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Intrinsic Value
Edited by Miles Tucker (Virginia Commonwealth University)
About this topic
| Summary | The intrinsic value of a thing is the value it has in itself or for its own sake. First-order questions about intrinsic value focus on its bearers. Are the only basic intrinsic goods pleasures or satisfied desires? Or might more ‘objective’ goods, such as virtue, beauty, and understanding be valuable as well? Second-order questions about intrinsic value focus on (i) the intelligibility of the concept (ii) the possibility that the intrinsic value of a thing may depend on its extrinsic features and (iii) the relation between intrinsic value and other moral concepts such as instrumental value, welfare, fittingness, virtue, and moral obligation. |
| Key works | Moore 1903 advances and defends the now classical conception of intrinsic value. Chisholm 1986 develops a fitting attitude analysis of intrinsic value grounded in the work of Franz Brentano and proposes influential answers to a range of axiological puzzles. Thomson 1997 introduces widely-discussed arguments against the coherence of non-relational value in general and intrinsic value in particular. Korsgaard 1983 provides a Kantian approach to axiology and suggests that the concept of intrinsic value is subordinate to the concept of final value. Kagan 1998 advances a battery of arguments which aim to show that the intrinsic value of a thing may depend upon its extrinsic features. Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen 2004 introduces the now widely discussed 'wrong kind of reason' objection to fitting attitude analyses of value. Lemos 1994 and Zimmerman 2001 are broad and important works that defend a generally Moorean approach to the nature and significance of intrinsic goodness. |
| Introductions | Zimmerman 2019 Bradley 2013 |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Aesthetic Value (1,631 | 392)
- Epistemic Value (625)
- Environmental Value (893 | 512)
- Moral Value (1,873 | 302)
- Well-Being (2,188 | 54)
- Varieties of Value, Misc (315)
Contents
547+ found
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| 1 — 50 / 547 |
- The Heart of the Problem with Longtermism (Draft).Ben Bramble - manuscriptIn this critique of longtermism, I attack its Heart, the idea that there is intrinsic value in the addition of each new happy being to the world. I provide new responses to longtermists' two main arguments for the Heart (The Argument from Extinction and The Argument from Miserable Beings). I then sketch an alternative view to longtermism, which I call Future Sentimentalism, a view that does a better job of explaining our future-regarding reasons. Finally, I consider an important objection to (...)
- Fitting Happiness: On The Nature and Normativity of A Central Emotion.Alex Gregory - manuscriptIn one sense, “happiness” refers to an emotion. This emotion – sometimes labelled “joy” – is central in our mental lives. And yet it has been neglected by philosophers. This book investigates the emotion of happiness, and especially the question of when it is appropriate, or fitting. If someone is happy about a certain politician’s death, you might think that their happiness is inappropriate; whereas happiness about a promotion seems perfectly appropriate. Cases like these suggest a more general idea: that (...)Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- The Hidden Valence: Why Nothing We Call Good Or Bad Is Separate From Feeling.Thomas Peacock - manuscriptIn an earlier paper, The Case for Hedonic Primacy, I argued that positive valence is the only thing that is intrinsically good, and negative valence the only thing that is intrinsically bad. That paper stated the claim and traced its consequences. What it never did was the one thing that would make the claim impossible to escape. It did not take the things we believe to be valuable in their own right, one at a time — money, status, love, truth, (...)
- The Case for Hedonic Primacy: A Framework for Consciousness, Adaptation, and the Engineering of Experience.Thomas Peacock - manuscriptThis paper sets out a philosophical framework I have arrived at through a combination of first-person experience with altered hedonic states, engagement with the neuroscience of reward and adaptation, and extended dialogue with the existing literature on ethics and personal identity. The framework rests on a single foundational claim: positive valence is the only thing that is intrinsically good, and negative valence is the only thing that is intrinsically bad. Every secondary value that humans pursue — meaning, purpose, dignity, accomplishment, (...)
- On the intrinsic value of diversity.Seth D. Baum & Andrea Owe - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Diversity is an important ethical concept, but it is almost exclusively studied within two domains: biodiversity and diversity of sociological attributes such as race and gender. We provide a general study of the intrinsic value of diversity. We survey prior literature on the intrinsic value of biodiversity and sociological diversity in search of insights relevant to the intrinsic value of all types of diversity. We then present three thought experiments designed to clarify intuitions about the intrinsic value of small amounts (...)
- Consciousness and Irreplaceable Value.Gwen Bradford - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz, The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.When someone dies, it’s no consolation to observe that new people are born every minute. This is true not only of people we love, but of any stranger, and perhaps any conscious creature. People, and perhaps other creatures, are thought to have irreplaceable value: value that, when lost, cannot be replenished in kind even if it can be replenished in amount. But precisely what irreplaceable value is and why we have it is surprisingly underexplored. Phenomenal consciousness initially seems to be (...)
