Isaac Hadfield: 'Caring, Inquiry, and the Puzzle of Moral Testimony'
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.
