Caring and full moral standing

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 460-497

  Jawarska, Agnieszka ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34250365426     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/512780     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. The last example is borrowed from Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 292. To put the point in the text differently, persons have special rights of noninterference, the content of which is specified by the correct theory of rights.
2. If A and B are both inviolable, how could they be unequally inviolable? It could be worse to violate A than to violate B in the same way. FMS rules out such comparative variations: if A and B have FMS, otherwise equivalent violations of each are equally bad.
3. Admittedly, privileging the person in such cases does not necessarily imply that the person as such matters more than the chicken: it is also possible that each creature matters morally just as much, but the person's interest at stake turns out to be more compelling. After all, the same level of pain may have more severe and lasting consequences for the person, given her ability to remember the pain, to attribute meaning to the pain in various ways, to fearfully anticipate further pain of this sort, etc. A similar imparity of interests could be behind the intuition that saving the life of a person is more important than saving an animal's life, since many feel that animals, due to their simple psychology, don't have a strong interest in continuing to live. Because, on this reading, the two interests could never (in the standard cases) be equal, I don't cite this intuition in the text. But for readers who don't accept that animals' interest in survival is weak, this intuition may be more telling (and all the more so since it persists even if the interests of the person are otherwise weaker: for example, even if the person is terminally ill, while the animal is young, with a long life ahead of it). In light of these complications, perhaps the clearest illustrations of the more stringent positive duties with respect to persons and their interests as a mark of FMS in commonsense morality are those involving simple inconveniences. Consider this scenario. There is only one very comfortable spot in the sun that both a cat and a person would greatly enjoy. You are in charge of the spot, and you don't have a special relation to either individual. Surely you would let the person have the spot. (Pet owners make analogous choices when they wave their pets off their favorite nooks to satisfy any wish of a person, however trivial, or when they lock pets in small enclosures to avoid even slight disturbances or inconveniences for themselves.) If you decided to flip a coin between the person and the cat, the person would rightly feel that you have treated her inappropriately by putting her on equal footing with an animal.
4. Ideas from John Broome ("Fairness," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 [1990-91]: 87-101) helped me in this paragraph, although not all I say is consistent with Broome.
5. For a prominent example of a preservationist view, see T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. 177-87. For a prominent example of a revisionist view, see Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 203-32.
6. There are important exceptions here - views that emphasize the role of relationships and of the possibility of the being in question sharing a form of life with us. See, e.g., Cora Diamond, "The Importance of Being Human," in Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35-62; Peter Byrne, Philosophical and Ethical Problems in Mental Handicap (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), chap. 9.
7. I list these different formulations since different proponents of the views in this category phrase their positions slightly differently. Sorting out whether these different formulations amount to substantive differences is beyond the scope of this essay.
8. As Peter Byrne perspicuously exhibits, even theological accounts, which ground FMS in humans' unique relation to God, when fully worked out, are typically forced to appeal to the very same valuable properties of humans invoked by the secular accounts: if you don't believe that God acts arbitrarily, something must explain why God cares about all human beings. (See Byrne, Philosophical and Ethical Problems, chap. 6.)
9. Note that the preservationists can use intuitions that a particular individual lacks FMS to confirm or disconfirm views about the ultimate source of FMS. These intuitions are not confounded by the possibility that potential or species capacities could ground FMS. For example, if, according to common sense, a great ape capable of using language lacks FMS, this rules out the view that language use is the ultimate basis of FMS and confirms views that require even more sophisticated capacities as the ultimate basis of FMS.
10. The term 'intra-agential FMS' does not strictly capture the notion I mean. I have in mind FMS at issue in conflicts of interest within the same life, but on a standard understanding of the term 'agent' (as someone capable of acting) a human individual may not be an agent in all phases of her life. 'Infra-individual' would be a more apt term, but it is too cumbersome. I thus settled on 'intra-agential' with the caveat that 'agent' should be understood very broadly, to encompass at least all conscious beings.
