The provided excerpts from Todd May's "Care" delve into a philosophical examination of what it means to care, its importance to individual identity and engagement with the world, and its role in ethical thought. May presents different perspectives on defining care, notably contrasting Harry Frankfurt's emphasis on reflective commitment with Agnieszka Jaworska's focus on emotional engagement. The book explores the distinct characteristics of care compared to desire and need, and highlights the intrinsic link between caring and vulnerability to loss. Care ethics is introduced as a feminist challenge to traditional principle-based moral theories, emphasizing relationality and the moral significance of emotion and care. The concept of caring for oneself is discussed, examining how traditional moral theories accommodate it and presenting Frankfurt's controversial view of self-love as the purest form of love, ultimately reframed as an important aspect of self-care involving identification with one's own caring. Finally, the text explores how philosophies like Buddhism and Stoicism, which aim for emotional detachment, might nonetheless engage in a form of "caring*" or solidarity, raising the question of whether a caring that is invulnerable to loss is a desirable form of caring. **Main Themes and Important Ideas:** 1. **Defining Caring: Importance and Vulnerability to Loss:** - Caring is fundamentally characterized by a sense of importance attributed to the object of care. This is akin to valuing something. - "If you care about something, then it’s important to you. Another way to put this is to say that you value it." - Caring is distinct from mere desiring, which is often fleeting and not deeply connected to one's character. - Caring is also different from needing; one can need something without caring about it, and one can even know they need something without caring enough to act. - A crucial aspect of caring is the sense of loss (or potential loss) experienced when the object of care is threatened or harmed. This loss is felt as a diminishment within the person who cares. - "If I care about my spouse or my sports team or surfing or justice, I don’t want those things harmed. If they are harmed, or threatened with harm, I’m likely to feel one or another senses of loss or diminishment." - This vulnerability highlights how caring "binds a person to what they care about." 2. **Different Conceptions of Caring: Reflection vs. Emotion:** - Philosopher Harry Frankfurt's influential view defines caring as involving a **reflective commitment** to one's desires. It requires recognizing and affirming a desire as important and being willing to act on it. - Frankfurt: "Caring, insofar as it consists in guiding oneself along a distinctive course or in a particular manner, presupposes both agency and self-consciousness. It is a matter of being active in a certain way, and the activity is essentially a reflexive one." - Frankfurt suggests that caring involves a "volitional necessity," where acting in accordance with what is cared about can feel compelled. - Philosopher Agnieszka Jaworska challenges Frankfurt's emphasis on reflectivity, arguing that it excludes clear cases of caring by young children and individuals with cognitive impairments (like Alzheimer's disease). - Jaworska proposes an alternative view grounded in **emotional engagement**. - Jaworska, drawing on Peter Goldie, suggests that an emotion, and by extension caring, is not a single episode but "an ongoing emotional relationship with the world," an "enduring pattern of these episodes." - While emotional engagement is key, May notes the challenge of defining the precise relationship between emotion and caring to avoid being too broad (e.g., simple irritation). 3. **The Significance of Caring:** - Caring is deeply intertwined with **individual identity**. What a person cares about largely defines who they are and how they are identified by others. - "We can easily recognize that we define ourselves, and are often defined by others, by what we care about." - Caring provides a **coherent and stable way of engaging with the world**, structuring our ambitions, concerns, interests, and goals. - Without caring, individuals would be "wantons," driven haphazardly by momentary desires without stability or commitment. - Caring can also **reveal aspects of ourselves**, sometimes even aspects we deceive ourselves about. Our behavior can demonstrate what we care about, even if we deny it. 4. **Care Ethics as a Moral Approach:** - Care ethics is presented as a **feminist approach** to ethics, critiquing traditional moral theories (consequentialism and deontology) for their emphasis on rationality, abstraction, and principles. - Traditional theories, like Kohlberg's stages of moral development, often positioned relationality and care as less morally mature than abstract principled reasoning. - Care ethics argues that the experiences of women, historically associated with emotion, care, and relationality, have ethical relevance. - The goal of care ethics is the **integration of emotion, care, and relationality into ethical thought and action**. - Key characteristics of care ethics, as discussed by Virginia Held, include: - Care as both a practice and