s nation, one’s ideals, and even other of one’scares. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have emotional reactionsto a manifold of events, and the wide-ranging diversity of the things wecare about reflects our thoroughgoing emotionality. As I will explain indetail later, the emotions we have make us the agents we are.

In the variety of examples just mentioned, however, it may seemthat an important distinction—between caring for and caring about—has been ignored. After all, caring for certain others, as many feministthinkers have shown, and as my dog example reveals, is a rather thickconcept, involving as it does a personal concern for the object of carefor its own sake, whereas caring about things (like peace on earth, say)is a more general, or much thinner, concept and does not seem toinvolve such personal concern. And so, one might say, while caring forsomeone will give rise to the emotional reactions I have discussed, caringabout something does not necessarily have such a close tie to emotions.After all, I may care a lot about wearing clean shirts, but that certainly

157–58), precisely because they lack the cognitive machinery for critical self-reflection,judgment, and interpretation. Borrowing from Antonio Damasio, we can articulate thispoint in terms of an already intuitive distinction between primary and secondary emotions.Primary emotions are like reflexes, responses triggered with no mediation by the cognitivemechanisms of the prefrontal cortex, and the emotional reactions falling under this rubricare the familiar “automatic” ones of fear, anger, and surprise. Secondary emotions, on theother hand, require the cognitive ability consciously to entertain a variety of mental imagesand considerations with respect to the myriad relationships between self, others, andevents, i.e., to engage in “a cognitive evaluation of the contents of the event of which youare a part” (Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain [NewYork: Putnam’s, 1994], p. 136). This, I take it, is the capacity that infants (and nonhumananimals) lack. The analytic relation between emotions and cares discussed in the text,therefore, holds only with respect to these secondary, more robust or developed emotions.


won’t involve any concern for anything for its own sake, and it thus mayseem difficult to imagine it giving rise to any real emotional reactions.14

I am inclined to view this distinction as somewhat overdrawn. Whatis crucial to caring—of any sort—is precisely the investment involved.And while I can obviously be invested in the fortunes of other people(or sentient creatures), where this is typically articulated as a personalconcern for them for their own sake, I can also be invested in thefortunes of things which, we might say, have no sakes, that is, there isno coherent notion of well-being applicable to them. I may find myselfinvested in either sort of object, and while the effects on these objectsmay be assessed in different ways, the fact that those effects may in turnaffect me emotionally is what matters here, and it constitutes the com-mon thread running throughout the variety of cared-for and cared-aboutobjects. I see no reason to believe, therefore, that if I really care aboutwearing clean shirts, I won’t be upset when I realize that I have forgottento do the laundry.

Nevertheless, these considerations do raise questions about the dis-tinctions between caring, desiring, and evaluative judgments. Considerfirst the relation between desires and cares. While there is an entailmentrelation from cares to desires, the converse clearly does not hold. Forme to care about X entails that I will have certain desires with respectto X, desires whose frustration or satisfaction is what gives rise to thetype of emotional reactions I have already discussed. But to desire Xdoes not entail that I care about X. To use an example that I will explorein more detail later, I may now desire some vanilla ice cream more thanI desire some chocolate, but I may very well care about neither.15 Nowas we shall see, there may yet be cares at work in my decision aboutwhich flavor to order, but the desires involved in and of themselvesentail no cares. To put this another way, these are desires about thingsI simply do not regard as important; I am not committed to their objectsin such a way that the frustration of my desires for them will affect meemotionally.16 Finding out that the shop is out of vanilla may, in sucha case, simply involve my shrugging and picking chocolate.

The structural relation between cares and desires is thus asymmet-rical. When I care about something, this caring produces a web of de-sires; for example, I will, as a result of my caring, want the cared-forobject preserved, protected, enhanced, or the like. But desiring some-thing, in and of itself, does not necessarily mean that I care about it,

14. I am grateful to two editors at Ethics for suggesting this worry.15. Compare Frankfurt, “On Caring,” p. 157.16. See ibid., pp. 161–62, for Frankfurt’s discussion of commitment. I differ from his

account slightly here insofar as I locate the object of commitment to be the cared-forobject and not the desire for that object.


and this is true even if I want it a lot.17 Surely though, one might say,the frustration of such a strong desire will produce an emotional re-action, in which case the earlier analysis implies that one cares aboutit. But this claim does not follow, for even if an emotional reaction isproduced, that does not mean that one cared about the desired object;rather, it could mean that one cared only about having such a strongdesire not be frustrated, a state of affairs that could have been producednot only by a satisfaction of the desire but also by an elimination of thedesire itself. This point will be crucial in my later discussion of addiction.

What, though, of evaluative judgments? Here, too, there is an im-portant distinction between judging valuable and caring. On the onehand, to judge X valuable is not necessarily to care about X. For example,I may recognize the considerable intrinsic value of a possible project orway of life, while failing in any way to be drawn to it myself.18 I simplyfind myself without any commitment to it—it’s just not important to me—although I can easily see how it could indeed be a good pursuit.19 Onthe other hand, to care about X is not necessarily to judge X valuable. Imay, for instance, care here and now about enjoying myself by bungeejumping, even though I now judge and have consistently in the past judgedsuch an activity to be without value.20

This is not to say, however, that there is not a significant connectionbetween caring, desiring, and evaluative judging. As we will see devel-oped throughout this essay, I take the ordinary structure of the will tobe as follows: one first comes to care about X, that is, one becomessubject to certain emotional reactions dependent on the fortunes of X,where this caring produces certain desires with respect to X (having todo, e.g., with promoting or preserving X), and one will then often, butnot always, judge X to be valuable in light of one’s caring, dependingon the overall role X plays in one’s life. One or more of these desiresor judgments will typically then serve as, or set parameters on the rangeof, one’s will, and action follows. And it is with this claim that we are

17. Ibid., p. 158.18. Ibid. Of course, if we restrict the permissible content of evaluative judgments to

those having to do with the agent’s most important goals or projects, then we’ve got adistinction without a difference. See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 22. But I think that there remains a dis-tinction between caring and evaluative judgment in our ordinary usage and considerationof the matter, and because one of my ultimate targets here is Watson’s account of freeagency, and because he takes there to be such a distinction, I think it best to leave itintact.

19. And Watson himself recognizes that his original model (in “Free Agency”) “con-flates valuing with judging good.” See “Free Action and Free Will,” p. 150.

20. Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” p. 150.


finally brought round again to my first general thesis: what we are typ-ically moved to do depends ultimately on our cares.

What precisely is involved, then, in the relation between motivatedaction and care? Knowing what we now know, we can see that it is simplyfalse that all my motivated actions depend on things I care about. Weall do a variety of things each day that seem to bear no dependencerelation at all to our cares; for example, we get out of bed, we scratchitches, we reach for the milk, we change the TV channels, and so on.These are all intentional, motivated actions, explained (rendered in-telligible) by reference to certain of our desires, one might say, withoutany necessary reference to things we regard as important, things whosechanging fortunes would tug on our emotional tethers. These are in-stances in which we act as wantons, then, as unreflective humans whosimply do not care what our wills are to be.21 In such cases we are movedby various impulses, with no real reflection on whether these are theimpulses that we want to move us, or on whether these impulses flowfrom what we care about, and the reason is usually that the situation justdoesn’t warrant that kind of reflection—the situation itself just doesn’tmatter.

