HARRY FRANKFURT

THE IMPORTANCE OF WHAT WE CARE ABOUT

1. Philosophers have for some time devoted their most systematic

attention primarily to two large sets of questions, each of which
develops out of concern with a pervasively compelling and trouble-
some aspect of our lives. In the first set, which constitutes the
domain of epistemology, the questions derive in one way or another
from our interest in deciding what to believe. The general topic of
those in the second set is how to behave, insofar as this is the subject
matter of ethics. It is also possible to delineate a third branch of
inquiry, concerned with a cluster of questions which pertain to
another thematic and fundamental preoccupation of human existence
- namely, what to care about.
It is not properly within the scope either of epistemology or of
ethics to investigate the various distinctive conceptual questions to
which this third preoccupation leads. Those disciplines need not
reflect upon the nature of caring as such, nor are they obliged to
consider what is implied by the fact that we are creatures to whom
things matter. I shall not attempt to provide a formal and exhaustive
account of the branch of inquiry that does specifically attend to such
things. I propose in this essay merely to broach, in a somewhat
tentative and fragmentary way, a few of its central concepts and
issues.
2. There is naturally an intimate connection between what a person
cares about and what he will, generally or under certain conditions,
think it best for himself to do. But while the third branch of inquiry
therefore resembles ethics in its concern with problems of evaluation
and of action, it differs significantly from ethics in its generative
concepts and ~n its motivating concerns. Ethics focusses on the
problem of ordering our relations with other people. It is concerned
especially with the contrast between right and wrong, and with the
grounds and limits of moral obligation. We are led into the third
branch of inquiry, on the other hand, because we are interested in
deciding what to do with ourselves and because we therefore need to
understand what is important or, rather, what is important to us.

Synthese 53 (1982) 257-272. 003%7857/82/0532-0257 $01.60

Copyright 0 1982 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.
258 HARRY FRANKFURT

It can hardly be disputed that, for most of us, the requirements of

ethics are not the only things we care about. Even people who care a
great deal about morality generally care still more about other things.
They may care more, for instance, about their own personal projects,
about certain individuals and groups, and perhaps about various
ideals to which they accord commanding authority in their lives but
which need not be particularly of an ethical nature. There is nothing
distinctively moral, for instance, about such ideals as being stead-
fastly loyal to a family tradition, or selflessly pursuing mathematical
truth, or devoting onesself to some type of connoisseurship.
The role of moral judgment in the development and pursuit of
concerns like these is often quite marginal, not only in potency but in
relevance as well. It goes without saying that there are many im-
portant decisions with regard to which moral considerations are
simply not decisive, and which must accordingly be based, at least to
some extent, upon considerations of nonmoral kinds. But even
decisions that are not of this sort are also often made, of course, in
the light of values or preferences other than moral ones. Moreover, it
is not wholly apparent that making them in such ways is always
unjustifiable.
Someone who takes morality seriously, and who believes that one
of his alternatives is in fact morally preferable to the others, may
nonetheless regard the importance of this fact as less than categoric-
ally preemptive. Suppose first that he does not actually know which
of his alternatives is the morally best one. It might be sensible for him
to decline to look into the matter at all, on the grounds that under the
circumstances doing so would be too costly. That is, he might
plausibly judge it more important to himself to reserve for other uses
the time and the effort which a conscientious exploration and
assessment of the relevant moral features of his situation would
require. Whether a judgment of this kind is ever fully warranted
depends upon whether or not moral considerations are necessarily so
much more important than others that there is no limit to the
resources which it is reasonable to spend in order to see that they get
their due.
Or suppose, secondly, that the person does already know what he is
morally obliged to do. He may nonetheless choose deliberately to
violate this obligation - not because he thinks it is overriden by a
stronger one, but because there is an alternative course of action
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 259

