The Moral, the Personal, and the Importance of What We Care About

Abstract

In 'The Importance of What We Care About," Frankfurt states the following:

[I]f there is something that a person does care about, then it follows that it is important to him. This is not because caring somehow involves an infallible judgment concerning the importance of its object. Rather it is because caring about something makes that thing important to the person...

In this paper I argue, first, that under the most plausible interpretation of it, this claim (henceforth, 'Frankfurt's Care-Importance Principle', or 'the CIP') is false. We are generally able to make unimportant things important to ourselves; occasionally, however, we fail to do so. For instance, one may mistakenly believe that one needs something, and, due to this belief, come to care about it. True, this thing may become important to oneself, because of one's caring about it, for caring may generate genuine needs. Nevertheless, caring may have blinding effects too: one's caring may reinforce the false belief that generated it. In this type of case, the agent's deep commitment simply blinds him (or her) to that is really important to him. The philosophical significance of correcting the CIP will become clear in the second part of this paper. There, I shall argue that Frankfurt's adherence to the CIP casts doubt upon the adequacy of his conceptual framework to deal with a special kind of conflict, namely, the conflict between the moral and the personal.

Keywords: Frankfurt, Care-Importance Principle, caring