I am not, then, claiming that all intentional, motivated actions aredependent on cares. Instead, I want to defend a much more restrictedclaim, namely, that when we find ourselves in situations that matter,where we do care about what our wills are to be and where we areusually thereby driven to self-reflection on the nature of our wills, ouractions are typically (in a sense I will explain shortly) dependent on ourcares. Now this may have the ring of a merely trivial truth: when wecare about what we do, what we do reflects what we care about. But thisreading is mistaken. I am claiming that our capacity for self-reflectionis called into play by situations in which there is something at stake inthe outcome of our action (or inaction). These are situations in whichI care that my will should perhaps not be constituted by a mere unre-flective impulse or momentary desire. And it is in these cases, I amsuggesting, that what I ultimately am moved to do is typically dependenton other things I care about. It is the motivation for nonwanton action—the action of Frankfurtian persons—that is grounded in cares, and thisis not a trivial claim.

Before defending this claim, however, a few qualifications are inorder. I have in mind the dependence relation that typically holds betweenmotivation and care, and all I mean by this is that such a relation virtuallyalways holds. There are a couple of implications of this qualification, then.First, what I will be discussing is merely a contingent relation, not a

21. For the notion of a wanton, see Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Conceptof a Person,” pp. 16–19.


conceptual, or analytic, one. As it so happens, given our construction asemotional creatures and the way that emotions ordinarily color our de-cision-making processes, the motivations for our (nonwanton) actionsordinarily—when things are functioning properly—flow from our cares.But this means that there will be nonstandard, exceptional cases, and Iwill discuss them below. Second, in light of what I have just said, I amnot explicitly defending an internalist account of motivational reasonshere. Both externalists and internalists can at least agree that such “rea-sons very often have subjective conditions,”22 and this is all I need tomove forward in the argument. It is the nature of the purported coun-terexamples to this claim about subjective conditions in general that isthe source of their debate, whereas I am merely concerned to showwhat those subjective conditions involve, so while what I say may havesome bearing on that debate, I don’t believe that my remarks will, inthe end, carry the day for either side.

That said, what I wish to do is discuss three possible exceptions tomy claim about the dependence relation between motives and cares,only one of which will turn out to be a genuine (and important) coun-terexample: (a) actions motivated by purely rational imperatives, (b) so-called weak-willed actions, and (c) addictive or otherwise internally com-pulsory actions. Let us, then, examine each of these possibilities moreclosely.

a) Moral motivation and rational imperatives.—The first proposed ex-ception represents an alternative account of practical reasoning andmoral psychology whose most obvious advocate is Kant. On this view,the proper picture of practical reasoning involves the attempt to discoverwhat we ought to care about (most), where this is determined by factsand principles whose normative force does not depend on our own(contingent) preferences and commitments. It is because one sees themoral law as a law that one is then necessarily moved to respect (careabout) it. There are times, then, when I may be moved to act in ac-cordance with the demand of duty solely because it is my duty, animperative of Reason entirely independent of—and perhaps even con-trary to—my nexus of cares.

There is no need to deny here that moral reasons can motivateaction. The important issue for our purposes, however, is why they mo-tivate us, and what precisely their relation is, if any, to our cares. Moralreasons, when motivationally efficacious, obviously have some kind ofauthority over other contending reasons for action. So what is the sourceof that authority? The Kantian maintains that it is provided solely by

22. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1998), p. 372.


Reason, but this answer fails to explain certain emotional reactions at-tendant upon the performance of immoral actions.

My failure to carry out my moral obligations—if I truly recognizethem to be my moral obligations—provokes in me feelings of guilt orshame. Now this is not to say that I am motivated to adhere to suchobligations by my aversion to these feelings; it is instead merely to saythat they are the ordinary (and expected) reactions to my failure to doso. But—and here is the key question to the Kantian—why would I feelguilt or shame over the failure to do something commanded solely byReason unless I antecedently cared about its dictates?23 Guilt, say, in-volves (to put it somewhat simplistically) feeling bad about somethingone has done (or has failed to do) in the past and, perhaps, desiringto make things right again.24 More specifically, in feeling guilt I amfeeling badly about having betrayed certain ideals and values, ideals andvalues that I have internalized and care about.25 Now I am not suggestingthat one unambiguously cares about the internalized ideals and values;one may, after all, hate the fact that one does care about those thingsso much. But nevertheless it is constitutive of guilt that one cares aboutthe ideals or values one has betrayed, however reluctantly. Emotionalreactions, as we have seen, are intelligible only in light of some artic-ulable care(s), so the guilty reaction is intelligible only in light of, andis thus indicative of, one’s caring about morality. This fact alone revealsthat something more is usually involved in moral motivation than mereReason.

Nevertheless, this focus on guilt does not yet fully rebut the Kantian,for while I may certainly care about morality (and typically will, once Irecognize the moral law as a law), this point does not yet establish thatmy motivation in duty-inspired cases depends on that care. After all, itmay simply be my recognition that others have a claim on me that movesme to adhere to my obligations to them and nothing more; caring aboutthe moral law, on this view, just comes along for the ride without doingany motivational work. Nevertheless, this view seems inaccurate (or atthe very least incomplete) as a description of our phenomenal lives.

23. Frankfurt advances a similar sort of argument against a slightly different targetin his article “Rationalism in Ethics,” in Autonomes handeln: Beitrage zur philosophie von HarryG. Frankfurt, ed. Monika Betzler and Barbara Guckes (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), pp. 259–73.

24. There is an enormous literature on the concept of guilt (usually contrasted withshame). But for the basic—and, I take it, fairly uncontroversial—view I am presentinghere, see, e.g., Blackburn, pp. 16–21; and Bernard Williams, “Morality and the Emotions,”in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 207–29, pp.222–23.

25. See, e.g., Herbert Morris, “Nonmoral Guilt,” in Responsibility, Character, and theEmotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp.220–40, p. 226.


