A comment or two on "Importance, Value, and Causal Impact" by Guy Kahane (2021)
"The kind of difference-making that endows things with genuine importance is... 'difference in value'."
"The Value Impact View: The degree to which something is important, relative to a domain, is a function of how much difference it makes to overall intrinsic value in this domain, compared to other things in it; and the more difference to value something makes, in this way, the more attention and concern it merits."
The first thing to note is that importance is relative to some domain. Kahane suggests that importance is also relational in that it functions on an affective continuum in comparison to the importance of other things in the domain. He is not clear, though. Because he relates importance to value he needs to define value. But because he simply defines it to be intrisic value he just kicks the can down the road. He does discuss instrumental value as well but barely. The conclusion he wishes to reach is that 'importance' and 'value' are not synonyms. Importance is a function of value, he says.
I'm sure that I have not dealt justly with Kahane's thoughts on this subject but my purpose isa bit different. It is to shed light on the concept of sufficiency wthin th UBI discussion. The idea that everyone in a community has equal rights to sufficient resources for life is vague at best. There seems to me a certain level of resources required for life's maintenance and that this maintenance is both important and valuable. Without both the whole discussion of UBI would be moot. But to consider sufficiency is terms of maintenace of some miserably wretched state is not consistant with the importance or value of lives either. Something more should be on offer. Of course this 'more' level of suffience should not only delay the miserably wretched state from being implemented.
Perhaps some measure of indolance can be calculated where only an arbitrariy determined percentage of people being indolant would be accepted. However, there is likely much more to be said about levels of sufficiency. Perhaps most basically the maintenance of a miserably wretched state addresses the intrinsic value of people, and absolutely nothing more.