which he considers more important to him than meeting the demands

of moral rectitude. It seems to me that both in this case and in the
first the subordination of moral considerations to others might be
justified. In any event, it is clear in both cases that the question
concerning what is most important is distinguishable from the ques-
tion concerning what is morally right.
There may be some people to whom ethical considerations are not
only unequivocally paramount but exclusive. If so, then nothing else
has as such any importance in their lives. Their only purpose, to
which they intend all their activities to contribute, is to do whatever
they regard as most desirable from the point of view of morality - to
maximize human welfare, perhaps, or to make society more just. This
sort of overspecialisation is difficult to sustain, and it is rare. But
suppose that someone will in fact accept no reason for acting except
that the action in question is more likely than any other to lead to the
realisation of his moral ideal. It is still the case that this person's
moral judgments are one thing and the fact that he cares about them
so much is another. His belief that certain courses of action are
dictated by ethical considerations differs, in other words, from his
belief that no other considerations compare in importance to those.
3. Providing fully articulated analyses of the concepts of caring and
of importance is no easier than defining the notions - e.g., those of
belief and of obligation - which are basic to the first two branches of
inquiry. Indeed, the concept of importance appears to be so fun-
damental that a satisfactory analysis of it may not be possible at all. It
is reasonable to suppose that things have importance only in virtue of
the differences they make: if it would make no difference at all to
anything whether a certain thing existed, or whether it had certain
characteristics, then neither the existence of that thing nor its charac-
teristics would be of any importance whatever. But everything does
actually make s o m e difference. How is it possible, then, for anything
to be genuinely unimportant? It can only be because the difference
such a thing makes is itself of no importance. Thus it is evidently
essential to include, in the analysis of the concept of importance, a
proviso to the effect that nothing is important unless the difference it
makes is an important one. Whether a useful account of the concept
can be developed without running into this circularity is unclear.
As for the notion of what a person cares about, it coincides in part
with the notion of something with reference to which the person
260 HARRY FRANKFURT

guides himself in what he does with his life and in his conduct. It is
not to be presumed, of course, that whenever a person's life displays
over a period of time some more or less stable attitudinal or
behavioral disposition, this reflects what the person cares about
during that time. After all, patterns of interest or of response may be
manifestations only of habits or of involuntary regularities of some
other kind; and it is also possible for them to develop merely by
chance. T h e y may be discernible, therefore, even in the lives of
creatures who are incapable of caring about anything.
Caring, insofar as it consists in guiding onesself 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. This is not exactly because
the agent, in guiding his own behavior, necessarily does something to
himself. Rather, it is more nearly because he purposefully does
something with himself.
A person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it.
He identifies himself with what he cares about in the sense that he
makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits
depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or
enhanced. Thus he concerns himself with what concerns it, giving
particular attention to such things and directing his behavior accord-
ingly. Insofar as the person's life is in whole or in part devoted to
anything, rather than being merely a sequence of events whose
themes and structures he makes no effort to fashion, it is devoted to
this.
A person might stop caring about something because he knew he
could not have it. But he might nonetheless continue to like it and to
want it, and to consider it both desirable and valuable. Thus caring
about something is not to be confused with liking it or with wanting it;
nor is it the same as thinking that what is cared about has value of
some kind, or that it is desirable. It is especially to be noted that these
attitudes and beliefs differ significantly from caring in their temporal
characteristics. The outlook of a person who cares about something is
inherently prospective; that is, he necessarily considers himself as
having a future. On the other hand, it is possible for a creature to
have desires and beliefs without taking any accouunt at all of the fact
that he may continue to exist.
Desires and beliefs can occur in a life which consists merely of a
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 261

