Apprehension of Care and Value

An underexplored aspect of moral experience is apprehending ("seeing") other people as mattering, grasping the significance of whether their interests are set back or enhanced. This dissertation contends that these value-apprehensional' (v-a) experiences play an important role of revealing values to us, both in our experiences of people in general and of those emotionally close to us. Caring emotions are plausibly involved in enabling, enriching, and enhancing these. An initial contention (in Ch. 2) is that experiencing other people's value is one way that we attain adequate systematic comprehension of morality. Evidence for this includes findings about psychopaths' performance on the so-labeled moral-conventional task. Psychopaths tend to be impaired in comprehending that protecting welfare is the point behind rules prohibiting acts of harming. This suggests that they are impaired at apprehending the significance of others' welfare, and this seems traceable to early emotional impairments.