Against Frankfurt’s Care Ground of Importance Adam C. Pelser Baylor University (prepublication draft; the final published version of this article appears in Southwest Philosophy Review 27, 1 [2011]) Moral theorists who reject objective moral normativity have made several attempts to explain what might ground (non-objective) morality and normativity more generally. One influential attempt in recent literature is that offered by Harry Frankfurt. In Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, Frankfurt argues that “importance is never inherent” (2006, p. 23). He explains, “In my view, it is only in virtue of what we actually care about that anything is important to us.” He then acknowledges the obvious fact that some things are important to us despite our failing to care about them and qualifies his view accordingly: “What people do not care about may nonetheless be quite important to them, obviously, because of its value as a means to something that they do in fact care about” (2006, p. 20). The principle Frankfurt here commends, henceforth Frankfurt’s Care Ground of Importance principle or CGI, can be stated as follows: For any x that is important to S, the importance of x to S is grounded either in S’s caring about x or in S’s caring about something else, y, the importance of which to S entails (perhaps unbeknownst to S) the importance of x to S. 1 Frankfurt argues on the basis of CGI that there is no care-independent (i.e., objective) ground of moral normativity. Although he does not make the connection between moral normativity and importance explicit, he seems to be reasoning as follows: if there are moral norms, they are, by virtue of being authoritative life-guiding norms, important; hence, if there is