succession-of separate moments, none of which the subject recog-

nises - either when it occurs or in anticipation or in m e m o r y - as an
element integrated with others in his own continuing history. When
this recognition is entirely absent, there is no continuing subject. The
lives of some animals are presumably like that. The moments in the
life of a person who cares about something, however, are not merely
linked inherently by formal relations of sequentiality. The person
necessarily binds them together, and in the nature of the case also
construes them as being bound together, in richer ways. This both
entails and is entailed b y his own continuing concern with what he
does with himself and with what goes on in his life.
Considerations of a similar kind indicate that a person can care
about something only over some more or less extended period of
time. It is possible to desire something, or to think it valuable, only
for a moment. Desires and beliefs have no inherent persistence;
nothing in the nature of wanting or of believing requires that a desire
or a belief must endure. But the notion of guidance, and hence the
notion of caring, implies a certain consistency or steadiness of
behavior; and this presupposes some degree of persistence. A person
who cared about something just for a single moment would be
indistinguishable from someone who was being moved by impulse.
H e would not in any proper sense be guiding or directing himself at
all.
Since the making of a decision requires only a moment, the fact
that a person decides to care about something cannot be tantamount
to his caring about it. Nor is it a guarantee that he will care about it.
By making such a decision, the person forms an intention concerning
what to care about. But whether that intention is truly fulfilled is quite
another matter. A decision to care no more entails caring than a
decision to give up smoking entails giving it up. In neither case does
making the decision amount even to initiating the state of affairs
decided upon unless that state of affairs actually ensues.
This would hardly be worth pointing out except that an exaggerated
significance is sometimes ascribed to decisions, as well as to choices
and to other similar "acts of will". If we consider that a person's will
is that by which he moves himself, then what he cares about is far
more germane to the character of his will than the decisions or
choices he makes. The latter may pertain to what he intends to be his
will, but not necessarily to what his will truly is.
262 HARRY FRANKFURT

The young man in Sartre's famous example is sometimes under-

stood to have resolved his dilemma, concerning whether to remain at
home and look after his mother or to abandon her and join the fight
against his country's enemies, by making a radically free choice. But
how significant is the fact that the young man chooses to pursue one
rather than the other of his alternatives, even if we understand this
choice to entail a decision on his part concerning what sort of person
to be and not merely concerning what to do? It surely gives us no
particular reason for thinking that he will actually become the sort of
person he decides to be, nor does it even entitle us to assume that he
will actually pursue the alternative he chooses.
The point is not that he might change his mind a moment after
making his choice, or that he might immediately forget his decision. It
is that he might be unable to carry out his intention. He might
discover, when the chips are down, that he simply cannot bring
himself to pursue the course of action upon which he has decided.
Without changing his mind or forgetting anything, he might find either
that he is moved irresistibly to pursue the other course of action
instead or that he is similarly constrained at least to forbear from the
course he has chosen. Or he might find that he is actually able to
perform the actions he has chosen to perform, but only by forcing
himself to do so against powerful and persistent natural inclinations.
That is, he might discover that he does not have and that he does not
subsequently develop the feelings, attitudes and interests constitutive
of the sort of person which his decision has committed him to being.
The resolution of the young man's dilemma does not merely
require, then, that he decide what to do. It requires that he really care
more about one of the alternatives confronting him than about the
other; and it requires further that he understand which of those
alternatives it is that he really cares about more. The difficulty he is in
is due either to his not knowing which of the alternatives he cares
about more, or to his caring equally about each. It is clear that in
neither case is his difficulty reliably to be overcome by making a
decision.
The fact that someone cares about a certain thing is constituted by a
complex set of cognitive, affective and volitional dispositions and
states. It may sometimes be possible for a person, by making a certain
choice or decision, effectively to bring it about that he cares about a
certain thing or that he cares about one thing more than about
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 263