Part and parcel of our usual aversion to doing what is immoral is thesense of betrayal it would involve, a betrayal of other people or of ourideals and values. And the feelings of guilt or of shame accompanyingour failures to protect these cared-for objects is distinctly absent whenwe fail to adhere to other—nonmoral—deliverances of theoretical orpractical reason.26

Now none of these remarks definitively establish that our motivesin cases like these depend on our cares. But if in the large variety ofnonmoral cases our actions are motivated by reasons whose efficacy overother contending reasons stems ultimately from what we care moreabout in that particular situation, then it seems that the burden of proofshifts to the advocate of purely rational imperatives to show preciselywhat it is about the nature of these imperatives that renders them mo-tivationally efficacious, independent of our cares. After all, if I do carea lot about morality as an ideal, then moral reasons will, on my analysis,typically be effective in moving me; explaining moral motivation is noproblem at all on this view. And if cares are indeed intimately tied tomoral motivation (as the above discussion of guilt shows), and if innonmoral cases motivation is dependent on cares, then the most plau-sible inductive move is to open up the care-dependency umbrella tocover all cases of (nonwanton) motivation and action, whether non-moral or moral. Otherwise, one has to explain precisely how it is that,despite the fact that I care about morality, despite the fact that I willexperience guilt at the prospect of betraying this care when I act im-morally, and despite the fact that it is this sort of consideration thatmotivates me in most other arenas, there is nevertheless something pe-culiar to moral reasons that enables them to bypass the ordinary care-dependence route on the way to being effective in motivation. This is astory that may be told, but it seems that the costs of doing so—obscurity,phenomenological inaccuracy, loss of parsimony—would in the end sim-ply be too high. As a philosophical penny-pincher, I thus fail to be con-vinced that moral motivation constitutes an exception to the general claimof Thesis 1.

Nevertheless, what if I do care about morality (or other things) butwind up betraying it (them) anyway? It is to this possible exception tomy general claim that I now turn.

b) Weakness of will.—Suppose I care about maintaining a healthy

26. See Frankfurt, “Rationalism in Ethics,” for a similar point. This is not to say,however, that in these nonmoral cases I am moved by Reason alone either (when I adhereto its deliverances). For in violating these requirements I may also experience certainemotions (e.g., embarrassment or foolishness), emotions that also presuppose certaincarings, e.g., caring about consistency or having transitive preference orderings, and thissuggests again the main thesis here, that my motivational reasons for action are tiedintimately to my nexus of cares.


diet in order to lose weight, yet nevertheless I yield to temptation at aparty and eat half a pie. This sort of case is usually described as weaknessof will. I do in fact genuinely care about X, yet in certain circumstancesI perform some action that clearly seems to betray X. How can this be?The answer, it seems to me, is that—where the behavior in question isnonwanton—I usually care more, here and now, about something otherthan X. My general caring about my diet, say, is outweighed by mypresent, specific caring about letting go and enjoying myself at the party.And this is how we typically articulate such events: “The only thing thatmatters right now is that I have some fun—the diet starts againtomorrow!”

On this analysis, then, what we call strength of will involves thepresence of an ongoing and powerful care about living up to one’s pastcommitments, and the degree to which one’s will is strong or weaktypically depends on how strong or weak that care is relative to thestrength of other cares that are tapped into in specific situations. Nowthis is a fairly standard sentimentalist account of weakness (and strength)of will, but I believe it is buttressed by phenomenological considerations.When we are in such situations, we may feel the tug of our general careabout our past commitments—and even experience, via projective imag-ination, the twinge of remorse that we might feel in the morning—butall in all it just seems to matter more that we let ourselves indulge a bithere and now.

Nevertheless, more needs to be said about such cases, and I willdo so by comparison to the examples in the next subsection. My mainpurpose here is to reiterate an earlier point about the critical natureof critical reflection: stopping to think about why we are about to dosomething is essentially a search for what it is we care most about inthe present circumstances. Upon such reflection, therefore, we maydiscover one of two things: either what we are about to do does reflectwhat we most care about here and now or it does not. If it is the former,then we typically accede to the forces which move us. If the latter, thenone of two events may occur: either the act of reflection itself will alterthe motivating force, in which case we recognize that what we wereabout to do would have been a wanton mistake (and thus the desire todo it typically fades away), or we are moved to action by the originaldesire anyway, regardless of our stronger cares to the contrary. And itis this last possibility, finally, that generates the problem of free agency.

c) Nondependent actions.—When I am moved to act in a given situ-ation by psychic elements that, upon or after genuine reflection, arenot dependent on, or are disharmonious with,27 my strongest care(s)

27. Although, I hasten to add, mere harmony between one’s motives and one’s cares


in that situation, my will is impeded by forces that are, in one sense,internal to me. Consider the famous unwilling addict, someone whohates his addiction and cares about being drug free, but who is nev-ertheless moved to take the drugs by his physiologically induced cravingfor them.28 The desires stemming from what he reflectively cares mostabout here and now are impotent, and his will is thus impeded fromthe inside. The same goes for unwilling kleptomaniacs and others whoare moved by some internal compulsion, motivational forces utterlyindependent from things they care about.

But there might be a problem here, for wouldn’t it be accurate todescribe the addict, say, as actually acting on a care after all, namely,the care to get his next fix? In fact, my account does not yet seem todistinguish between the addict and the merely weak-willed person (e.g.,the party pie-eater), insofar as both could be said to be motivated bycares weightier here and now than their more general persistent caresabout, respectively, being nonaddicted and being healthy. And if thepie-eater’s actions are actually dependent on his cares, why aren’t theaddict’s?

To differentiate the two cases, we need to distinguish between twosorts of motivational desires: (a) desiring X and (b) desiring to quellone’s desire for X (call this latter a Y-desire). What is important to noteis that the X-desire and the Y-desire may or may not be satisfied withthe same piece of behavior. In the case of the truly unwilling addict, ifhe had had a pill available to stop his craving, we can assume that hewould take it, thus satisfying his Y-desire by eliminating his X-desirealtogether. But when he shoots up, he satisfies both desires with thesame piece of behavior, even though that piece of behavior is moreaccurately described as two different actions: he was both (a) shootingup (getting the heroin he desired) and (b) eliminating his craving (fora time). Action b was dependent on a care of his; action a was not.

This analysis has two benefits. First, it explains our uneasy intuitionsin cases of addiction, for we often want to say that, while the addict isindeed addicted, a slave to his cravings, he is not a total slave with respectto them. For one thing, when and where he shoots up is still in somesense up to him. For example, he could shoot up immediately afterpurchasing the drug, even if he is in a public place; nevertheless, heprobably cares more about not being arrested than he does about sat-isfying the craving then and there. For another thing, if the addict trulycares about being drug free, he should still be able to perform otheractivities to try and eliminate his cravings, perhaps enrolling in a drug

will not be sufficient for free agency. Something more is needed, namely, a dependencerelation between motivation and care.

28. See Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” pp. 17–25.


program or locking himself in his room for a week or two of painfuldetoxification.