11. As will become clearer in Sec. I.B, it is important that the conflicts of relevance here are generated by the interests of the "diminished" self, and not merely by her choices. An individual lacking decision-making capacity will likely make many inappropriate choices, and when custodians rightfully bypass such choices this may have no bearing on the individual's FMS.
12. For a further discussion, see, e.g., Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), app. I, esp. 495.
13. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing.
14. One may worry that, whenever a severe enough psychological discontinuity is involved, discontinuity alone would generate a prohibition against overriding the individual's current interests for the sake of her interests from her psychologically remote future or past. If this were the case, such a prohibition would not be indicative of FMS - it would not be a function of the current capacities of the individual, but only of the weakness of the relationship between her life stages. This worry is exacerbated once we realize that, realistically, loss of intra-agential FMS could occur only in cases involving psychological discontinuity: after all, the very capacities that make strong psychological cohesion possible would likely provide the basis for FMS. However, the worry can be easily allayed, As we shall see shortly, if an individual lacks intra-agential FMS, he is not intra-agentially inviolable, so there is no prohibition against sacrificing his interests for important enough interests stemming from a more sophisticated stage of his life. Lack of psychological continuity with that life stage is insufficient to introduce such a prohibition.
15. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 327.
16. See McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 499-500.
17. Life-as-a-whole considerations may still be somewhat relevant even in cases of radical discontinuity. I don't settle this question, since it doesn't affect my analysis here.
18. These were typical treatment options at the time, in the late 1990s.
19. Note also that if the requirements of intra-agential FMS amounted merely to antipaternalism, these requirements would be stricter than what I have outlined: paternalistic treatment of a competent time-slice self is presumably morally prohibited and not merely morally costly.
20. None of the cases I discuss below involves interference, but there are plenty of situations in which intra-agential FMS manifests itself by making interference morally problematic. Suppose parents face a decision whether to subject their child to a painful operation with lasting effects that will diminish the child's quality of life throughout childhood but enhance the child's prospects later in life (bone operation for short stature, cochlear implants, etc.). It may be permissible to impose the surgery on the child, but the choice involves the severe moral cost of considerably disrupting childhood, a whole phase of a life of a person. The moral cost remains significant even when the negative effects of the surgery during childhood are less severe, perhaps just a short period of convalescence. By forcing the child to undergo surgery, one uses the child against its present interests for the sake of the interests of its later, more advanced self, and this in itself generates a high moral cost if done to a person. (Thanks to Jeff McMahan and Jodi Halpern for inspiring this comment.)
21. It may appear odd that the requirements of fairness apply even intra-agentially. Concerns with fairness are typically motivated by the recognition of the separateness of persons. (For example, a Rawlsian would oppose utilitarianism on the grounds that while maximizing well-being seems appropriate within a life, separateness of persons makes it inappropriate - unfair - to maximize well-being across lives.) So applying fairness to person stages may seem to overextend this concept beyond its proper home in interpersonal morality. However, if the framework I introduced in Sec. I.A is correct, the interests of person stages can be sufficiently independent to require separate moral attention, and it is precisely this separateness of interests that makes the requirements of fairness applicable. Thanks to Winston Chiong for prompting this clarification.
22. Some readers may still think that, despite all these structural parallels, the bar for meriting interpersonal FMS is lower than the bar for meriting intra-agential FMS - because protection against others seems more basic and vital than protection against one's more advanced self. Even if this were correct, we could still infer interpersonal FMS from intra-agential FMS, but lack of intra-agential FMS would not imply lack of interpersonal FMS. However, the detailed requirements of intra-agential FMS, which I go on to discuss presently, militate against this approach. It is true that protection against one's more advanced self is not as stringent as protection against others: in some cases, it is morally appropriate to sacrifice the interests of the current self to promote the best life as a whole for the individual. But there is a special moral cost to such a sacrifice if the current self is a person, and the bar for incurring such moral cost is not higher than the bar for meriting interpersonal moral standing of a person.
