Abstract
It was obvious to Plato and Aristotle and, in more recent times, to Brentano and Moore, that there is a distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘nonintrinsic’ value. These philosophers took it for granted that, if there is anything that is good, then there is something that is intrinsically good or good in itself, and that if there is anything that is bad, then there is something that is intrinsically bad or bad in itself. But at the present time this distinction is often called into question and even ridiculed. In this paper I will defend the distinction.
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Notes
I wish to express my indebtedness to Fred Feldman and Lars Bergstrom.
I suggested this definition in ‘Objectives and Intrinsic Value,’ in Rudolf Haller, ed., Jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein (Graz: Akademisches Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1972), 261-9: seep. 262.
Suppose that, for any amount of pleasure that one may experience, it is also possible to experience a lesser but still positive amount of pleasure. Then Jones feeling pleasure would not itself be an intrinsic value state, since any world containing it would also contain the good that is in some wider state of affairs (e. g., Jones feeling pleasure to degree 10). In such a case the latter state of affairs, but not the former, will be an intrinsic value state. This possibility was pointed out to me by W. Rabinowicz.
This was pointed out to me by Eva Bodansky. Were it not for this possibility, we could replace ‘p reflects all the good and evil that there is in q’ by ‘p contains all the good and evil that there is in q.’
We could now say that intrinsic value states are the’ source’ of the good and evil that is to be found in any possible world. The ‘ultimate source’ of such good and evil could then be said to be certain basic intrinsic value states — those intrinsic value states which are either good or bad and which have no intrinsic value states as proper parts. It should be noted that ‘proper part’ is here understood in terms of a strict sense of entailment — a sense of entailment which does not enable us to say that for any state of affairs, p and q, p entails the disjunction, p or q. Compare the undefined concept of ‘evaluatively basic proposition,’ introduced in Warren S. Quinn, ‘Theories of Intrinsic Value’ American Philosophical Quarterly, XI (1974), 123–132; see pp. 128ff.
An alternative to the present procedure would be to characterize the intrinsic value of a state of affairs p as being a function of the value of those intrinsic value states that reflect all the good and evil that there is in p. Then all states of affairs, and not just the ones I have called ‘bearers of value,’ would fall within the field of the intrinsic preferability relation. But the present procedure, as we shall see, enables us to solve the problem of the intrinsic value in disjunctive states of affairs. And the alternative does not have this advantage.
Roderick M. Chisholm and Ernest Sosa, ‘On the Logic of ‘Intrinsically Better’’, American Philosophical Quarterly, III (1966), 244–9. In this system we made use of rules corresponding to modus ponens and to a principle of substitution for logically equivalent states of affairs. The latter principle enabled us to say that all logically equivalent states of affairs are the same in value. But that system, unlike the one presented here, did not restrict the intrinsic preferability relation to those states of affairs that are here called the bearers of intrinsic value.
Rhetoric, Book I, Ch. 7, 1364a.
Oscar Kraus, Die Werttheorien: Geschichte und Kritik (Brunn: Verlag Rudolf M. Rohrer 1937) 227. Compare
Georg Katkov, Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie und Theodizee (Brunn: Verlag Rudolf M. Rohrer 1937), 67ff.
Concerning the intrinsic value of disjunctions, compare Lennart Aqvist, ‘Chisholm-Sosa Logics of Intrinsic Betterness and Value,’ Nous, II (1968), 253–70; and
Roderick M. Chisholm, ‘The Intrinsic Value in Disjunctive States of Affairs,’ Nous, IX (1975), 295–308. The present approach would render superfluous the axioms about disjunction that were defended in the last-named paper.
See Hector-Neri Castaneda, ‘Ought, Value, and Utilitarianism,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1969), 257–275.
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Chisholm, R.M. (1978). Intrinsic Value. In: Goldman, A.I., Kim, J. (eds) Values and Morals. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7634-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7634-5_7
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