another. But that depends upon conditions which do not always

prevail. It certainly cannot be assumed that what a person cares about
is generally under his immediate voluntary control.
4. There are, of course, wide variations in how strongly and how
persistently people care about things. It is also possible to dis-
criminate different ways of caring, which are not reducible in any
obvious manner to differences of degree. The most notable of these
are perhaps the several varieties of love. Another significant dis-
tinction - which is related to but not identical with the one concerning
whether or not caring can be initiated by an act of will - has to do
with whether or not a person can help caring as he does. When a
person cares about something, it may be entirely up to him both that
he cares about it and that he cares about it as much as he does. In
certain instances, however, the person is susceptible to a familiar but
nonetheless somewhat obscure kind of necessity, in virtue of which his
caring is not altogether under his own control.
There are occasions when a person realises that what he cares
about matters to him not merely so much, but in such a way, that it is
impossible for him to forbear from a certain course of action. It was
presumably on such an occasion, for example, that Luther made his
famous declaration: " H e r e I stand; I can do no other." An encounter
with necessity of this sort characteristically affects a person less by
impelling him into a certain course of action than by somehow making
it apparent to him that every apparent alternative to that course is
unthinkable. Such encounters differ from situations in which a person
finds that he is unable to forbear, whether or not he wants to do so,
because he is being driven to act by some desire or by some
compulsion which is too powerful for him to overcome. T h e y also
differ from situations in which it is clear to the person that he must
reject the possibility of forbearing because he has such a good reason
for rejecting it - for instance, because to forbear strikes him as too
unappealing or too undesirable a course of action to pursue.
On the other hand encounters with necessity of the sort in
question are in certain respects similar to situations like these. They
resemble those of the latter type - viz., the person cannot forbear
because his reasons for not doing so are too good - in that the
inability to forbear is not a simple matter of deficient capacity on the
part of the agent. T h e y resemble those of the former variety - viz.,
the person is driven by irresistible passion or the like - in that the
264 HARRY FRANKFURT

agent experiences himself as having no choice but to accede to the

force by which he is constrained even if he thinks it might be better
not to do so.
It is clear, of course, that the impossibility to which Luther
referred was a matter neither of logical nor of causal necessity. After
all, he knew well enough that he was in one sense quite able to do the
very thing he said he could not do; that is, he had the capacity to do
it. What he was unable to muster was not the power to forbear, but
the will. I shall use the term "volitional necessity" to refer to
constraint of the kind to which he declared he was subject. To the
extent that such constraint actually does render it impossible for a
person to act in any way other than as he acts, it renders it impossible
by preventing him from making use of his own capacities. Perhaps
there is a sense in which Luther, even if his declaration was true,
might have been strong enough to o v e r c o m e the force which obstruc-
ted his pursuit of any course of action but the one he pursued. But he
could not bring himself to overcome that force.
A person who is subject to volitional necessity finds that he must
act as he does. For this reason it may seem appropriate to regard
situations which involve volitional necessity as providing instances of
passivity. But the person in a situation of this kind generally does not
construe the fact that he is subject to volitional necessity as entailing
that he is passive at all. People are generally quite far from consider-
ing that volitional necessity renders them helpless bystanders to their
own behavior. Indeed they may even tend to regard it as actually
enhancing both their autonomy and their strength of will.
If a person who is constrained by volitional necessity is for that
reason unable to pursue a certain course of action, the explanation is
not that he is in any straightforward way too weak to o v e r c o m e the
constraint. That sort of explanation can account for the experience of
an addict, who dissociates himself from the addiction constraining
him but who is unsuccessful in his attempt to oppose his own energies
to the impetus of his habit. A person who is constrained by volitional
necessity, however, is in a situation which differs significantly from
that one. Unlike the addict, he does not accede to the constraining
force because he lacks sufficient strength of will to defeat it. He
accedes to it because he is unwilling to oppose it and because,
furthermore, his unwillingness is itself something which he is un-
willing to alter.
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 265

