The Ockham Society (Thursday - Week 2, MT23)

Caring is often understood in terms of non-cognitive dispositions, including emotional vulnerability to the object of care and a desire to enhance their well-being. When we care about someone, their suffering affects us, their successes bring us joy, and we seek to benefit them. In this talk, I suggest that caring also possesses an epistemic dimension: it includes a desire to comprehend the objects of our concern. This connection between caring and inquiry may also shed light on the puzzle of moral testimony-roughly the idea that there is something wrong or infelicitous with gaining knowledge about moral matters through testimony in a way which is not the case is non-moral domains. I argue that what goes wrong in moral testimony arises from the presumption that we should care about morality.

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