Mattering

Harry Frankfurt thinks that the only thing we can do is to see whether a given thing is one that we care about. Consequently, Frankfurt identifies what is important with what we care about. But the "consequently" does not actually all follow. For in exactly the same way we might argue that the only way of figuring out what really exists in physical reality is by examining what we perceive with our senses, and thus conclude, with Berkeley, that to exist in physical reality just is the same as to be perceived. We can say that the fact that we care about something is evidence as that it is important, just as the fact that we apparently perceive something by our senses is evidence that the object is physically real, without denying that I might care about something unimportant or have hallucinatory perceptions of unreal things.