23. The moral cost will be incurred only if the sacrificed interests are vital, or at least on par with the interests of the distant self that are given priority. Consider a ten-year-old who wants a facial tattoo. "She has a present interest in getting the tattoo: it'll definitely establish her as cool among her friends. But her parents forbid it because they correctly realize that the tattoo would imperil her later prospects for marriage, employment, etc." (McMahan, unpublished comment). Not only is the parents' action permissible, but it also doesn't seem to carry the moral cost of failing to respect the girl, the person she is now. This is presumably because the interest in being cool, as a type of interest, is not terribly important and not nearly as weighty as the girl's later interest in employment, etc. If we sacrificed one person's interest in being cool for the sake of another's interest in marriage and employment, this similarly wouldn't involve a failure to respect the first person or a grave moral cost. Things would be different, though, if forbidding the tattoo were to somehow ruin the girl's childhood - a weighty interest of the child would generate a moral cost.
24. And also, in the moral remainder cases, it does not make sense to worry that the interests of stage A are sacrificed to the interests of stage A+.
25. Given this analysis, from now on I will speak of the basis (ground, foundation, etc.) of FMS, and I will mean by this the capacities that constitute the ultimate basis of interpersonal FMS and, by extension, the basis of intra-agential FMS (or, what amounts to the same thing, the capacities that constitute the basis of intra-agential FMS and, by extension, the ultimate basis of interpersonal FMS).
26. Since I chose not to take a stand on whether potential or species membership can be the source of interpersonal FMS, this limits somewhat the power of my arguments: I am not always able to draw inferences about interpersonal FMS of a particular (type of) being from intuitions about intra-agential FMS of the same (type of) being. (To be exact, I can draw such inferences from the presence of intra-agential FMS, but not from its absence.) But this leaves my strategy intact. If I am right that the ultimate foundations of interpersonal and intra-agential FMS are the same, the ultimate foundation of interpersonal FMS can be discovered by investigating the basis of intra-agential FMS. A particular being who lacks intra-agential FMS may still possess interpersonal FMS due to her species or potential capacities. If so, the moral importance of those capacities themselves is the ultimate foundation of her interpersonal FMS, and we can discover which capacities these are by examining which beings occurrently possess (or lack) intra-agential FMS.
27. This difference in what we are looking for in the two cases arises, recall, from the possibility that potential or species capacities could also be sufficient for interpersonal FMS, so the presence of specific attributes might not be necessary for interpersonal FMS.
28. Note that, given my assumptions, not every individual who has interpersonal FMS needs to be currently endowed with the abilities that ground FMS. So I am not claiming here that an individual who has interpersonal FMS must be treated fairly vis-à-vis his past self. That is, what I say here is consistent with my earlier view that interpersonal FMS does not imply intra-agential FMS.
29. For a Kantian, these two tasks amount to the same thing, but I leave room for the possibility that they might be distinct.
30. Note that even the most minimal requirements of practical reason are much more cognitively demanding than the "minimal rational capacities" (language use, self-awareness, etc.) discussed in the previous section.
31. Tamar Schapiro, "What Is a Child?" Ethics 109 (1999): 715-38.
32. Recall that we cannot test our views about interpersonal FMS in analogous ways: Ms. F, children, etc., surely possess interpersonal FMS, but this doesn't show that the capacity for autonomy cannot ultimately ground FMS: in those special cases, interpersonal FMS could be due to past, potential, or species capacity for autonomy.
33. My discussion of the nature of caring and the intemality of caring, here and in Sees. III.A and III.C, including several examples of caring in children, is borrowed, some-times verbatim, from Agnieszka Jaworska, "Caring and Internality," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2007), forthcoming.
34. Sergei Aksakov, Yean of Childhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1-6. According to the recollections, Aksakov would have been around three at the time.
35. Ross A. Thompson, "Empathy and Emotional Understanding: The Early Development of Empathy," in Empathy and Its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 131. For more recent data, see Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Marian Radke-Yarrow, Elizabeth Wagner, and Michael Chapman, "Development of Concern for Others," Developmental Psychology 28 (1992): 126-36.
36. Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick, Siblings: Love, Envy, and Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 114.
