Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1988 (hardback ISBN 0-521-33324-5, paperback 0-521-33611-2) — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511818172.
Key takeaways
From the publisher’s preview: front matter, contents, sources and preface. The essays themselves are filed separately.
- Contents. 1 “Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility” (LIT-694); 2 “Freedom of the will and the concept of a person” (LIT-692); 3 “Coercion and moral responsibility”; 4 “Three concepts of free action”; 5 “Identification and externality”; 6 “The problem of action”; 7 “The importance of what we care about” (LIT-686); 8 “What we are morally responsible for”; 9 “Necessity and desire”; 10 “On bullshit”; 11 “Equality as a moral ideal”; 12 “Identification and wholeheartedness” (LIT-575); 13 “Rationality and the unthinkable”.
- Structure, not history. “The considerations my essays recommend and address … are primarily structural rather than historical. Understanding what a person is … differs from understanding how he came to be that way”; “it is not inquiry into what has produced us but the endeavor to identify and to make sense of what we have become that is the more authentically philosophical enterprise” (p. viii).
- The will, not reason. “volition pertains more closely than reason to our experience of ourselves”; “The inner organization of the will and what that implies for us are … the subjects I have mainly attempted to explore” (p. viii).
- Necessity and autonomy. “necessity is not only compatible with autonomy; it is in certain respects essential to it … What has no boundaries has no shape” (p. ix).
- Responsibility is not the point. “I do not think that it is mainly for the sake of moral responsibility that we care as much as we do about being free” (p. viii).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, as the optional seed in the batch on Frankfurt. The record’s book rule is to read and file the shorter works and to file a book only if the record would lose something without it. Two things would be lost here. The record’s readings cite Frankfurt by this book’s pages (“IWWCA 18”, “IWWCA 65–6”), and those citations had no code to point to. And the preface is Frankfurt’s own statement that his account is structural and not historical, which no essay the record holds says in so many words.
How the preface bears on the theories. THEORY-040 says a condition stated in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent, and that Frankfurt accepts this, citing a 2002 reply second-hand. The preface states the method that commits him to it, in 1988 and first-hand, and n. 10 of the 1971 paper (LIT-692) already applies it. For THEORY-120, the preface’s “necessity … essential to autonomy” is the programme the Tanner Lectures (LIT-293) carry out with love’s volitional necessities.
The date of chapter 12. The Sources page gives the Schoeman volume as
“Copyright © 1987 by Cambridge University Press”, which is where the
usual 1987 date for “Identification and Wholeheartedness” comes from. That
answers the question LIT-575’s body leaves open (it had not seen the
copyright page), and leaves its published: (1988-01-29, Crossref’s
earliest full date) as the record’s rule requires.