Second, the analysis reveals two important distinctions between ad-diction and ordinary cases of what we term weakness of will. For onething, in the pie-eating case my motivationally efficacious desire to eatdepends on my caring about enjoying myself at the party, somethingwhich simply matters to me more now than my long-standing commit-ment to healthy eating. Tomorrow I may feel badly for having betrayedmy general commitment to health (and so may consider myself “weak”for having undermined a general long-term care for the sake of a merelyshort-term one), but I also recognize that I will regret it more tomorrowif I don’t relax and enjoy myself. In either case, what I do (and wantto do) is still dependent on my cares, though. This is not the case withaddiction, however, insofar as the addict’s craving for the drug willultimately be effective regardless of what he cares about. For anotherthing, cases of weakness of will typically do not involve Y-desires, whereascases of addiction typically do. For the unwilling addict, it matters greatlythat his desires for the drug are satisfied or eliminated—it may notmatter how. For the merely weak willed, however, the primary object ofone’s care-dependent desire is not the mere satisfaction (or elimination)of some other non-care-derived desire; one’s aim instead is simply todo what one most wants to do (because one cares more about certainfeatures related to doing it than anything else) here and now.29

Thus ends my long explication and defense of Thesis 1. Settingaside wanton (unreflective) actions and actions resulting from (unwill-ing) addiction, compulsion, or various cognitive impairments, what Iam moved to do depends on what I care most about at the time ofaction. If we attach free agency to willing action, then, and willing actionconsists in the action I genuinely want to do, and what I genuinely wantto do depends on what I care most about in any particular situation,

29. What, though, of the willing addict, who, while certainly addicted to the drug,nevertheless loves his addiction and would do what he could to maintain it were it towane? (See ibid., pp. 24–25.) The first thing to note is that his will to take the drug wouldbe effective regardless of whether he loved being an addict. His will is, let us assume,shaped initially by his physiological addiction and so is, at least to that extent, independentof his nexus of cares. But because he now cares about the drug, his will is certainly notincompatible, or disharmonious, with his relevant cares, as it is for the unwilling addict;indeed, even if he were to stop being addicted, his will would remain as it is, for it wouldin that case depend solely on his actual cares, and furthermore it may, for all we know,actually come to depend on them as well during the period of his addiction. The onlydifference in such a case, then, between the willing addict and the nonaddicted but happydrug taker would be that the former’s will would have one more source, namely, hisphysiological addiction. But insofar as it also depended on his caring about the addiction,he would not then constitute the exception to my general thesis about caring and mo-tivation represented by the unwilling addict.


then free agency is grounded ultimately in care. To the extent that whatI do does not ultimately depend on my strongest care(s) at the time ofaction, I am unfree. I turn now to an elaboration of these claims in theremaining four theses, which, after my lengthy discussion of Thesis 1,will each be comparatively brief.

Thesis 2: Certain ways of caring operate as necessitating forces on one’sbehavior. I begin by borrowing from and expanding upon Frankfurt’scrucial concept of volitional necessity. According to him, a person issubject to volitional necessity when “what he cares about matters to himnot merely so much, but in such a way, that it is impossible for him toforbear from a certain course of action.”30 The way of caring at issuehere is that the person cannot help caring as he does. When his caringitself is not under his control, his ability to forbear from actions requiredby that care is also not under his control. He simply cannot bring himselfto act in a way that betrays what he cares about. Caring for somethinginvoluntarily, then, operates as a necessitating force on one’s will. Butit is also liberating, according to Frankfurt, insofar as the will necessi-tated by the caring is one’s own will: because of the care that one has,one’s will is shaped accordingly, so that one ends up doing preciselywhat one genuinely wants to do. One wouldn’t have it any other way,and it is somewhat irrelevant that one couldn’t have it any other way.

In illustration Frankfurt offers the case of Martin Luther. When hemade his famous stand, declaring that he could do no other, the wayin which he cared about his cause rendered it impossible for him toforbear the course of action he took. In this matter, it is essential topoint out, Luther was neither logically nor causally necessitated to actthe way that he did. Indeed, he still had the physical power to refrain,it seems. Rather, he simply could not summon the will to do otherwise.He had the capacity to do otherwise, we might say, but he was unableto make use of that capacity. But what is key here is that he genuinelywanted to be constrained in this way, and so Frankfurt maintains thatLuther’s autonomy was actually enhanced.31

Frankfurt occasionally talks about cases of volitional necessity bysaying that one’s being unable to forbear from doing X involves one’sviewing every other alternative to X as unthinkable, but his examplesdo not really bear out this point, and I think in the end that his de-scription of the phenomenon needs to be altered slightly.32 So, for ex-ample, Lord Fawn, in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, is unable to bring

30. Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” in The Importance ofWhat We Care About, pp. 80–94, p. 86.

31. Ibid., pp. 86–88.32. See ibid., as well as Frankfurt’s “Rationality and the Unthinkable,” in The Importance

of What We Care About, pp. 177–90.


himself to continue a conversation with a (lower-class) estate stewardin which the steward is describing to him a possible sexual liaison be-tween Fawn’s fiancee and another man. According to Frankfurt, “ForLord Fawn, it is unthinkable to share a matter of such intimate concernwith a person so inferior to himself in breeding and class,” even thoughhe has previously judged it best to attempt to do so.33 But if Frankfurt’sdescription of the case is accurate, then the action was not unthinkableafter all. Indeed, it was thought about and reasoned over—the possi-bilities of forbearance were entertained—but then the reasons for doingit simply became overwhelmed by Fawn’s powerful emotional commit-ments to the contrary. The action thus became for him unwillable, despitethe fact that he initially thought that he could both will it and do it(and indeed, he judged it the best thing to do). What Frankfurt is bestinterpreted as having in mind, then, are cases in which one’s will isfixed by one’s emotional commitments independently from one’s rea-sons or judgments, such that when push comes to shove, one findsalternative courses of action—regardless of whether one’s reasons coun-sel for or against them—as unwillable: one cannot muster the will toperform them, and so they are rendered moot as genuine alternatives.

If this is the case, then I accept Frankfurt’s central insight here.There are clearly cases in which I cannot bring myself to do other thanwhat I do—independent of any reasons or judgments involved—but Ialso would not want my will to be otherwise, given that this wouldindicate a reduction or elimination of a crucial care of mine. What Iwish to do now, though, is show how this fairly uncontroversial insighthas some powerful and unforeseen implications for freedom.

Thesis 3: None of one’s current cares are under one’s voluntary controlat the current time. It is clear that Frankfurt thinks that volitional necessityattaches only to certain sorts of care, namely, cares that are “not alto-gether under [one’s] own control.”34 But this sort of caring is not sup-posed to be exhaustive of the ways of caring that there are. As he putsit, “When a person cares about something, it may be entirely up to himboth that he cares about it and that he cares about it as much as hedoes.”35 A moment’s reflection, however, reveals that this claim, if itremains unqualified, starkly conflicts with the phenomenological facts,for it should seem obvious that we cannot simply start or stop caringabout something; indeed, we cannot even alter the valence of the thingswe already care about right now.

Of course, while we may have no direct, immediate control overthe presence or valence of our current cares, it nevertheless seems that

33. Frankfurt “Rationality and the Unthinkable,” p. 183.34. Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” p. 86.35. Ibid., p. 85.


we do have some indirect, mediate control over them. Indeed, if caresare formed originally by causal processes, then it also seems they canbe formed or reformed by causal processes that I deliberately set intomotion. True enough. Nevertheless, two points should be stressed. First,my thesis about involuntary caring has to do with one’s current psychicstate or the nexus of cares one has at any given time. These cares arenot subject to one’s direct voluntary control at that time, and the reasonis that the potential emotional reactions indicative of my cares are them-selves not subject to my direct voluntary control at that time.36 Regardlessof whether one has in the past attempted to bring one’s current caresabout, they are, at that moment, in both presence and valence, heldinvoluntarily. This psychological fact is enough to establish the pointsabout necessity I intend to advance in the next thesis.