37. I am assuming that caring about things and ideas and caring about people have core features in common. The basis of this assumption will become clear shortly.
38. What follows is a quick sketch of my argument against this interpretation. For details, see my "Moral Psychology in Practice; Lessons from Alzheimer's Disease and the Terrible Twos'" (unpublished manuscript, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University).
39. This is a requirement for evaluative beliefs, not meant to apply to other beliefs (about tables and chairs, etc.). For a belief to have evaluative content, the belief holder must understand the evaluative concept evoked in the belief. And one does not really understand the evaluative concept one purportedly employs in one's belief unless one would recognize the lack of such a belief - especially one's own former, future, or counterfactual lack - as a mistake. Believing that my chair is blue does not immediately involve me in imputing error to anybody (including a counterfactual me) who lacks this belief - my chair-related belief is not inherently tied to considerations about believing, my own or others'. But if I believe one ought to help others in need, or that it's good to have fulfilling personal relationships in one's life, I do implicitly hold that those who lack this belief (esp. my past or projected self who lacks it) would be importantly mistaken.
40. Alison Gopnik, "How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 4.
41. Ibid.
42. See Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2. What I say here is indebted to Goldie's work, but it is not meant to be a full or fully faithful representation of his views.
43. This aspect of my understanding of caring is indebted to Bennett Helm's work. See, e.g., "Freedom of the Heart," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (1996): 76-77.
44. For a very helpful elaboration of this idea, see Helen Nissenbaum, Emotion and Focus (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1985), esp. chaps. 5-7.
45. For a more detailed discussion, see Bennett W. Helm, Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67-69.
46. The connections don't guarantee that the individual caring emotions belong to the same agent. But they contribute to the overall psychological unity and so, on the neo-Lockean picture, to the unity of agency over time.
47. There may be a weaker notion of caring for which such conceptual sophistication is not necessary: the subject could imbue the object with importance by virtue of his emotional reactions, without having a conceptual grasp of the object's importance. In fact, animals such as cats and dogs seem capable of "caring" in this weaker sense. However, I focus on caring of the more sophisticated kind described here because, on my view, only this kind of caring can be the basis of FMS. As I will explain in Sec. III.C, by virtue of inspiring further cognitive activity (including the formation of stable intentions, plans, and policies), this kind of caring helps to support the unity of agency over time and thereby helps to fashion a self worthy of special respect.
48. Zahn-Waxler et al., "Development of Concern for Others," 134.
49. Ibid., 129. I omitted a confusing use of brackets from the original.
50. It is important to note that we can be at least confident, based on young children's linguistic capabilities, that they could grasp the concept of importance. This point will be relevant again in my discussion of great apes below.
51. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam's, 1994), 44.
52. Ibid., 138-39.
53. Ibid., 49.
54. Ibid., 51.
55. Note that, given my analysis of caring as a complex of emotions, "momentary caring" is not a possibility. Caring is a structured compound of various emotions and emotional predispositions, unfolding over time in response to relevant circumstances (see Sec. III.A).
56. If the desire of the moment happens to persist, a psychopath may pursue something for an extended period of time and give the impression of being devoted to a goal. This, I think, is what happens with psychopaths we tend to hear about in popular culture: they have strong and persistent desires and, since no deep concern about anything puts a check on their activities, they can end up doing terrible things to others in the process of pursuing what captivates their current attention. But monomaniacal attention to a goal is not the same as caring.