a value, focused on maintaining and repairing our world and responding to needs. - Rejection of the idea that more abstract reasoning is always better, arguing against the unconditional priority of **impartiality**, especially in close relationships (e.g., parent-child relationships are founded on care, not just duty). - **Reconceptualization of the public and private spheres**, challenging the traditional separation that has marginalized women and relegated care to the private realm. - Conceiving of persons as **relational** rather than as self-sufficient, independent individuals. - Care ethics has affinities with virtue ethics, which focuses on what kind of person one should be rather than solely on rules for action. However, traditional virtue ethics can be seen as more individualistic than care ethics' emphasis on relationships. 5. **The Objects of Caring:** - Caring can be directed towards a wide variety of objects, including people, animals, ecosystems, ideas, and non-living things. - Caring about something for its own sake implies that we attribute **inherent value** to it, not just instrumental value. - "To care about something for its own sake and thinking it has inherent value go together." - Wonder is a key emotion that can signal caring about something, like an ecosystem, for its own sake. - Non-living things, such as works of art, can also be cared about for their own sake, implying they hold inherent value. - Objects like heirlooms (e.g., a grandfather's watch) can be cared about as **irreplaceable** due to their specific history or connection, even if they don't have inherent value in themselves. - Abstract ideas, such as justice or mathematical systems, can also be objects of caring for their own sake. 6. **Caring for Ourselves:** - Traditional moral theories (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) allow for self-regard or looking after oneself, though they differ in their framing (happiness as part of total utility, duties of self-development, living a flourishing life). - Frankfurt's view of **self-love** is explored, which he controversially describes as the "purest" form of love based on his four characteristics of love (disinterestedness, particularity, volitional necessity, identification). - May challenges whether self-love can truly be "disinterested" in the usual sense, suggesting that Frankfurt might be describing an important form of **self-care** rather than love. - This form of self-care involves taking one's own caring seriously and identifying oneself with it ("caring about the fact that I care"). - "So in order to really be myself as a person who cares, my caring must be something I care about." - Self-care also involves actively developing one's own genuine interests. - Michel Foucault's historical analysis of practices of self-care in different societies (ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work, ethical telos) offers a framework for understanding self-care as a cultural practice of molding oneself. 7. **Caring, Vulnerability, and Philosophical Detachment:** - Philosophies like **Buddhism** and **Stoicism** aim to reduce suffering and achieve tranquility/nirvāna by diminishing emotional attachment to the world and cultivating equanimity in the face of change and loss. - Both philosophies emphasize the illusion of a permanent self (Buddhism) or the irrationality of resisting the rational cosmos (Stoicism). - Despite aiming for emotional detachment, both traditions commend **engagement with the world and solidarity with others** (e.g., the Buddhist bodhisattva, Stoic efforts to help others). - This solidarity can be seen as a practice to loosen the grip of self-interest and emotional attachment, or as acting in accordance with their core doctrines. - However, a key difference from the typical understanding of caring is the **lack of vulnerability to loss**. Strictly speaking, neither Buddhism nor Stoicism allows for the sense of grief, anger, or sadness associated with a threat to the object of care. - May posits whether this is a different kind of caring, potentially an "invulnerable" caring or "compassion*," where things are held to be important without the accompanying feeling of loss if threatened. - The text concludes by suggesting that, for most people, caring and vulnerability to loss are inextricably linked, and that being the kind of person who _is_ vulnerable to feeling loss under certain circumstances is a desired aspect of their caring, even if the emotions themselves are unpleasant. **Conclusion:** The excerpts from "Care" provide a rich and multifaceted exploration of caring. They move beyond simple definitions to delve into its philosophical underpinnings, its central role in human identity and engagement, its significance as a distinct ethical framework, and its relationship to self-regard and detachment philosophies. The tension between reflective and emotional accounts of caring, the challenge to traditional views of impartiality, and the complex relationship between caring and vulnerability are particularly important ideas presented in the text. The book encourages readers to reflect on what they care about, the diverse forms that caring can take, and the kind of "caring self" they aspire to be.