Care and the Four Quotients

If the “four quotients” introduced earlier in the book are understood as four capacities, then care does not occupy exactly the same conceptual space. Care is both a capacity and an attitude toward life. As a capacity, it contains strong internal tensions. Those tensions may be moderated only when care is also lived as an orientation, not merely exercised as a skill.

Let us begin with care as a capacity. In that sense, it is intimately connected with all four quotients. Intelligence provides the cognitive condition for good care: if we cannot tell what the facts are, who most needs care, or how far care can be effective, then our caring intention may easily backfire. The Luo Yixiao case discussed earlier is a good example. She was certainly a proper object of concern, but national-scale pity directed overwhelmingly toward one case is itself difficult for any person to bear. Care requires not only feeling but judgment about object, proportion, and likely effect.

Emotional intelligence, in turn, is the carrier of care. It supplies the motive force, the psychological energy, and the felt reason for acting. Merely knowing who ought to be cared for and what that person needs does not yet guarantee caring action. This is one version of the problem Aristotle identifies in the practical syllogism: a person may possess the relevant conditions for action and still fail to act. Empathy supplies the will or meaning that allows care to become practice rather than remain an inert conclusion.

Moral intelligence concerns the social realization of care. People often connect care with moral qualities such as social responsibility. That is right, but social responsibility and care are not quite the same thing. Social responsibility is more specific; care is more general. To use a perhaps slightly playful analogy, care is like inner force in martial-arts fiction, while social responsibility is like the outward form of a technique. Inner force without technique does not make one a master, but technique without inner force also fails at decisive moments.

This difference matters because care cannot remain merely in the mind. It has to be realized through a concrete moral environment. One way to see this is through science fiction. Cixin Liu’s Three-Body novels imagine that interstellar civilizations cannot establish relations of empathy, and that even morally advanced civilizations may therefore mistrust and destroy one another in a dark forest. If empathy were something that did not need to be socially realized, this problem would not arise. But because empathy must take institutional, cultural, and moral form, different worlds may embody it differently. Frank Herbert’s Dune gives a vivid image of the same point: an act that counts as respect in one culture may appear offensive in another unless some mediating understanding is present. Care without social embodiment remains an unrealized mental possibility.

Finally, systems intelligence points toward the horizon within which these tensions can be held together. When we speak of a system, we imply that there are disharmonies within a larger whole that require coordination. The most difficult theoretical issue, in my view, lies here. Care itself contains irreducible tensions. My preference for second-person empathy already implies one of them. Second-person empathy is meant to avoid the defects of both first-person sympathy and third-person calculation, but no complete positive theory can fully reconcile the two. We know that emotion may be misled. We also know that pure effective altruist rationality is impossible to realize in its ideal form, and may even become counterproductive. Yet no final formula tells us exactly how to combine the strengths of both.

The same problem appears in other forms. Should empathy education stress embodiment or mentality? Embodied sensitivity matters, because many forms of relation begin at the level of perception and bodily response. Yet embodiment is limited by social and biological conditions. If you teach a child how to interact with a kitten, for example, you have to explain that a kitten may hug with its paws and kick with its hind legs in ways that seem rough, because that is part of its embodied expressive repertoire. One cannot simply abolish that fact. Mentalist approaches, by contrast, emphasize rational control and interpretation, but they too have limits. Reason has blind spots, and human beings never cease to be embodied creatures.

Similar tensions appear elsewhere: between specialist education and liberal education, between belief and will, and between intervention and restraint. Enhancement-oriented education tries to cultivate knowledge and skill within one framework. Liberal education asks for wider tolerance across frameworks. The two do not easily coincide. Likewise, a person may judge that something should be done and still fail to do it; or may accept the evidence intellectually while resisting it emotionally, producing some form of self-deception.

Systems thinking offers one possible response, but only if we understand it carefully. Earlier in the book, Zhang Yuanyuan describes what I would call a positive form of systems thinking, one that asks individuals or groups to step outside narrow perspectives and seek possibilities from a wider standpoint. In many global crises this way of thinking is indeed necessary. Yet its efficacy is still limited. Any system, once operationalized, becomes finite. Any perspective that claims to be complete eventually reveals its incompleteness.

So I want to add a further idea: a negative form of systems thinking, understood not as passivity but as restraint. Here the relevant attitude is close to what classical Chinese thought sometimes calls wuwei: not doing nothing, but refusing unnecessary and impulsive intervention. In many situations, doing less, looking longer, and acting only where action is necessary may be the wiser course. This kind of restraint sets a very high standard of self-regulation.

From the side of intelligence, that means monitoring not only what one thinks but also what one allows oneself to take in. In an age saturated by data and digital bombardment, every person needs some ability to examine the informational channels through which identity and judgment are formed. From the side of embodiment, it means recognizing how urban life and the loss of contact with nature weaken perceptual capacities that care depends upon. Practices that restore embodied alertness therefore matter.

This is where I want to end. At best, we can try to keep the conditions of care from becoming worse. We may be able to help learners remain above a humane baseline from which better relations remain possible. But education cannot guarantee excellence in any absolute sense. Too many factors remain uncertain. If that sounds somewhat anti-utopian, I am willing to accept the charge. I believe it is the more realistic and more responsible educational philosophy.