57. Harvey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (Augusta, GA: Cleckley, 1988), 160-62.
58. In cases such as the conflict between Elliot's current interest in spending his money willy-nilly and his former commitment to his family, the intuitions that Elliot's earlier interests ought to trump seem robust, and they establish the notion that Elliot lacks intra-agential FMS. However, there may be other cases in which the intuitions are more uncertain. Consider, for instance, what should be done if healthy Elliot wrote an advance directive requesting that, in case he develops ventromedial prefrontal brain damage, he should be allowed to die and not be given life-saving medical care. In this matter of life or death for the brain-damaged self, it may not seem so obvious that the earlier self ought to prevail. I suspect that this is because, in such dire circumstances, Elliot's lack of intra-agential FMS interacts with his interpersonal FMS to complicate the picture. (The somewhat different grounds for the two senses of FMS I discussed in Sec. I.C give rise to the possibility of a conflict between them: even if Elliot currently lacks intra-agential FMS, he may well have interpersonal FMS by virtue of his past or species capacities. Even if, intra-agentially, Elliot's earlier interests ought to trump, lives of beings with interpersonal FMS are morally paramount and should be supported, other things being equal.) The interaction between the two senses of FMS is a large and interesting topic, but I cannot address it here. The permissions to disregard Elliot's current interests in less dire cases establish Elliot's lack of intra-agential FMS, and this is all that's necessary for the purposes of this article.
59. Of course, Elliot's contemporaneous interests are largely determined by his desires, which get expressed in his choices, so it would often be practically impossible to override his choices without violating his contemporaneous interests. Still, it is crucial to note that we are sanctioning the latter and not merely the former. (Besides, this practical coincidence is not absolute, since an effort to assure that Elliot does not, in the long run, end up in a confining environment, such as a jail or a mental institution, would support his contemporaneous interests, but may well go against many of his explicit choices.)
60. Note that if Elliot now has interpersonal FMS only by virtue of his former capacities, it makes sense that he lacks intra-agential FMS vis-à-vis his past, fully capacitated self.
61. I chose not to take a stand on whether potential or species membership can be the source of interpersonal FMS. But suppose for a moment that species capacities cannot confer interpersonal FMS. My arguments would now seem to imply that individuals like Milt lack interpersonal FMS because of their inability to care. Is this a plausible result? I cannot embrace it. Indeed, cases like this are part of the reason why I am unwilling to rule out approaches appealing to potential and species capacities, despite my misgivings about the available defenses of them.
62. I used the case of Ms. P to show that full Kantian autonomy is unnecessary for intra-agential FMS, and I used the case of the more severely demented patient capable only of appetitive desires to show that minimal rational capacities are insufficient. I picked these cases because they involve just the right set of capacities to help us determine what is not the basis of intra-agential FMS, but they are not well calibrated to positively pinpoint what such basis in fact is.
63. In other words, if the ability to care is necessary and sufficient for intra-agential FMS, it seems to be a ground of intra-agential FMS. And given that intra-agential and interpersonal FMS are different applications of fundamentally the same moral requirements, we can presume that this ability also ultimately grounds interpersonal FMS.
64. Harry Frankfurt, "Identification and Externality," in his The Importance of What We Can About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 59.
65. Phrase borrowed (ibid.).
66. Thanks to Michael Bratman for prompting this clarification.
67. I thank Gary Watson for this way of putting the point.
68. What if a person is both overcome or swept away by a caring, so that she has no control over it, and also judges it bad to care? Is she still identified with the caring? The abused woman in our example may be precisely in this predicament: she is caught up in her love for her husband, and yet she thinks she ought to cease to love him. This doesn't make the conflict she experiences any less deep; we would trivialize her problem if we invited her to view her love for her husband as a mere happening in her psychic life. (I am grateful to David Hills, Sibyl Schwarzenbach, and Alien Wood for pressing me to elaborate on these examples.)
69. Carings are constituted by complex rational and referential connections, which synthesize and organize disparate elements of one's psychic life, allowing for convergence of several psychological elements into a coherent cluster. In this sense, they support the agent's identity and cohesion over time. Note that, to play this role, carings need not be consistent with each other. Love and hatred of the same person, so long as each is constituted by an entire network of its own emotions and emotional episodes, will each function to support the agent's ongoing identity.
70. For a fuller exposition of this point, see Jaworska, "Caring and Internality."
71. My use of the term 'wanton' here is somewhat different from that familiar from Frankfurt's work. According to Frankfurt, a wanton is a creature who does not assess his own desires in any way, who is "not concerned with the desirability of his desires themselves" (Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," in Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Can About, 17).