N o t only does he care about following the particular course of

action which he is constrained to follow. He also cares about caring
about it. T h e r e f o r e he guides himself away from being critically
affected by anything - in the outside world or within himself - which
might divert him or dissuade him either from following that course or
from caring as much as he does about following it. He cannot bring
himself to o v e r c o m e the constraint to which he is subject because, in
other words, he does not really want to do so. The predicament of the
unwilling addict is that there is something which he really wants to
do, but which he cannot do because of a force other than and superior
to that of his own will. In the case of the person constrained by
volitional necessity, there is also something which he cannot do but
only because he does not really want to do it.
The reason a person does not experience the force of volitional
necessity as alien or as external to himself, then, is that it coincides
with - and is, indeed, partly constituted by - desires which are not
merely his own but with which he actively identifies himself.
Moreover, the necessity is to a certain extent self-imposed. It is
generated when someone requires himself to avoid being guided in
what he does by any forces other than those by which he most deeply
wants to be guided. In order to prevent himself from caring about
anything as much as he cares about them, he suppresses or dis-
sociates himself from whatever motives or desires he regards as
inconsistent with the stability and effectiveness of his commitment. It
is in this way that volitional necessity may have a liberating effect:
when someone is tending to be distracted from caring about what he
cares about most, the force of volitional necessity may constrain him
to do what he really wants to do.
Whatever the pertinence and the validity of these considerations,
however, they do not explain how it is possible for a person to be
constrained by a necessity which is imposed upon him only by
himself. To be sure, people do often force themselves to act in certain
ways - for instance, when they are strongly tempted to act otherwise.
But the strenuous exertion of will power in cases of those kinds is
fully voluntary. The agent can discontinue it whenever he likes. On
the other hand, even if volitional necessity is self-imposed there must
be some respect in which it is imposed or maintained involuntarily.
The condition that it be self-imposed helps to account for the fact
that it is liberating rather than coercive - i.e., the fact that it supports
266 HARRY FRANKFURT

the person's autonomy rather than being opposed to or independent

of his will. It cannot be the case, however, that the person who
requires of himself that he avoid guiding himself in a certain way
accomplishes the self-imposition of this requirement merely by per-
forming a voluntary act. It must be an essential feature of volitional
necessity that it is imposed upon a person involuntarily. Otherwise it
will be impossible to account for the fact that the person cannot
extricate himself from it merely at will - i.e., the fact that it is
genuinely a kind of necessity.
It may seem difficult to understand how volitional necessity can
possibly be at the same time both self-imposed and imposed in-
voluntarily, or how it is possible to avoid the conclusion that an agent
who is constrained by volitional necessity must be simultaneously
both active and passive with respect to the same force. Resolution of
these difficulties lies in recognising that: (a) the fact that a person
cares about something is a fact about his will, (b) a person's will need
not be under his own voluntary control, and (c) his will may be no
less truly his own when it is not by his own voluntary doing that he
cares as he does.
Thus volitional necessity may be both self-imposed in virtue of
being imposed by the person's own will and, at the same time,
imposed involuntarily in virtue of the fact that it is not by his own
voluntary act that his will is what it is. Similarly, in such cases,
involuntariness does not entail passivity. A person is active when it is
by his own will that he does what he does, even when his will is not
itself within the scope of his voluntary control. It appears, then, that
unless a person cares about certain things regardless of whether or
not he chooses to d o so, he will not be susceptible to the liberation
which volitional necessity can provide.
5. The suggestion that a person may be in some sense liberated
through acceding to a power which is not subject to his immediate
voluntary control is among the most ancient and persistent themes of
our moral and religious tradition. It must surely reflect some quite
fundamental structural feature of our lives. This feature remains,
however, relatively unexplored. As a consequence, we are unable to
give satisfactorily thorough and perspicuous accounts of certain facts
which are central to our culture and to our view of ourselves: in
particular, that the two human capacities which we prize most highly
are those for rationality and for love, and that these capacities are
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 267

