Todd May teaches philosophy at Warren Wilson College and is the author of seventeen books on philosophy, including Death, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability, and A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us. He was also a philosophical advisor to the popular television sitcom, The Good Place. His most recent book, Care: Reflections on Who We Are, explores the key role that care plays in our lives. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight interview, May discusses the book’s inspiration, its relevance to our contemporary media landscape, and the impact he hopes his work will have.
What is your work about?
Care is the first book in Agenda Publishing’s series Philosophy: The New Basics. The series is dedicated to offering brief and clear overviews of central concepts in philosophy. What particularly drew me to the series was its dedication, as it states, “to speak to the concerns, fears, and aspirations of an emerging generation of readers interested in how philosophy might help frame present-day political, social, and environmental concerns as well as offer insights into personal well-being and flourishing.” In my engagement with students, I am indeed finding an urgency to understand and integrate philosophical concerns into their lives, particularly in a world faced with the prospect of an emerging political authoritarianism, economic dislocation, and environmental catastrophe.
I think the concept of care, although it has been reflected on more recently in philosophy, deserves more consideration than it has received. (Undoubtedly this is due in good part to the fact that a number of the most significant discussions of care have been authored by women.) As Harry Frankfurt and others have pointed out, care is central to who we are. The book canvasses a number of aspects of care and in doing so, I hope, gives a sense of its importance in understanding what human beings (and other animals) are about. If the book were longer, I would have liked to add more about the topic of care among non-human animals. However, it may be best that I left it alone since it would be more the province of biologists and zoologists than philosophers.
Who has influenced this work the most?
I began to think about care many years ago, after reading Carol Gilligan’s seminal In a Different Voice. (Later, I had the opportunity to meet her, and, to my delight, found that she exemplified the caring attitude that she discussed in her book.) That book challenged my more traditional view of morality as a set of principles, Kantian or otherwise, that dictate proper moral behavior, although it took a while to integrate that challenge into my own thinking. More recently, I have been influenced by Frankfurt’s work as well as that of care ethicists, especially Virginia Held and Joan Tronto.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Actually, I was approached to write the book by Anthony Morgan and Steven Gerrard of Agenda. They were starting the New Basics series and thought a book on care would be a good entry. I immediately jumped on it, mostly because it would allow me to pull together the disparate thoughts about care that had been knocking around in my head for many years. I’m sure many philosophers have ideas that float along outside the mainstream of their work, ideas that interest them but to which they’ve never really turned their full attention. Care was one of those topics for me. So when Anthony and Steven suggested it, my reaction was, “Oh, yes: let me do that!”
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
The book tries to cover a number of topics in the area of care. I start with the question of what care is, focusing on the classic work of Frankfurt and, more recently, the fascinating approach of Agnieszka Jaworska, who focuses more on emotion than Frankfurt does. Then the book turns to care ethics and its development in Gilligan, Held, and Tronto. The third chapter is on care for and with non-human animals. I also mention, although as I said above, don’t focus on, care within non-human animal communities. The fourth chapter concerns caring for ourselves. It returns to Frankfurt’s view and then looks at Michel Foucault’s important ideas around care of the self. The final chapter returns to a theme I discuss more fully in my book A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability: the relationship between care and vulnerability. There I discuss the vexed question of how to think about care in the context of philosophies, like Buddhism and Stoicism, that prescribe distancing ourselves from our attachments to the world and others in it. The general idea is to canvas a number of areas in philosophy in which care makes an appearance, from our constitution to ethics to meaningfulness.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
There is, I believe, a more universal concern the book taps into as well as a topical one. The more universal concern is, as the book’s subtitle indicates, a focus on who we are. This is a matter not only of an ontological understanding of ourselves but also of reflecting on the question of what we care about and what we ought to care about. This leads to the topical issue. As everyone knows, we’re barraged by various media vying for our attention. It is easy for our attention to get bounced from pillar to post through social media, the internet, television, and so on. As a result, we often don’t take the time to ask what is important to us, what matters. That is: what do we really care about? By recalling and reflecting on care, we can step back from the immediacy of the purported urgency promoted by the media surrounding us in order to ask about the shape we would like our lives to take.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
Philosophy, to my mind, has at least two different, but not always independent, tasks. One is to offer insights into important areas of life that we have not recognized before. This is often, but not always, done in ways that are technical and abstract and therefore distant from the non-philosophical reader. There are exceptions to this, for instance in the work of Susan Wolf, who has influenced a lot of my other writing. However, when people say philosophy is difficult, they are often referring (when they’re not—justifiably—complaining about the needless jargon philosophers often employ) to that aspect of philosophy.
The other task is to recall us to things we either already know but have forgotten or to things that are there for us to know, if we would just attend to them. When we read philosophy written in this vein, our reaction is often something like, “Oh, yes, of course,” not in the sense that what we’re reading is obvious, but in the sense of being called back to something we should have either recognized or integrated into our lives.
My hope is that the book works on both levels, by canvassing insights on care that others have offered and by recalling readers to important aspects of themselves that are there for them to see but that might have gone unnoticed in a world of constant information (or, perhaps better, “information”); social, political, environmental, and economic urgency; and general planetary brouhaha.
Todd May
Todd May teaches philosophy at Warren Wilson College. He has been teaching for over thirty years, and has authored seventeen books of philosophy, among them Death, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability, and A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us. He was also a philosophical advisor to the television sit-com The Good Place. His most recent book is Care: Reflections on Who We Are.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