Second, the trying to bring about a change in the presence orvalence of one or more of one’s cares is itself an action, one itselfmotivated ultimately by psychic elements dependent on the nexus ofcares one already has, which again are themselves not under one’s im-mediate voluntary control. So ultimately, while some of the more par-ticular cares that I currently have may certainly be subject to alterationdown the road, whether I am moved now to pursue such alteration isgoing to be dependent on the presence or absence at the current timeof one of these more general reflexive cares, cares once more beyondmy direct, immediate control.

Thesis 4: Freedom consists in both the necessitation stemming from careand one’s reflective awareness of such necessitation. The implication of thepreceding point is enormous. If none of my current cares are undermy immediate voluntary control, then all nonwanton action motivatedultimately by care is volitionally necessitated. And if free agency is amatter of my doing what is ultimately dependent on my cares, then freeagency just is volitional necessity. I act freely in performing X insofaras I cannot bring myself to do anything other than X.

But surely this cannot be right, can it? After all, aren’t there plentyof actions I perform freely where there seems no hint of the type ofvolitional necessity under discussion? For instance, if I choose chocolateice cream over vanilla, it seems crazy to suggest that I could not bringmyself to pick vanilla or to do anything other than pick chocolate. Afterall, Luther was taking a stand, whereas it may strike us as ludicrous to

36. And of course we must be careful to distinguish one’s emotional reaction fromone’s overt display of the emotional reaction. When playing poker, I may hide my joy atdrawing an inside straight from the other players (because I care about winning the hand,on my analysis), but that certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t experience joy. Of course,the attempt to hide the reaction may be fruitless as well, given the multiplicity of “tells”people have, recognizable to those in the know.


claim that in this case I am saying, “Here I eat chocolate; I can do noother.” So why should we think that all free action is necessitated in away akin to Luther’s inability to refrain from doing what he did?

While I have a number of things to say in response to this importantworry, I begin with a reminder: many examples like this will be instancesof wanton behavior, where the situation just isn’t important enough towarrant any real reflection on whether we genuinely want to be ruledby our current impulses or desires. Let us set such instances aside, then,and assume from here on out that we are exploring nonwanton versionsof these cases. What are we to say?

To answer this worry, I need to introduce the notion of freedomby degrees, which will be explained by consideration of competing cares.First, though, let us return briefly to Luther’s case: suppose he had hada daughter he loved dearly, someone for whom he would do anything.If she were threatened with death and he cared about her more thanhe cared about his religious ideals, surely he could have—and wouldhave—been able to bring himself to refrain from his stand, for at thatpoint I imagine that he would have found himself unable to muster thewill to betray his daughter. If this is correct, then his lack of willablealternatives in the actual circumstances was determined by the degreeto which he cared about his ideals in tandem with the lack of activationof any seriously competing cares at the time of action. But this meansthat one’s will is clearly and overwhelmingly fixed in a given situationonly to the extent that there are no care competitors being activatedin that particular situation.

So consider again the ice cream example. There are two relevantalternatives: chocolate or vanilla. Aren’t I clearly able simply to plumpfor one or the other? Where, then, is the volitional necessity? How isthis at all like the Luther case? The first thing to notice is that we shouldnot disregard the interesting and often-overlooked connections to caresthat may be at work in such cases. To consider just one possibility,suppose my wife is irritated with me for always being so predictablyboring (so vanilla), so because I care a lot right now about assuagingher irritation, I pick the chocolate (“Wow, bold move,” she says). Whatthis indicates is that the object of the care that ultimately motivates me(in this case, my caring about my wife and her anger management) maynot be the object of my actual choice (in this case, the chocolate icecream). Other things being equal, I may not care one whit about eitherchocolate or vanilla ice cream per se (even though I still have variousdesires with respect to them). Nevertheless, there are certain otherthings I care about that are or become directly relevant here, thingsthat shape my will to pick chocolate, and indeed, given my present setof cares here, I could not bring myself to choose vanilla in this particular


set of circumstances.37 I like vanilla, but today it is not a willable option.I am, then, taking a stand after all, as trivial as it may seem, for I amacting to prevent the betrayal of something I truly care about. Perhapsif things had been different and I had cared more about increasing mywife’s irritation level than assuaging it, then I would have been led tovanilla. But things were not different. My caring has taken the choiceout of my hands.

Indeed, I believe that the notion of choosing or decision makinghas been terribly misconstrued by both libertarians and compatibilistsas some kind of thoroughly active enterprise. But reflect on the phe-nomenology of the decision-making process. What precisely happenswhen I am deciding between two alternatives, for example, if I havebeen offered two great jobs in two different parts of the country? WhenI am trying to decide which job to take, all sorts of considerations comeinto play, including the size of the towns, the competence of the schoolsystems for my children, the access to cultural activities, the number ofbars with good pool tables, and so on. Factors that do not come underconsideration will include things like the size of the towns’ water towers,the number of gas stations with attendants named Ralph, the aggregateweight of their citizens, and so on. These factors do not come underconsideration because I do not care about them (although someoneelse might). Of the factors that I do care about, though, some will carrygreater weight than others, given the degree to which I care about them.So as the various facts come in, a complicated and subtle process takesplace, resulting (one hopes) in a clear-cut victor: the job addressing thegreatest number of my cares in the way that I care about having themaddressed is the job I will take. But notice just what has occurred: whenall the facts are in, and all my relevant cares have been taken intoaccount, I simply find myself knowing what to do, and I articulate theresult by saying, “There really was no choice after all. Once I realizedcertain things about the various towns in relation to what I cared about,the decision had been made for me.” In other words, decision making ismisleadingly characterized as a kind of active event, as the definingmoment of “true freedom.” Rather, our minds are “made up.” Theprocess is over once we find ourselves already having gravitated to oneside or the other. We thus have no more active control over what de-cisions will be made than we do over what cares we currently have orwhat information exists. This is not to suggest, however, that having ourcares determine our decisions is akin to having them imposed on us bysome outside element. Instead, the determining forces are internal to,and (what is key) representative of, us. What it means for my self to

37. I will return to the admittedly puzzling phenomenology of this sort of case later.


make a decision is best expressed, then, simply in terms of my cares—the cares I currently have—determining what I should do.38

One might want to resist my claims about decisions, however, bymaintaining the importance of active reflection in the process. True,decisions may occur passively, but don’t they occur only after I activelyreflect on my various cares and actively investigate relevant information?Perhaps decisions about what to do are just the “unmanaged conse-quences” of my critical reflection, but certainly my critical reflection isitself both active and generative of the free action that flows from theresultant decisions.39