prized not only for their usefulness in enabling us to adapt to our

natural and social environments but also because they are supposed
to make available to us especially valuable experiences or states of
fulfillment and of freedom. The idea that being rational and loving are
ways of achieving freedom ought to puzzle us more than it does,
given that both require a person to submit to something which is be-
yond his voluntary control and which may be indifferent to his desires.
When we accede to being moved by logic or by love, the feeling
with which we do so is not ordinarily one of dispirited impotence. On
the contrary, we characteristically experience in both cases - whether
we are following reason or following our hearts - a sense of liberation
and of enhancement. What accounts for this experience? It appears to
have its source in the fact that when a person is responding to a
perception of something as rational or as beloved, his relationship to
it tends towards selflessness. His attention is not merely concentrated
upon the object; it is somehow fixed or seized by the object. The
object captivates him. H e is guided by its characteristics rather than
primarily by his own. Quite commonly, he feels that he is overcome -
that his own direction of his thoughts and volitions has been super-
seded. H o w are we to understand the paradox that a person may be
enhanced and liberated through being seized, made captive, and
o v e r c o m e ? Why is it that we find ourselves to be most fully realised,
and consider that we are at our best, when - through reason or
through love - we have lost or escaped from ourselves. ~
Rationality and love equally entail selflessness. T h e y differ in that
the former is also essentially impersonal. The substance of this
difference between rationality and love is not that what a person loves
depends largely upon his own particular characteristics, whereas
those characteristics play no role in determining what he considers to
be required or permitted by reason. The judgments a person makes
concerning rationality are manifestly no less dependent than are any
other occurrences in his life upon contingent features of his nature
and of his circumstances. What renders these judgments impersonal
is that the claims they make are not limited to the person who makes
them; rather, it is implicit that anyone who disagrees with the claims
must be mistaken. A declaration of love is a personal matter, on the
other hand, because the person who makes it does not thereby
commit himself to supposing that anyone who fails to love what he
does has somehow gone wrong.
268 HARRY FRANKFURT

Now moral judgments are also impersonal, and in this respect their
force differs fundamentally from that of volitional necessity. Even
when volitional necessity arises in connection with actions which are
required or forbidden by duty, it does not derive from the person's
moral convictions as such but from the way in which he cares about
certain things. If a mother who is tempted to abandon her child finds
that she simply cannot do that, it is probably not because she knows
(or even because she cares about) her duty. It is more likely because
of how she cares about the child, and about herself as its mother, than
because of any recognition on her part that abandoning the child
would be morally wrong. Consistency therefore does not require her
to suppose that the action which she cannot bring herself to perform
must be found to be similarly impossible by every mother whose
circumstances are similar to hers. 2
In the same way, a person who finds that he cannot bring himself to
compromise an ideal to which he has been dedicated, despite his
anxiety concerning the costs of remaining loyal to it, probably is not
being moved most immediately by objective moral considerations
even if the ideal in question is of a distinctively moral variety.
Suppose that someone's ideal is to be meticulously honest in conduc-
ting his business affairs. Everyone is morally obliged, of course, to be
honest; but it does not follow that anyone has a duty to pursue
honesty as an ideal of his life - i.e., to accord to pursuing it the
preemptive attention and concern which commitment to an ideal
entails. A person's discovery that it is volitionally impossible for him
to neglect one of his ideals is not to be equated, then, with an
acknowledgment on his part of an ethical requirement.
Especially with respect to those we love and with respect to our
ideals, we are liable to be bound by necessities which have less to do
with our adherence to the principles of morality than with integrity or
consistency of a more personal kind. These necessities constrain us
from betraying the things which we care about most and with which,
accordingly, we are most closely identified. In a sense which a strictly
ethical analysis cannot make clear, what they keep us from violating
are not our duties or our obligations but ourselves.
6. The formation of a person's will is most fundamentally a matter
of his coming to care about certain things, and of his coming to care
about some of them more than about others. Although these proces-
ses may not be wholly under his voluntary control, it is nonetheless
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 269