- Positional conditional egalitarianism.Susumu Cato & Ken Oshitani - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Conditional egalitarianism is a form of egalitarianism that responds to the levelling-down objection by asserting that equality is intrinsically valuable only when it benefits some individuals. Andrew Mason’s original formulation of conditional egalitarianism faces criticism from Nils Holtug, who proposes a refined formulation that introduces a clause regarding the effects of additional benefits on equality. However, Holtug’s own formulation encounters internal inconsistencies. This paper proposes a positional refinement of Holtug’s conditional egalitarianism, emphasizing the importance of impartiality in evaluating distributions. This (...)
- Precious Goods.Dale Dorsey - forthcoming - Utilitas:1-15.Many of the most significant goods in human life are fleeting, fragile, and subject to loss. But this aspect of such goods, what I call their preciousness, is undertheorized. Here I provide an account of the nature of precious goods, and argue that this category of goods is significant. I argue that while the preciousness of goods is not a consistent contributor to their intrinsic value, preciousness nevertheless calls for a distinct attitudinal response on the part of rational agents: a (...)
- Personal Relationships, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life.Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - In Sarah Stroud & Monika Betzler, The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Personal Relationships. Oxford University Press.While friendship, love, and familial bonds at their best are widely regarded as central to human flourishing, it is an open question why they benefit us. Reductionist accounts regard good relationships as only instrumentally or derivatively good for us. However, there may also be a non-contingent connection between good personal relationships and what is good for a person. I focus on three kinds of Anti-Reductionist claim and their implications. -/- First, some philosophers hold that personal relationships can be in themselves (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 3 citations
- On the Value of Irreplaceable Objects.Robbie Kubala, Harvey Lederman & Adam Lovett - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.Bradford (2023) calls attention to the fact that the strength of our reasons to preserve distinctively valuable objects increases as the number of such objects decreases. Bradford develops an account of this phenomenon in terms of ‘irreplaceable value’, and in particular in terms of a notion of the degree of such value, which is distinct from its amount. We present an alternative explanation of this pattern in our reasons, which appeals to the value of diversity: the world is better, other (...)
- Towards an account of basic final value.Timothy Perrine - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Ordinary and philosophical thought suggests recognizing a distinction between two ways something can be of final value. Something can be of final value in virtue of its connection to other things of value (“non-basic final value”) or something can be of final value regardless of its connection to other things of value (“basic final value”). The primary aim of this paper is to provide an account of this distinction. I argue that we have reason to draw this distinction as it (...)
- Perfect Trouble: Atomism, Non-Atomism, and the Dilemma of Perfect Being Theology.J. Resto Quiñones - forthcoming - Res Philosophica.Perfect Being Theology holds that God is the greatest possible being and that the divine nature is fixed by the perfections a being instantiates. This paper examines four ways of relating perfections to overall greatness: Distributivist Atomism, Collectivist Atomism, Distributivist Non-Atomism, and Collectivist Non-Atomism. I argue that each approach faces structural difficulties. The atomist views require that all perfections be jointly instantiated at their intrinsic maxima, which raises a substantive worry about whether the relevant set of perfections is compossible at (...)
- Against the Fundamentality of GOOD.L. Nandi Theunissen - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the (...)
- Hedonism.John J. Tilley - forthcoming - In Ruth Chadwick, Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 3rd ed. Elsevier.This article covers multiple varieties of hedonism, focusing mainly on value hedonism and psychological hedonism. For instance, it clarifies those views, addresses errors about them, and discuses arguments for them. It closes with some words about the relevance of those views to applied ethics.Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 1 citation
- Can Virtue Grow out of Vicious Human Nature? Xunzi’s Genealogy Reconstructed.Tang Yun - forthcoming - Philosophy East and West.Xunzi’s pessimistic understanding of human nature and his endorsement of the intrinsically valuable virtue of yi (義) put him in a vulnerable position. To defend this position, Xunzi needs to conquer what the essay calls “the compatibility problems,” the first of which concerns the compatibility between bad human nature and virtue, while the second is between Xunzi’s functional understanding of virtue and his understanding of virtue as possessing intrinsic value. If Xunzi’s moral philosophy were to fail to solve these two (...)
- Values and Vampires: Why Moral Axiology Withstands the Argument From Queerness.Vuko Andric - 2026 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 29 (1):251-271.The argument from queerness is one of the most important arguments for moral error theory. Moral error theory holds that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed or, more precisely, that all moral judgements are false. The argument from queerness, in the version I am concerned with, claims that moral discourse is centrally committed to the thesis that moral facts entail categorical reasons, understood as irreducibly normative favouring relations, and that if this thesis were true, moral facts would be queer. In this (...)
