Importance
Importance is a property of entities that matter or make a difference. For example, World War II was an important event and Albert Einstein was an important person because of how they affected the world. There are disagreements in the academic literature about what type of difference is required. According to the causal impact view, something is important if it has a big causal impact on the world. This view is rejected by various theorists, who insist that an additional aspect is required: that the impact in question makes a value difference. This is often understood in terms of how the important thing affects the well-being of people. So in this view, World War II was important, not just because it brought about many wide-ranging changes but because these changes had severe negative impacts on the well-being of the people involved. The difference in question is usually understood counterfactually as the contrast between how the world is and how the world would have been without the existence of the important entity. It is often argued that importance claims are context- or domain-dependent. This means that they either explicitly or implicitly assume a certain domain in relation to which something matters. For example, studying for an exam is important in the context of academic success but not in the context of world history. Importance comes in degrees: to be important usually means to matter more within the domain in question than most of the other entities within this domain.
The term "importance" is often used in overlapping ways with various related terms, such as "meaningfulness", "value", and "caring". Theorists frequently try to elucidate these terms by comparing them to show what they have in common and how they differ. A meaningful life is usually also important in some sense. But meaningfulness has additional requirements: life should be guided by the agent's intention and directed at realizing some form of higher purpose. In some contexts, to say that something is important means the same as saying that it is valuable. More generally, however, importance refers not to value itself but to a value difference. This difference may also be negative: some events are important because they have very bad consequences. Importance is often treated as an objective feature in contrast to the subjective attitude of caring about something or ascribing importance to it. Ideally, the two overlap: people subjectively care about objectively important things. Nonetheless, the two may come apart when people care about unimportant things or fail to care about important things. Some theorists distinguish between instrumental importance relative to a specific goal in contrast to a form of importance based on intrinsic or final value. A closely related distinction is between importance relative to someone and absolute or unrestricted importance.
The concept of importance is central to numerous fields and issues. Many people desire to be important or to lead an important life. It has been argued that this is not always a good goal since it can also be realized negatively: by causing a lot of harm and thereby making an important but negative value difference. Common desires that are closely related include wanting power, wealth, and fame. In the realm of ethics, the importance of something often determines how one should act towards this thing, for example, by paying attention to it or by protecting it. In this regard, importance is a normative property, meaning that importance claims constitute reasons for actions, emotions, and other attitudes. On a psychological level, considerations of the relative importance of the aspects of a situation help the individual simplify its complexity by only focusing on its most significant features. A central discussion in the context of the meaning of life concerns the question of whether human life is important on the cosmic level. Nihilists and absurdists usually give a negative response to this question. This pessimistic outlook can in some cases cause an existential crisis. In the field of artificial intelligence, implementing artificial reasoning to assess the importance of information poses a significant challenge when trying to deal with the complexity of real-world situations.
Definition and essential features
Importance is a property of entities that make a difference in the world. So for something to be important, it has to impact the world around it. For example, World War II was an important event in history both because of the suffering it caused and because of the long-term political changes it affected. Or in the field of medicine, Alexander Fleming was an important person because he discovered penicillin and thereby made a difference to the health of many people since then. Things that lack importance, on the other hand, could be removed without affecting any significant change to the world. Nonetheless, it seems that making a difference is not sufficient: even unimportant things usually make differences, however trivial they may be. An uncontroversial but circular definition holds that something is important if it makes an important difference.Various suggestions have been made to give a more substantial account of the nature of this difference. This is necessary to give a precise definition that can distinguish important from unimportant things. The idea behind such an approach is that there are many ways to make an important difference and there should be some element they all share in common. According to the causal impact view, all that matters is the extent of the causal impact a thing has in its domain or on the world at large. Many theorists require as an additional element that this impact affects the intrinsic value of the world, often in terms of promoting someone's well-being. The difference between these views matters for various issues. For example, it has been argued that human life lacks importance on a cosmic level when judged based on its causal impact but has it in relation to the value difference it makes. Other central aspects of importance are its context-dependence, i.e. that importance claims usually assess the significance of something relative to a certain domain, and its relationality, i.e. that the extent of the impact is usually assessed relative to the impact of other entities within this domain. Importance manifests in degrees: the more important something is, the bigger the difference it makes.