often possible for him to affect them. For that reason, as well as
because people are generally interested in knowing what to think of
themselves, a person may care about what he cares about. This leads
to questions concerning evaluation and justification.
The fact that what a person cares about is a personal matter does
not entail that anything goes. It may still be possible to distinguish
between things that are worth caring about to one degree or another
and things that are not. Accordingly, it may be useful to inquire into
what makes something worth caring about - that is, what conditions
must be satisfied if something is to be suitable or worthy as an ideal
or as an object of love - and into how a person is to decide, from
among the various things worth caring about, which to care about.
Although people may justifiably care about different things, or care
differently about the same things, this surely does not mean that their
loves and their ideals are entirely unsusceptible to significant criticism
of any sort or that no general analytical principles of discrimination
can be f o u n d ]
People often do not care about certain things which are quite
important to them. T h e y may simply fail to recognise, after all, that
those things have that importance. But if 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 who cares
about it.
It is necessarily the case, of course, that a person who cares about
a certain thing is not cold-bloodedly indifferent to it. In other words,
what happens to the thing must make a difference to a person who
cares about it, and the difference it makes must itself be important to
him. This naturally does not mean that he cares about it just because
it affects him in important ways. On the contrary, it may well be that
he is susceptible to being affected by it or on account of it only in
virtue of the fact that he cares about it.
This suggests that it is necessarily important to people what they
care about. The fact that a person cares about a certain thing or about
some person, or the fact that he does not care about them, makes an
important difference to him. It means that he is, or that he is not,
susceptible to being affected by various circumstances in ways which
he considers important. Thus the question of what to care about
270 HARRY FRANKFURT

(construed as including the question of whether to care about any-

thing) is one which must necessarily be important to him.
It does not quite follow from this that it is necessarily worth a
person's while to care about the question. The question may not be
sufficiently important to him for that. What does follow, however, is
that if anything is worth caring about, then it must be worth caring
about what to care about. It could hardly be the case both that there
is something so important to a person that it is worthwhile for him to
care about it, but that it is not worthwhile for him to care about
whether or not he cares about that thing.
In any event, there are two distinct (albeit compatible) ways in
which something may be important to a person. First, its importance
to him may be due to considerations which are altogether independent
of whether or not he cares about the thing in question. Second, the
thing may become important to him just because he does care about
it. Correspondingly, there are two distinct sorts of ground on which a
person who thinks it worthwhile to care about a certain thing might
attempt to justify his view. He might claim that the thing is in-
dependently important to him and that it is worth caring about for this
reason. Or he might maintain, without supposing that the thing is
antecedently important to him at all, that he is justified in caring about
it because caring about it is itself something which is important to
him.
People naturally want the things they care about to coincide, up to
a point, with those that are independently or antecedently important
to them. Thus a person often begins to care about something when he
recognises its capacity to affect him in important ways, ceases to care
about it when he discovers that it does not have that capacity, and
criticises himself for caring too much or too little about things whose
importance to himself he has misjudged. When the importance of a
certain thing to a person is due to the very fact that he cares about it,
however, that fact plainly cannot provide a useful measure of the
extent to which his caring about the thing is justified.
In such cases, the critical question cannot be whether the object is
sufficiently important to the person to warrant his caring about it. It
must instead be whether the person is justified in making the thing
important to him by caring about it. Now the only way to justify
doing this is in terms of the importance of the activity of caring as
such. It is manifest that the varieties of being concerned or dedicated,
 WHAT WE CARE ABOUT 271

and of loving, a r e important to us quite apart from any antecedent

capacities for affecting us which what we care about may have. This
is not particularly because caring about something makes us suscep-
tible to certain additional gratifications and disappointments. It is
primarily because it serves to connect us actively to our lives in ways
which are creative of ourselves and which expose us to distinctive
possibilities for necessity and for freedom.
It would be a serious mistake to believe that the importance of an
object to someone is not fully genuine unless it is independent of his
caring about the object. Consider the fact that many of the people we
care about most would not affect us in important ways if we did not
care about them. This can hardly mean that they are not genuinely
important to us. In certain cases, to be sure, it may appear that
something does lack real importance to a person despite the fact that
he cares about it. But if the importance of the object in such cases is
not fully genuine, that is not because it derives from the fact that the
person cares about the object.
Suppose, for example, that what a person cares about is avoiding
stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. No doubt he is committing an
error of some kind in caring about this. But his error is not that he
cares about something which is not really important to him. Rather,
his error consists in caring about, and thereby imbuing with genuine
importance, something which is not worth caring about. The reason it
is not worth caring about seems clear: it is not important to the
person to make avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk important to
himself. But we need to understand better than we do just why this is
so - i.e., what conditions must be satisfied if it is to be important to us
to make something important to us which would not otherwise have
such importance.
Even when the justification for caring about something rests upon
the importance of the caring itself, rather than being derivative from
the antecedent importance of its object, the choice of the object is not
irrelevant or arbitrary. According to one theological doctrine, divine
love is in fact bestowed without regard to the character or antecedent
value of its objects. It is God's nature to love, on this view, and He
therefore loves everything regardless of any considerations extrinsic
to Himself. His love is entirely arbitrary and unmotivated - absolutely
sovereign, and in no way conditioned by the worthiness of its
objects. 4 Perhaps it is possible only for an omnipotent being - to
272 HARRY FRANKFURT

