What is it to "value" something, in the semi-technical sense of the term that Gary Watson establishes? I argue that valuing something consists in caring about it. Caring involves not only emotional dispositions of the sort that Agnieszka Jaworska has elaborated, but also a distinctive cognitive disposition -namely, a (defeasible) disposition to believe the object cared about to be a source of agent-relative reasons for action and for emotion. Understood in this way, an agent's carings have a stronger claim to "speak for" her as her values than do other attitudes that have been proposed for this role. In particular, an agent's carings establish more robust psychological continuities and cross-temporal connections than do self-governing policies of the sort that Michael Bratman has described; and they forge diachronic coherence not just in her deliberation and action, as self-governing policies do, but also in her cognitive and emotional life. An agent's carings thus help to constitute her identity as a temporally persisting subject. Self-governing policies are at best ersatz-values, which an agent may choose to adopt when she finds that her proper values -her cares -leave her course underdetermined.
argues that for virtuous agents the requirements of virtue do not outweigh competing considerations, but 'silence' them. He explains this claim in two different ways: a virtuous agent (a) will not be tempted to act in a way which is incompatible with virtue ('motivational silencing'), or (b) will not believe that he has any reason to act in a way which is incompatible with virtue ('rational silencing'). I identify a small class of cases in which alone McDowell's claims about rational silencing are true. He draws his claims from Aristotle's assertion that a life of virtue is 'selfsufficient'. I offer an alternative reading of Aristotle's assertion, which does not imply the truth of McDowell's. But McDowell's claims about motivational silencing are true.
This essay seeks to explain a morally important class of psychological incapacity-the class of what Bernard Williams has called ''incapacities of character.'' I argue for two main claims: (1) Caring is the underlying psychological disposition that gives rise to incapacities of character. (2) In competent, rational adults, caring is, in part, a cognitive and deliberative disposition. Caring is a mental state which disposes an agent to believe certain considerations to be good reasons for deliberation and action. And caring is a mental state which structures an agent's practical deliberation, by establishing presumptive boundaries on the landscape of possibilities over which her deliberative imagination ranges. Incapacities of character are a consequence of the structure which these presumptive boundaries give to an agent's deliberation.Bernard Williams has argued that a person may find that she is incapable of doing something, because her character renders it ''unthinkable'' for her. A person's character is revealed not merely by her actions, but by such incapacities, Williams claims. I think that this claim is correct. To the extent that it is, it helps give determinate shape to a large question: what does a person's character consist in? What are the underlying psychological dispositions which constitute a person's character, and how do they manifest themselves in the incapacities Williams identifies? In what follows, I will argue that a person's character is constituted, in
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