Hey all,
I am unsure about this concept, and I was hoping others might give me a better understanding of it:
Can one really have more than one intrinsically valuable thing in a moral worldview?
In my mind, intrinsically valuable and ultimate are more or less synonymous - they are the end goal and are to be striven for or protected without relation to anything else. Examples include: happiness, utility, humanity, virtue, fulfilling of desires, etc. Many ethical views base their conclusions on intrinsic values.
But can you truly have more than one thing that is ultimate? What happens when two things which are supposedly both ultimate conflict with each other, say privacy and well-being/safety of others? The natural stance is that one must be compromised for the sake of the other, and to decide which one, and to what extent, we utilize a model of scale and relation with which to evaluate the "level" of each "ultimate" with respect to other "ultimates."
This strikes me as implying that one is "more ultimate" than the other, as if something is truly ultimate, it would not need to have its worth be defined with respect to another concept at any time. Indeed, it is my impression that what is truly the basic, and fundamental, intrinsically valuable quantity is actually revealed by our chosen system of relation. For example, should we use utilitarianism to evaluate the relative levels of two ultimates in a given case, then it is, I believe, implied that utility is the final, true ultimate.
I would greatly appreciate any thoughts and comments on this topic!
(This response is based off my own knowledge, never having been given a literal definition of "ultimate value" and "intrinsic value," only having discussed the ideas.)
ReplyDeleteTo me it seems there's a difference between ultimate and intrinsically valuable. Intrinsically valuable doesn't seem to carry a weight on its own. To value something intrinsically is to value that thing as you said- without value to anything else. Professor Tresan's question of privacy seemed to capture that well I thought. If we take away the 5 values of privacy, do we still value it? If no harm (psychological or otherwise) can come from information about us being known, do we still want that information private? If so, we value privacy intrinsically.
Ultimate does seem to carry a weight to it. If I value something ultimately, it ENTAILS intrinsic value, but it also carries the implication that is is the most important value a person has. To value something ultimately seems to suggest valuing it about everything else.
So I suppose to value something ultimately is to also value it intrinsically, but not vice versa. Ultimate value is just intrinsic value + weight, if that makes sense?
Hm... okay, I see what you are saying. And you're right, that example is a good way to figure out what is intrinsically valuable.
ReplyDeleteSo you're saying there could be multiple things that are intrinsically valuable, but only one ultimate? But then, as I mentioned above, what happens when intrinsic values are incompatible? We must judge them against each other, measure them in some other way. I feel like this very methodology implies they are not, in fact, intrinsic and derive their worth from something else, with the end result being that only one thing is truly intrinsically valuable. This is why I thought it was the same as the ultimate.
Thanks for the feedback :)
I think that intrinsic is value something "x" for itself, as such/just for existing. Ultimate is to care for "x" underivatively, not because it relates to something else that you truly care for. I think that every thing that has ultimate value also has intrinsic value but to care for something intrinsically could have be either ultimate or derivative. But going back to your question of having two ultimate/intrinsic values in conflict. Hmmm, it would seem that in the end you might have to choose one over another. Does this mean one is actually not ultimate. I mean I think both are still ultimate but you assign different importance even between ultimate values. But that means that in the end you should have some ultimate values which in general are always given more weight than compared to others and thus can be said to be essentially ultimate.
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