w h o m n o t h i n g is a n t e c e d e n t l y i m p o r t a n t - to l o v e a l t o g e t h e r f r e e l y
and without conditions or restrictions of any kind. In any case, a
c a p a c i t y f o r w h o l l y u n c o n d i t i o n e d l o v e is b y n o m e a n s a n e s s e n t i a l
c o n s t i t u e n t o f o u r finite n a t u r e .
W h a t m a k e s it m o r e s u i t a b l e , t h e n , f o r a p e r s o n to m a k e o n e o b j e c t
r a t h e r t h a n a n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t t o h i m s e l f ? I t s e e m s t h a t it m u s t b e t h e
f a c t t h a t it is possible f o r h i m t o c a r e a b o u t t h e o n e a n d n o t a b o u t t h e
o t h e r , o r to c a r e a b o u t t h e o n e in a w a y w h i c h is m o r e i m p o r t a n t to
h i m t h a n t h e w a y in w h i c h it is p o s s i b l e f o r h i m to c a r e a b o u t t h e
o t h e r . W h e n a p e r s o n m a k e s s o m e t h i n g i m p o r t a n t to h i m s e l f , a c c o r d -
i n g l y , t h e s i t u a t i o n r e s e m b l e s a n i n s t a n c e o f d i v i n e agape at l e a s t in a
c e r t a i n r e s p e c t . T h e p e r s o n d o e s n o t c a r e a b o u t t h e o b j e c t b e c a u s e its
w o r t h i n e s s c o m m a n d s t h a t h e d o so. O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , t h e w o r t h i -
ness of the activity of caring commands that he choose an object
w h i c h h e w i l l b e a b l e to c a r e a b o u t .

Yale University

NOTES

1 We are also susceptible to being overcome by beauty and by grandeur; and we

encounter similar, though perhaps not identical, experiences when we lose ourselves in
the thrill of a moment or in work. These experiences also tend to be liberating. On the
other hand, experiences of great fear or pain provide analogues to the selflessness of
reason and of love in which the loss of self is not ordinarily construed as fulfilling or as
liberating. It seems unlikely that this is merely because these experiences are less
enjoyable than those of love and rationality, but it is unclear what does account for the
difference.
2 Although consistency does not require her to suppose this, she and others might
suppose it anyhow on other grounds. Even if it is not morally obligatory for mothers to
care deeply about their children, a mother who does not do so might still be open to
criticism - not that her attitude violates a duty but, for instance, that it is "unnatural"
or "shameful" and that she lacks important human qualities.
3 One version of scepticism with regard to these matters is the view that there is really
nothing worth caring about. Whatever the merits of this view, it is important not to
confuse it with - nor to suppose that it entails - the more radical claim that nothing is
of any importance to us. A person who cares about something thereby incurs certain
costs, coonected with the effort which investing himself requires and with the vul-
nerability to disappointment and to other losses which it imposes. In virtue of these
costs, it is possible for something to be important to a person without being important
enough for it to be worth his while to care about it. The view that nothing is worth
caring about therefore entails only that nothing is of sufficient importance to make
caring about it reasonable.
4 Cf. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (New York, 1969), pp. 75-8l, 91-95.