CONCEPT
Caring (Frankfurt)
Not a warm feeling but a structural feature of the will — a configuration in which certain commitments are treated as non-negotiable and certain standards are maintained regardless of external pressure. The organizing principle of the self, and the determinant of whether amplified output is worth producing.
Frankfurt titled his most important collection The Importance of What We Care About. The title was not decorative. It was an argument compressed into eight words: the most important fact about a person is not what they can do, not what they know, not what they have achieved, but what they care about. Caring is the organizing principle of the self. It determines which desires are endorsed and which are repudiated, which commitments are constitutive and which peripheral, which actions express the person's identity and which betray it. Everything else — skill, intelligence, productivity — is downstream of caring. The quality of what a person produces depends, in the final analysis, on the quality of what they care about.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Frankfurt's account of caring is not sentimental. Caring, in his framework, is not a warm feeling toward an object. It is