Mark Fedyk (Univ. of California, Davis): "Intentionality and Caring"

Anscombe’s Intention and On Brute Facts offer an analysis of intentionality that, among other things, highlights the normative character of intentional action. This talk explores how an Anscombeian account of intending can be extended to provide an analysis of caring — specifically, caring as surrogate intentionality. Why does this matter? In nursing and medicine, it is easy to find moralizing that presupposes an analysis of caring that hold that A cares for B when B has desires that are known to B herself, those desires are revealed to A by B, and A then does something of her own volition to satisfy some of B’s desires. But this analysis of caring has many of the flaws that Anscombe criticizes when her target is “purely interior” conceptions of intentionality — among other things, it fails to capture the normative characteristics of caring, a failure of sophistication that carries normative risks for ethics — such as engendering the idea that moral relations are mechanical in character. An “Anscombeian” theory of caring is therefore valuable because it can serve as a prophylaxis against various moral risks. But as I hope to show, such an analysis of caring is also philosophically interesting on its own, as it highlights one of the ways in which human agency is fundamentally relational.