Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, and Happiness

14. An Existential Objectivist Account of What Is Worth Caring About

14 An Existential Objectivist Account of What Is Worth Caring About Overview. This chapter develops the idea introduced in chapters 12 and 13 that an existential conception of the will as an end-setting and motivation-sustaining capacity is compatible with moderate objectivism about the values that give us reasons to set ends, initiate new projects, and form deep commitments. The chapter begins with a review of the importance of this question about the nature of good lives for contemporary political philosophy, and then develops an existential response to Harry Frankfurt’s subjectivist interpretation of the worth of what we care about. The analysis does not try to establish the metaphysical status of values but it does have normative implications (in particular in the concluding taxonomy of grounds for caring). Introduction This chapter concludes the argument for the book’s first main thesis by showing that the existential conception of the will is compatible with an objective account of practical reasons for willing and so escapes charges of arbitrariness or irrationalism. Against Harry Frankfurt’s subjectivist account of practical normativity, I argue that when caring is understood in terms of projective commitment, it always depends on objective (and even, in a weak sense, ‘‘universalizable’’) grounding value-judgments. Nor are these reasons for caring entirely derivative from already-existing cares or loves. There must always be grounds for the projection of any goals, yet these grounds do not necessitate action and need not themselves constitute prepurposive motivation.1 487 488 Will as Commitment and Resolve Consistent with the account of aretaic commitment in the last chapter, I also maintain that the grounds for caring about something X are not generally exhausted by the product-values involved in realizing X or bringing about X’s good; for there are often other goods related to the process of pursuing X that can (without self-defeat) provide at least part of the basis for devotion to X. Moreover, some grounds for caring about X may be accessible or salient only to particular agents, depending on contingent features of their personal history, including past choices and standing projects or relationships. This chapter concludes with a preliminary taxonomy of grounds for projective willing, which plays the same role in an existential virtue ethics that a list of basic goods plays in ‘‘new’’ natural-law theories of practical reason.2 1. Existential Objectivism In chapter 13, we saw that the existential account of caring and volitional love explains and supports Frankfurt’s theory on all but these two points: the existential conception of the striving will does not require that the core of the self be constituted by ‘‘volitional necessities’’ that, in turn, are determined by contingencies beyond the agent’s control; nor does it imply that the agent’s ultimate grounds for caring are inscrutably personal or subjective . My goal in this chapter is to show that an existential theory of the will does not imply that the volitional constitution of our life goals or ground projects is ultimately arbitrary or without interpersonal justification. By contrast, in explaining the structure of projective motivation (chap. 9, secs. 4 and 5), I introduced the Grounding thesis, which says that goals and ends are projected upon objective grounds. This implies what I call existential objectivism (EO): EO: The goal-setting and goal-pursuing activity of the striving will (projecting new final ends, modifying existing motives, and consolidating or focusing the motivation behind intended purposes already decided on by the agent) is always performed in light of values or goods that (appear to the agent to) ground or at least partially justify the motives formed by volitional commitment and resolve, independently of any relation between these goods and the agent’s existing D1-D3 desires. In general, these values have the broadly ethical character of tending to provide intersubjectively accessible reasons for ways of life, modes of caring, or different types of personal ethos. This kind of existential view clearly rejects Sartre’s signature thesis that my practical orientation toward goals, relationships, and concerns that inform my actions is an ‘‘original projection of myself . . . which causes the What Is Worth Caring About 489 existence of values, appeals, expectations, and in general a world’’ of practical significance to exist for me.3 Whether or not we exercise libertarian control over projective motivation in my sense, it does not experience itself as utterly unjustified or anguished due...