If you mean value is always wrt to some standard, then sure. But is that really the case? I invite you to think a bit more about what value is. Is gold valuable? How do you go about answering that question? Or if not gold, then food, water, shelter, or tickets to the opera.Intrinsic value is entirely subjective. — Shawn
What's the problem with intrinsic value being reduced to instrumental value? — khaled
If you mean value is always wrt to some standard, then sure. But is that really the case? I invite you to think a bit more about what value is. Is gold valuable? How do you go about answering that question? Or if not gold, then food, water, shelter, or tickets to the opera.
Your question would seem to be, can there be value where there is no valuer? A nonsense question until and unless the details qualified, but qualification then being/providing the answer. — tim wood
To my mind the answer is: that for which anything is instrumental. More precisely: each and every first-person subject itself relative to itself in nonreflective manners (“nonreflective” here meaning: intrinsic value doesn’t pertain to the thoughts one thinks of oneself - for these are instrumental - but to oneself as, in part, thinker of such thoughts).
Given that each sentient being holds intrinsic value relative to itself, it can then be possible for some sentient beings to find other sentient beings’ personal intrinsic value to be of intrinsic value to their own selves: we address such tendencies by terms such as “compassion”, “love”, and so forth. Their suffering becomes our suffering just as their joys become our joys.
This to the effect that if one’s compassion for some other is strictly instrumental then it cannot be genuine compassion. For example, if you hold compassion for another strictly so as to be praised by the general public so as to get a promotion at work, you in fact don’t genuinely care for the other. But to the extent that you do genuinely care for the other, their being - replete with its intrinsic value relative to itself - will become intrinsically valuable to you.
When we don’t (intrinsically) value the intrinsic value of another, they at best become only instrumentally valuable to us. And this is where they get used.
If all this holds, then by shear fact that subjective beings occur in the world, so too occurs intrinsic value. If any one of us doesn’t find anyone else to be intrinsically valuable, the individual will nevertheless be intrinsically valuable to him/herself. — javra
One must remember that nothing in the world has meaning in and of itself, but only in relation to a conscious subject. Another way of clarifying might be to say that the physical world is utterly meaningless. It only gains meaning when biological consciousness bestows meaning upon it. So, your struggle is right on the money. Intrinsic value is necessarily a value to biological consciousness, it may well be a property of an object, but it can only have value if consciousness determines it so. — boagie
1. Intrinsic value only [useless] :sad:
2. Instrumental value only [useful] :smile:
3. Intrinsic + Instrumental value [useless + useful] :chin: — Agent Smith
instrumental for what? — Astrophel
For anything at all. We don't need to specify what exactly something is useful for; that something can be used (Wittgenstein & meaning of life) is all that matters. — Agent Smith
No, no. I mean, you say intrinsic value is useless — Astrophel
I think you are close, or, closer than anyone I have come across. — Astrophel
But you don't quite say what intrinsic value IS. [...] What makes it intrinsic? Being non contingent. [...] Intrinsic value can't be something that is relativized to a particular person's tastes, for if, say, skiing were an intrinsic value, it would be a value for all. Intrinsic values are not variable.
The trick is to reconcile the vagaries of subjectivity with the requirements of intrinsic value. — Astrophel
Yes, it has to be. How would you isolate the variable intrinsic value otherwise? — Agent Smith
Doing so is no easy task. But I’ll just say that if intrinsic value is a non-contingent end-in-itself this to me strongly connotes concepts of an ultimate reality. Brahman as an eastern, Hindu notion of this; the One as a western Neo-platonic notion. The underlying idea pivoting around the supposition that all sentient beings are, for lack of a better phrasing, fragmented emanations of this ultimate reality which is not contingent and is an end-in-itself. Thereby making each sentient being endowed with that which is not contingent and an end-in-itself, i.e. with intrinsic value, relative to itself. — javra
Husserl's phenomenological reduction is like this: a method, not unlike meditation! — Astrophel
Anyway, as I see it, if you are looking for ways to talk about ultimacy, you have to go "to the things themselves" and here, you have to discover the "Otherness" of the world. In my thought, this begins with Husserl. See his Ideas I, and prior (or contemporaneously) the last books of Logical Investigations which I am just reading now for the first time. Husserl gets very intimate with the intuitive disclosure of the world and gives the whole affair ground breaking language. One cannot SAY the world, but one can approach it, negatively (apophatically) go into it. Husserl's phenomenological reduction is like this: a method, not unlike meditation! — Astrophel
Very much enjoyed reading Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, for example. Haven't yet read Husserl, though. Still, I've so far not found in it a satisfactory exposition of meta-ethics.And meta-ethics naturally addresses issues of value such as those we've been discussing. — javra
You mean you haven’t found in Thompson a satisfactorily meta-ethics? — Joshs
I think the kinds of suppositions that would make a ‘meta’ useful or even coherent have been unraveled by phenomenological approaches. — Joshs
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