I have already agreed that critical reflection is important both for(in some cases) discovering what one really cares about and for initiatingthe (occasional) subsequent reordering of one’s motivations. But inwhat respect is critical reflection itself active, that is, something that Ido or initiate voluntarily, as opposed to something that merely occurspassively within my psychic domain? Although it may initially seem asif my embarking on the path of self-reflection is something I myselfdecide to do, it, too, is an action grounded ultimately in cares I eitherhappen to have or do not happen to have. To see why, consider thefact that I actually have an indefinitely large number of alternative pos-sible actions I could perform every waking moment of every day: at thismoment I could raise my arm, roll around on the floor, go join thearmy, kick my dog, and so on. But again, the only time that I am movedto reflection on what I should do is when certain alternatives becomerelevant, that is, when the stakes of various possibilities matter to me(or when my general lack of consideration of these everyday possibilitiessuddenly matters to me). If I remain utterly indifferent—as I typicallydo—about this huge number of possible alternatives, they simply neveroccur to me. But if I happen to care about which of two or more possiblecourses of action to pursue, my “deciding” to reflect on various facts andcares is itself necessitated. The movement to critical reflection is simplyanother instance of volitional necessity: when I care about which actionis to reflect what (other things) I care about, I cannot bring myself toforbear from critical reflection; the alternative is simply unwillable.40

38. I hasten to point out, however, that this account of decision making is not a kindof “rational necessity” account, one according to which it is the force of reasons thatdetermines one’s will. While reasons and evaluations often are in harmony with one’s will,it is not necessarily they which shape the will. I will return to explain this point in greaterdetail later on.

39. Frankfurt argues just such a point in “The Faintest Passion,” in Necessity, Volition,and Love, pp. 95–107, pp. 104–5.

40. Nevertheless, I do not want to deny that there are some aspects of the deliberativeprocess that are active in a common and intuitive sense. After all, once my will to engagein critical reflection has been necessitated by my recognition of the importance of the


What usually moves us to critical reflection is ambivalence, an un-certainty about what to do, generated by seemingly competing or con-flicting cares. The possibility of ambivalence lurks within us all, and itis initiated by some event(s) that taps into one or more of our heretoforeuntapped cares. When I come to realize the conflict between two ormore of my cares in such a situation, I am led to reflect on what it isI care about more, and what occurs at this point is rather interesting.In being volitionally necessitated (by my caring about the resolution ofmy ambivalence) to reflect momentarily, I focus on the two competingcares41 in order to see, to become aware of, what it is I actually andalready care about more (in this particular situation, remember). In sodoing, I may projectively imagine what I would feel like were bothscenarios to be played out. My hope is that one of the two cares willquickly reveal itself as stronger (via imagined emotional reactions in-volved in each scenario) so that I will know what I care more aboutbefore I lose the chance to act. If it turns out that the two cares are ofequal strength, what will surely also matter is that I do something, so Imay resolve the dilemma through a coin flip or some other such pro-cedure. Most of the time, though, one care is victorious (either becauseof its own strength or because of its strength in combination with certainother related cares), and I am then motivated to do what is in accordancewith it. And whatever I do at that point will be volitionally necessitatedas well: given my present circumstances and cares, I will be unable tobring myself to do other than what I do.

Now this sort of volitional necessity may feel quite different, phe-nomenologically speaking, from what things must have felt like for Lu-ther, but the reason it seems so is only because of the monolithic dom-inance of Luther’s care for his religious ideals over all his other cares(in the relevant circumstances). He cares to such a strong degree forhis religious ideals that there is no question of there being any evenremotely competing cares, cares which might give rise to ambivalence(and thus critical reflection). He knows precisely what he wants to do(what he cannot help but do) because he already knows precisely whatit is he cares about above all else. So his path is quite clear. There is,for him, no choice or decision to be made now, for his decision was

situation in which I find myself, there are various aspects of my reflection on the caresinvolved that surely feel active (where such a feeling of activity is compatible with theirbeing caused); e.g., I focus my attention on certain factors over others, I relate to thevariety of factors in various ways, etc. What I want to resist, though, is the typical claim inthe literature that active agency extends beyond this fairly restricted range to include themaking of decisions or the determining of one’s will. Instead, both are passive processes,made or determined by one’s passions, specified in terms of one’s cares.

41. This would be the active part of agency suggested in the previous note.


made (with respect to virtually all foreseeable such scenarios) long be-fore this moment.

But we are subject to volitional necessity in cases that are far lessdramatic. The reason, it seems, phenomenologically speaking, that wemight have been able to bring ourselves to do something else is simplythat our competing care(s) was so very close to the victorious care(s) instrength: we can more easily see how it might have been otherwise if onlywe had cared just a little bit more. But we didn’t, because we couldn’t.Consequently, the alternative is unwillable, for it would involve the betrayalof—and thus the greater emotional pain involved with—something wecare about just a little bit more.

Further, critical reflection on one’s current psychic condition isactually not the be-all and end-all it has been made out to be with respectto freedom. The man imbued with Aristotle’s brand of phronesis, forinstance, would not be the moral paradigm he is supposed to be if hewere unsure of, and had to reflect upon, what it is he cared about everytime he were faced with a morally charged situation. Instead, he isalready reflectively aware of what he cares about: this knowledge iscarried about with him on a daily basis. At some point, of course, hehad to engage in some critical introspection, but this is a process heno longer needs to undergo. Given that he has been habituated properlyand he has practical wisdom, his caring both about eudaimonia and aboutvirtue as constitutive of it is so dominant that he can no longer beambivalent about what courses of action to pursue. He simply cannotbring himself to do anything other than what virtue demands (and heknows what that will be in nearly every situation), and critical reflectionis no longer required.

It is only we moral nonsaints who are moved to the occasional boutsof critical reflection, then, for it is only we who are ambivalent. Andambivalence can be debilitating. At the very least, anyway, it is inefficient.Hobbes speaks of deliberation as the process of “putting an end to theliberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our own appetite, oraversion.”42 Frankfurt claims that the freedom that is lost here is thefreedom of the wanton, blindly following his impulses, whatever theymay be. Consequently, this anarchic freedom is replaced, through de-liberation, with “the autonomy of being under [one’s] own control.”43

But this seems to me only half right. The other kind of freedom that isabsent or lost when one is moved to deliberate is the freedom of personswho are completely self-aware, persons who know precisely what they care

42. Emphasis in original. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1994), pt. 1, chap. 6, p. 33.

43. Harry Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” in The Importance of WhatWe Care About, pp. 159–76, p. 175.


about and whose cares are already clearly ordered by strength. The restof us fall somewhere in between: we do not know everything about theways in which our cares stack up against one another, but at least we careenough about having our actions conform to our cares that we are movedto deliberate when two or more of them move us in different directions.We are, most of us, more fortunate than thoroughgoing wantons, in thatwe care about being moved by more than blind, anarchic impulse. Butwe also tend to be less fortunate than the self-aware saints, in that ourignorance of certain aspects of ourselves prevents us from enjoying theconfidence and unhindered action of genuine autonomy. For the trulyself-aware, freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to choose.

