When we love something, however, we go further. We care about it not as merely a means, but as an end. It is in the nature of loving that we consider its objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important to us for their own sakes.

What people cannot help caring about, on the other hand, is not mandated by logic. It is not primarily a constraint upon belief. It is a volitional necessity, which consists essentially in a limitation of the will. There are certain things that people cannot do, despite possessing the relevant natural capacities or skills, because they cannot muste

Suppose now that someone is performing an action that he wants to perform; and suppose further that his motive in performing this action is a motive by which he truly wants to be motivated.

This relationship between love and the value of the beloved—namely, that love is not necessarily grounded in the value of the beloved but does necessarily make the beloved valuable to the lover—holds not only for parental love but quite generally.4 Most profoundly, perhaps, it is love that accounts for the value to us of life itself.

Caring about something differs not only from wanting it, and from wanting it more than other things. It differs also from taking it to be intrinsically valuable.

Aristotle apparently believed that there must be a single final end at which everything we do aims. I mean to endorse only the more modest view that each of the things we do must aim at some final end.

Our response to it bears directly and pervasively upon how we conduct ourselves—or, at least, upon how we propose to do so. Perhaps even more significantly, it affects how we experience our lives. When we seek to understand the world of nature, we do so at least partly in the hope that this will enable us to live within it more comfortably. To the

is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives. A person who cares about something is guided, as

Without such purpose, action cannot be satisfying; it is inevitably, as Aristotle says, “empty and vain.” By providing us with final ends, which we value for their own sakes and to which our commitment is not merely voluntary, love saves us both from being inconclusively arbitrary and from squandering our lives in vacuous activity that is fundament