I think there’s a conflation here between “the internal experience of the emotion of caring” and “the act of caring, visible to external observers.”
I think you’re saying “I might take actions that look like not-caring, due to constraints like memory, and I don’t want this to be misconstrued as not having the internal experience of caring,” but I think that ultimately if one has … akrasiatic caring? … this doesn’t matter. I think that whether it’s down to unfortunate memory constraints or like deliberate callousness, what usually carries weight is “does this person take the actions that I need them to take, in order to be happy interacting?” and if the answer is “nope” then the reason doesn’t matter all that much to me.
Or to put it another way, “sufficiently advanced obliviousness is indistinguishable from malice” is a sentence pattern that has a lot of other versions, e.g. “sufficiently advanced inability to scrape together spoons, due to chronic illness, is indistinguishable from apathy.”
It’s not that an “I don’t care about you” signal was accidentally sent, it’s that the action of care, sufficient for the needs of the other person, wasn’t taken. It’s tragic when it wasn’t-taken due to reality constraints, as opposed to due to a free and unpressured choice, but what matters is whether the action is on the table.
Your colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, for instance … in my culture, it’s bad to excoriate that colleague if it’s a genuine constraint issue, but whether it’s inability or unwillingness isn’t pertinent if what matters is “can we say each other’s names, reliably?”
I think there’s a conflation here between “the internal experience of the emotion of caring” and “the act of caring, visible to external observers.”
I think you’re saying “I might take actions that look like not-caring, due to constraints like memory, and I don’t want this to be misconstrued as not having the internal experience of caring,” but I think that ultimately if one has … akrasiatic caring? … this doesn’t matter. I think that whether it’s down to unfortunate memory constraints or like deliberate callousness, what usually carries weight is “does this person take the actions that I need them to take, in order to be happy interacting?” and if the answer is “nope” then the reason doesn’t matter all that much to me.
Or to put it another way, “sufficiently advanced obliviousness is indistinguishable from malice” is a sentence pattern that has a lot of other versions, e.g. “sufficiently advanced inability to scrape together spoons, due to chronic illness, is indistinguishable from apathy.”
It’s not that an “I don’t care about you” signal was accidentally sent, it’s that the action of care, sufficient for the needs of the other person, wasn’t taken. It’s tragic when it wasn’t-taken due to reality constraints, as opposed to due to a free and unpressured choice, but what matters is whether the action is on the table.
Your colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, for instance … in my culture, it’s bad to excoriate that colleague if it’s a genuine constraint issue, but whether it’s inability or unwillingness isn’t pertinent if what matters is “can we say each other’s names, reliably?”