Thesis 5: Identification occurs passively, garnering its authority for self-determination from one’s nexus of cares. This point should by now be seenas inevitable. In terms of nonwanton behavior, what makes a motiva-tionally efficacious psychic element mine is that it is ultimately depen-dent on—and not merely consistent with—one or more of my cares.44

I am identified with those elements flowing from my cares, that is, whatis authoritative in self-determination are those elements dependent onthe emotional investments I recognize myself to have. What makes amotivationally efficacious psychic element external, or alien, to me isits independence from, and inconsistency with, my nexus of cares. Fur-ther, because caring is a matter of degree, so is identification. To theextent that I care about something moving me to F and I also careabout something else moving me to w, I am partially identified withboth potential sources of my action. I will then be led by my ambivalencein this situation to reflect upon my various carings, and the caring(s)that emerges as stronger will motivate my actions. But in doing whateverI do, I do not shunt aside the losing, merely weaker care as alien, asexternal to me. It—and the psychic elements to which it gives birth—is still a part of who I am, just not as much as the winning care. It willshape my will on other days, but not today.

The ambivalence giving rise to critical reflection in such cases stemsultimately from an uncertainty about just who one is, which is really aquestion about what one cares about and to what degree one caresabout it. It is not, as Frankfurt would have it, an uncertainty merelyabout what first-order desires one wants to be effective, and it is also

44. There is an obvious sense in which pains and itches are psychic elements that aremine, and they can also be motivationally efficacious, but they typically move me in sit-uations where I act wantonly (unreflectively), akin to pangs of hunger and thirst. What Iam interested in, of course, are those psychic elements that are mine in the sense ofidentification, where the (nonwanton) actions I perform are determined by psychic ele-ments on authority of my self. Pains or itches rarely (if ever) play such a role, and, if theydo, I am maintaining that they would be connected in some way with other psychicelements (e.g., desires or judgments) that depend on my cares.


not always, as Watson would have it, an uncertainty merely about whatone judges best. The ambivalence is much deeper than that: it goes tothe core of our identities, to the heart of what kinds of persons we areand, perhaps, care about being.

I suspect that nearly all of us care deeply about being integrated,whole persons. On the model I have suggested, this goal translates intocaring about who we are, about understanding the forces which moveus, and about knowing what things are more important to us than others.We may never come to have the kind of overwhelmingly dominant andmonolithic cares seemingly necessary for sainthood, but perhaps in theend we do not care so much for that. What we may be perfectly satisfiedwith instead is an awareness of the relative strengths of our various cares,an understanding of what things are more or most important to us inwhat circumstances. Such reflective awareness allows us to see that whatwe cannot help but do is what we actually care most about doing hereand now. It allows us to recognize the elements with which we havebecome identified, sometimes partially, sometimes wholly. It allows usgraciously to submit to being swept along by the necessitating currentof freedom.

So how does this model answer the original problems associatedwith the previous attempts of Frankfurt and Watson? After all, it mayseem that I have yet clearly to show how my view, which bears someresemblance to Frankfurt’s, avoids the objections about identificationraised at the beginning to his view, and that I also have yet clearly toshow how my view, which also bears some resemblance to Watson’s,avoids certain objections raised against his view. I will start explicitlywith Frankfurt, but it will soon become obvious how we may deal withWatson as well.

The Frankfurtian objection presses the main point of this essay: ofany desire which moves an agent to act, we can always legitimately ask,“What makes this desire the agent’s desire? Why isn’t it external to her—as external as the craving of the unwilling addict?” Appealing to voli-tional necessity may not yet seem to answer these questions, for what isit about caring that lends it the special authority involved in identifi-cation? Indeed, what of the possibility that someone does not like whatshe cares about? Why think, then, that she identifies with the desiresproduced by this uncared-for care any more than the unwilling addictidentifies with those cravings produced by his uncared-for addiction?

The answer is that our identity as functioning, well-developedagents—as something more than just wantons—is constituted by ournexus of cares. Who we are—from the way that we construe the worldand our experiences to our desires, values, goals, and ideals—is shapedby, colored by, or filtered through our emotional lenses. In the rareinstances where humans’ emotional capacities have been destroyed or


crippled, so, too, have been their capacities for practical reason anddecision making: their ability to plan for the future, conduct themselvesaccording to social rules, and even choose appropriate means to theirown survival are severely compromised.45 And it is not hard to see why:without the ability to feel, one would (by definition) be without thecapacity to care, leaving one’s decision-making landscape flat and with-out salience. With no emotional investment in what one might do, alloptions are on an equal footing—anything is possible—and it is nowonder that such damaged individuals wind up doing things that strikeus as capricious or utterly incomprehensible. Losing one’s capacity tocare means losing one’s identity as a coherent agent. But fortunatelysuch a capacity is functioning—and inescapable—for the rest of us. Evenwhen we step back from certain of our cares to critically evaluate them,we can do so only from the perspective of other cares.46

But if this is true—if who I am as a developed agent is both madepossible by, and is a function of, my emotional commitments—thenwhat else could provide the authority for self-determination than mycares? Cares involve emotional investments: when I care for something,I find part of myself tied tightly to it, such that when something badhappens to it, something bad (emotionally) happens to me. So when Iam moved to preserve something I care about, I am acting to preservemy investments. In other words, I am acting on behalf of myself, or atleast the part of myself that is tied to the cared-for object. But this isjust to say that I am, in such circumstances, determined and authorizedto act by my self. Motivationally efficacious desires and judgments flowingfrom my cares, therefore, flow from me: they get any authority theyhave only derivatively, reflecting what I genuinely want—what I authorizeon my behalf—only insofar as they depend on my cares, the set ofemotional investments making me the agent I am.

Consequently, what makes cares, and the motivationally efficaciouspsychic elements flowing from them, mine is simply that I now havethem, that they are part of, or flow from, the nexus of cares that con-

45. See, e.g., Damasio, p. 33.46. Watson makes a similar point about one’s evaluational system in “Free Agency”:

“One can dissociate oneself from one set of ends and principles only from the standpointof another such set that one does not disclaim. In short, one cannot dissociate oneselffrom all normative judgements without forfeiting all standpoints and therewith one’sidentity as an agent” (p. 106). I am making a stronger point, however, namely, that onecannot dissociate oneself entirely from one’s set of cares, which, while giving rise to one’sspecific set of evaluational judgments, are more inclusive and wide-ranging than just thatset.


stitutes me now.47 The difference, then, between the person who findsthat she does not like some of her cares and the unwilling addict is thatthe former’s actions still flow from who she is (from her cares), whilethe latter’s do not (at least with respect to his addiction). Or, moreprecisely, the addict’s overpowering desire to take the drugs (which,remember, is different from his desire to put an end to the craving)will ultimately be effective regardless of what he cares about. But themere fact that we do not like some aspect of ourselves does not makeit any less a part of ourselves. We may resign ourselves to it or undertakesome course of action designed indirectly to alter or purge it (motivatedultimately, of course, by a conflicting care), but as long as it remains,it is, for better or worse, part of who we are.