Causal impact view
According to the causal impact view, a thing is important if it has a sufficiently big causal impact on a large scale. This view has a strong initial plausibility since it is true for many events we see as important. It is reflected in the intuition that, to become important, one must interact with the world and change it. For example, Napoleon is seen as an individual of world-historic importance because of how his decisions affected the course of history and changed the lives of many Europeans. Something similar is true for many world-historic figures: they affected how many people lived, perceived them, and responded to them. However, various arguments have been raised against the causal impact view, often based on counterexamples to the effect that having a big causal impact is neither sufficient nor necessary for importance. For example, it has been argued that the invention of a device that can bring about cosmic changes to the orbits of planets in faraway galaxies would not be important if these changes had no impact on anyone's well-being. Or in analogy to The Myth of Sisyphus: if rolling a rock up a hill on earth is pointless, then one cannot simply increase its importance by multiplying its causal impact. So doing the same thing not just for one rock, but for billions of rocks across the galaxy, is equally pointless.Other counterexamples aim to show that, at least in a few cases, a large causal impact is not necessary for importance. For example, it has been argued that if there was sentient life in Alpha Centauri, its intrinsic value would significantly affect the overall importance of Alpha Centauri. This would be the case even if the causal influence of this life on other star systems was negligible. Or on a small scale, a short period of extraordinary suffering before death may significantly affect the overall value of someone's life even if it does not have any wider causal impact.
Value impact view
Many of the counterexamples raised against the causal impact view suggest that something else besides or instead of the causal influence is central to importance. According to the value impact view, this factor consists of an impact on the intrinsic or final value. In this regard, the relation to value is built into the concept of importance: causal powers only matter instrumentally by bringing about or protecting valuable things. Against the pure causal impact view of importance, it has been argued that having immense causal powers does not entail importance if these powers are not used to make a value difference. So an event is important not because of its sheer causal impact but because of the differences on the evaluative level it brings about. To assess the value impact of something, it is necessary to study not just the thing itself but also its wider and sometimes indirect impact on its surroundings. Many theorists combine both views in their conception of importance: things are important to the extent that they cause value differences. Some theorists, however, defend a pure value impact account by not including causation as a requirement.A central aspect of the value impact view is how intrinsic or final value is understood. Many theorists in this field have argued for some form of welfarism. On this account, final value consists in the well-being of someone and a thing is important to the extent that it affects someone's well-being. According to Harry Frankfurt, this can be understood in terms of needs: a thing becomes important because some sentient being needs it. In this context, a person needs something if they will be inevitably harmed unless they have it. For example, food and shelter are important to humans because they suffer if they do not have them. Abraham Maslow holds that there is a complex hierarchy of needs. The needs on the higher levels, like esteem and self-actualization, can only be fulfilled once the needs on the lower levels, like food and shelter, are fulfilled. A more general definition includes not just negative impacts on well-being, but also positive ones. So a thing may be important either because it harms someone or because it helps someone or is enjoyed by them. A similar connection between being good and being important is drawn by Ernst Tugendhat. He defines "good" as that which is justifiably preferred. According to him, this can be understood, for the most part, in relation to someone's well-being: a thing is good or justifiably preferable to the extent that it contributes to someone's future well-being. In the case of altruism, for example, an action by one person is good because it aims at improving the well-being of another person.
The value impact of things is often understood counterfactually: based on how much value would be lost or gained if, hypothetically speaking, the thing had not existed. This value includes both the intrinsic and the instrumental value of the thing. In the former case, some things are important because they are good in themselves, like pleasurable experiences. In the latter case, some things are important because they are useful to other things and help them become more valuable, like medicine or school books. The overall degree of importance is then given by the total value difference a thing makes.