72. Healthy agents, not alienated from themselves, will usually explicitly identify with aspects of their psychology that are truly their own and will not identify with the external aspects. Hence, we can usually tell that an attitude is internal to the agent if the agent experiences the attitude as his own, or at least if he doesn't dissociate himself from the attitude and doesn't see it as alien. Our patterns of associating ourselves with some attitudes and dissociating ourselves from others are vital inputs into any workable theory of internality, and I relied on them at the beginning of this section. Such a theory is meant to delineate which attitudes are truly the agent's own, and not merely when an agent would feel that this is the case. Once we construct the theory based on paradigm cases of agents identifying themselves with some attitudes and distancing themselves from others, we can apply it to instances in which the agent is not explicitly aware of her fully internal attitudes, and even to agents outright incapable of such awareness, as is likely the case with young children.
73. A few points to clarify the relation of my proposal to Kantian concerns. On my proposal, the capacity to care is the foundation of FMS, where caring is a type of attitude, not necessarily associated with a specific object or content. Similarly, as I read it, the standard Kantian view treats the capacity to value as the foundation of FMS, without requiring the agent to hold specific values. In particular, just as on my proposal the capacity for altruistic caring is not necessary for FMS, so the Kantian view doesn't require the specific ability to recognize moral reasons as a precondition for FMS - the more general ability to engage in evaluative reasoning is sufficient. Thus, amoral agents and other agents whose concerns may be misguided or mistaken are handled similarly by both approaches. But what about the misanthropic, yet morally upright man whom Kant describes in Groundwork I? It might be thought that he fails to meet my criterion of FMS, since he is unable to bring himself to care. However, first, while this man doesn't care about humanity, there is no indication that he doesn't care about anything at all. And further, even if we imagine him as someone who really altogether doesn't care, so long as he is a standardly endowed human being, there is no reason to suppose that he lacks the capacity to care. So here, too, the two approaches yield parallel results. The reader may wonder how my view would assess the moral standing (esp. the intra-agential FMS) of a depressed person, since severe depression may appear to rob one of the very capacity to care. When a disease leads a person to lose all motivation to pursue the projects and activities she has ordinarily engaged in, this begins to look like a systematic loss of the capacity to care. However, severe depression would not be so excruciatingly difficult to bear if it left the agent altogether uncaring. Depression may skew the person's perspective, so she responds more acutely to the negative aspects of life, but depression by no means removes a person's susceptibility to emotional arousal. For one, a severely depressed person typically cares a great deal about her condition, and this is why she finds it unbearable. (Thanks to the anonymous associate editors of Ethics for prompting these clarifications.)
74. Jane Vessels, "Koko's Kitten," National Geographic 167 (1985): 110-13. There are many accounts of the remarkable abilities of the great apes: see, e.g., Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). However, Koko's relationship with All Ball provides the clearest illustration I am familiar with of animal caring.
75. Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon, "The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas," in The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity, ed. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 67-68.
76. Ajournai entry over five years after All Ball's death: "Koko comes across a picture of herself and All Ball in a photo album. K: THAT BAD FROWN SORRY [emphatic] UNATTENTION [Koko's negation of the sign for attention, covering her eyes with her hands-clarified in the internet version of the article]" (ibid., 68).
77. Since I labeled this view "preservationist," it appears odd to suggest that the view can be revised and still remain preservationist. My idea is this: the goal of preservationists is to justify the commonsense approach to FMS, and especially the conviction that all humans have interpersonal FMS. In doing so, they typically adopt a certain theoretical strategy: they appeal to valuable capacities of ordinary adult humans and to the value of potential and/or species possession of such capacities. I have tried to show that, once we attend to intuitions about intra-agential FMS, this preservationist approach can be sustained only if we recognize the capacity to care as an ultimate ground of FMS. The resulting view preserves the key element of common sense: the idea that all humans have interpersonal FMS. But it forces some revisions of common sense; namely, animals capable of caring, such as great apes, now also turn out to have interpersonal FMS. (Note that by suggesting this revision I do not side with revisionists in their core debate with preservationists: I still remain neutral on whether potential and/or species capacities can ground interpersonal FMS.)