Desires and evaluative judgments may, therefore, lack the authorityfor self-determination when they do not flow from our cares, that is,our selves. On the one hand, it seems perfectly possible for me both tohave a desire to F and to have a second-order desire that my desire toF be my will and, yet, when push comes to shove, to fail to identify witheither desire. Neither desire, in other words, may provide the authorityfor self-determination. What they need for such authority is some de-pendence relation to things I care about. And the same thing goes forevaluative judgments. After all, my judgment that it would be best to F

may not have any bearing whatsoever on my will. What I genuinely wantmore here and now—the course of action with which I genuinely iden-tify—may clearly be opposed to such reasons.

Now it remains true enough that much of the time my will is infact constrained in harmony with my desires or evaluational judgments;indeed, if these are the only sorts of psychic elements that can be mo-tivationally efficacious (in nonwanton action), then obviously freeagency would have to involve one or more of them constituting one’swill. The point, though, is that they are each individually insufficient to

47. It might be objected that surely not all our cares are part of our identity. Afterall, I might care a great deal right now about wording this note correctly, insofar as I amemotionally vulnerable to the prospect of getting it wrong. But once I finish wording itcorrectly, this care will fade from my motivational structure. Have I then changed identities?Surely not, it would seem. Now while I agree that such a case would not necessarily involvea change in identity, the reason is not the fading away of the care here and now, for acare’s fading away from my motivational structure does not mean that it is no longer apart of my general nexus of cares. After all, caring about wording this note correctly issurely part of a more general care I have about doing good philosophy. The specific formthat the care took here and now—the way it was articulated after having been tappedinto—was determined by the specific circumstances in which I found myself, needing torespond to a particular possible objection. But this is not to say that that specificallyarticulated care’s absence from my motivational structure indicates (a) its absence alto-gether from my nexus of cares or (b) a corresponding change in my identity. It may, afterall, be tapped into again quite soon.


account for the whole of freedom and identification. Desires in and ofthemselves, no matter how well they are structured with respect to oneanother, may or may not flow from or reflect who I am, and neithermay my general evaluative judgments. To be a part of me now, to bemine, they must have some dependence relation to my cares. They mustdepend on who I am.

What matters for freedom and identification is that my will have acertain structure, instantiating the proper dependency relation betweenmotivation and cares. When my will is structured in this way, I am boundin the way that I truly want to be bound, constrained by my own emo-tional commitments to act on their—my—behalf. This is merely one ofmany ways that the view is importantly different from the classical com-patibilism of Hobbes and Hume (and even more contemporary versionslike Ayer’s and Stace’s), for it takes a crucial kind of constraint—theself-constraint produced by one’s cares—as essential for, and not asopposed to, freedom. It also requires that the desires or judgments onwhich I act flow, not just from any old part of my general character, butfrom a distinctive and essential part, namely, my network of emotionalcommitments. When my act is free, I am indeed taking a stand in defenseof the things I care about: not only are alternatives unwillable, but Iwouldn’t want them to be willable. Furthermore, the view that I ampresenting is compatibilist in a truly robust sense. Whereas the classicalcompatibilists claimed that freedom is not only compatible with deter-minism but also requires it, if freedom instead is simply a matter ofone’s will embodying a certain structure, then freedom is actually com-patible with determinism or indeterminism. Whether one comes to havea properly structured will through deterministic or indeterministicmeans becomes irrelevant.48

Nevertheless, isn’t it still possible that I could be alienated frommy cares in the way that I occasionally can be from my desires andjudgments? Suppose, for example, that someone has somehow fiddledwith my brain (or hypnotized or brainwashed me) such that he hascaused me to have certain cares which lead to my acting in certain ways.How, then, could the actions that flowed from these externally im-planted cares be either mine or free? In other words, if all that mattersfor freedom is that one’s will is necessitated ultimately by one’s cares,then the causal provenance of those cares is irrelevant, but this seemswrong in cases of external tampering.

I agree that freedom is undermined in such cases, but the reasonis not that the causal source of the cares is external to me, as theobjection seems to imply. Rather, I would be unfree here insofar as myordinary cognitive functioning would be impaired in crucial ways. As

48. Compare Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” p. 25.


Watson puts it, I would have been rendered “incapable of effectivelyenvisaging or seeing the significance of certain alternatives, of reflectionon [myself] and on the origins of [my] motivations, of comprehendingor responding to relevant theoretical and evaluational criteria.”49 Suchfunctioning capacities are surely a precondition of genuine agency; ifthey are not in place, one is simply not an agent—or at most one is aseverely damaged agent—and so the question of whether one’s agencyis free is a nonstarter. Regardless, then, of whether cares necessitateone’s actions in such cases, if one’s ordinary background cognitivemechanisms—for critical self-reflection and evaluation, for having one’scares and subsequent motives be responsive to such reflection, and forhaving certain of one’s other cares tapped into in relevant circum-stances—are incapacitated, then the conditions necessary for agency,and thus freedom, are absent. But I have maintained all along the crucialrole these mechanisms play in the overall picture of free agency, so thisanswer to the standard tampering objection should come as no surprise.

* * *

I clearly recognize that much of what I have said here deserves fullerexplanation and refinement. I also recognize that I may be insufficientto the task. Talk of freedom and identification is messy and difficult,precisely because human beings are messy and difficult. Fully graspingthe nature of the self is, as Hume realized, most likely an impossible task.Instead, the best that we can hope for is to be moved to reflect upon it,to come to some limited understanding of it (or parts of it), and to befortunate enough to have the forces moving us to action be dependenton the cares we recognize our selves to have. Our freedom—our abilityto do what we genuinely want to do, where what we genuinely want todo is dependent on what we care most about in any given situation—expands in proportion to the expansion of our self-knowledge. But, par-adoxically enough, as our self-knowledge increases, as we come to knowmore and more about what it is we care about and to what degree wecare about it, the seemingly open-ended number of our potential actionsshrinks, gradually approaching just one. Freedom is essentially the lim-iting of options through expanded self-knowledge.

Of course, tying freedom to necessity and the elimination of willableoptions may simply strike some as a reductio of the position. After all,the other feature of freedom mentioned at the outset has generallybeen thought to involve certain counterfactual abilities, including theability to act against one’s own cares. But this type of freedom isshrouded in mystery, and anyway it simply seems irrelevant, given thephenomenological facts. Even if it is humanly possible, I seriously doubt

49. Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” p. 152.


that, upon reflection, it is an aspect of freedom we really care that muchabout. Instead, we care about having the ability—the freedom—to dowhat is in accordance with our cares, and in the end we may simply notcare about any more freedom than that.

Caring, Identification, and Agency

Documents

Transcript of Caring, Identification, and Agency