Joseph Gurrola / Cares in Action
Joseph Gurrola / Cares in Action
Friday May 1, Joe Gurrola defends his dissertation, "Cares in Action," abstracted below. Chaired by Peter, the committee also includes Dan, Lizzie, Nick and Rachel, plus Luke Butler representing the Dean.
Across multiple areas in moral psychology people talk about cares and psychological values. These notions play a critical role in explanations of how we act freely, and when we are praiseworthy for our actions. They also support certain puzzles concerning which emotions are fitting given our set of values. This dissertation advances a naturalized account of what it means to care about something. It argues that cares as philosophers have traditionally discussed them are identical to the psychological values in our valuational systems countenanced by affective science. In three chapters, it applies this account to different phenomena in our psychological lives. The first phenomenon is free will. A long compatibilist tradition in the free will debate takes free action to be action that is in accordance with what we care about. In chapter 1, I formulate an account along these lines. My account is distinctive in that it argues that the correct naturalistic picture of cares and what it means to act on them implies that if acting freely is acting in accordance with what we care about, then other animals can act freely too. This paper’s main contribution to the free will literature is in showing that philosophers have been mistaken in believing that only persons can act freely. The second phenomenon is grief. Most of the philosophical discussion surrounding grief of late has focused on the fittingness of grief as it diminishes over time, seemingly taking for granted that resilient people still care for their dead loved ones just as much. This is puzzling: given that cares make us sensitive to the fortunes of their objects, it appears that if we still cared about our lost loved one, we would not cease to grieve. To address this puzzle, I use the naturalized account of care developed in chapter 1 to explain why we are resilient after the loss of someone we love, and how our resilience is consistent with the idea that our cares for them remain undiminished. The third phenomenon is moral worth. The right-reasons account of moral worth holds that for an action to be praiseworthy it must be motivated by the non-instrumental reasons that explain why the action is right. In chapter 3, I draw on the science of motivation to explain why this account of moral worth is false. There are cases of morally praiseworthy action where the agent is motivated by the right-making reasons, but only instrumentally. These are cases where the values required for the agent to be intrinsically motivated by the right-reasons have not developed, but where the agent nevertheless decides to act for the right-reasons. Together, these chapters provide insight into the questions of what it means to care about something, and what it means to act in accordance with what we care about.