- Kierkegaard on the Reasons for Neighborly Love.Michael Au-Mullaney - 2026 - European Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):673-690.Some Kierkegaard scholars view him as endorsing a bestowal account of neighborly love. In this view, love is not grounded in the lovability of the neighbor but freely bestows value on the neighbor. Others interpret him as endorsing a qualities‐responsive view, in which love is a response to the neighbor's intrinsic value. I argue both readings miss a distinction Kierkegaard makes between the normative justification for love and its motivation. I suggest Kierkegaard held that love was normatively justified by the (...)
- Perfectionism.Gwen Bradford - 2026 - In David Copp, Tina Rulli & Connie Rosati, The Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 147-163.This chapter describes perfectionism, a theory of the good life according to which wellbeing is a matter of the exercise and development of the capacities or features that are central to human nature. Perfectionism is an objective theory of wellbeing, as opposed to a subjective one, meaning that the excellence of human nature is good regardless of whether or not it brings pleasure or is the object of any subjective attitude such as desire. The advantages of perfectionism over competing theories (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 14 citations
- Incommensurability, conditional value, and the procreation asymmetry.Ben Bradley - 2026 - Analysis 86 (1):24-32.A popular view in population ethics is the procreation asymmetry, according to which we have strong reasons not to bring a miserable life into existence but no reason to bring a good life into existence. Several philosophers have recently defended this asymmetry by arguing for incommensurability between a good life and nonexistence, on the grounds that the values of positive welfare goods are conditional on the existence of the person who receives them. In this paper I present an argument against (...)
- The Subjectivity Argument Against the Intrinsic Value of Pleasure.Antonin Broi - 2026 - Utilitas.Pleasure is widely thought to have intrinsic value. However, this thesis has been threatened by the argument that pleasure is a mental state that essentially involves the subject’s conative attitudes. Its value, then, would be subjective. Though the existing version of the argument can be resisted by simply rejecting the attitudinal theories of pleasure on which it is based, I will develop a new and more general version based on the reasonable hypothesis that the phenomenal character of pleasure is reducible (...)
- Taking Retributive Value Seriously.Douglas Husak - 2026 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 20 (1):45-67.I present the following challenge to retributivists (including myself). I stipulate that retributivism is the claim that inflictions of deserved punishment produce intrinsic value. If this definition is accepted, it is curious that the academic writing of few if any retributivists express enthusiasm for punishing greater numbers of persons who commit serious crimes but are not apprehended. A great deal of intrinsic value could be added by increasing the clearance rates for serious offenses. In this paper I briefly explore five (...)
- Better be a Zombie?Uriah Kriegel - 2026 - In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.According to many philosophers, something possesses intrinsic value if it is good in and of itself, without any external justifications. In contemporary scholarship, notable thinkers like Thomas Nagel (1979), William Frankena (1973), Charles Siewert (1998), and Walter Glannon (2016) argue that phenomenal consciousness—the subjective aspect or “what it’s likeness” of experience—holds positive intrinsic value. It is uncommon to encounter a pessimistic perspective on the intrinsic value of phenomenal consciousness. The chapter proposes that early Buddhism espouses the belief in the intrinsic (...)
- The Objective Value of Childrearing.Danielle Levitan - 2026 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 54.ABSTRACT Most countries legally recognize the right and duty to raise the child one has carried and given birth to, (i) reflecting a traditional legal presumption (despite widespread abuse and neglect) that parents should be granted wide‐ranging legal rights with respect to their minor children. What interests me here is the moral aspect of the right to childrearing: does childrearing have a value that is objective, and if so, why? In this paper, I explore a theory of intrinsic value that (...)
- Intrinsic and Universal Value in Heritage Ethics.Erich Hatala Matthes - 2026 - In Andreas Pantazatos, Tracy Ireland, John Schofield & Rouran Zhang, The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics. London: Routledge. pp. 46-56.The contemporary heritage ethics literature often adopts a critical attitude towards the ideas of intrinsic value and universal value. Intrinsic (inherent, innate) value is criticized for ignoring the social dimensions of cultural heritage and fetishizing material heritage; universal value is criticized for facilitating imperialism and colonialism in the management of cultural heritage. While there are important dimensions to these critiques, particularly with respect to how these value concepts have been employed in practice, they also tend to depend on narrow interpretations (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Appreciating pigeons: Aesthetic experience, emotion, and the intrinsic value of nature.Sandra Shapshay - 2026 - Environmental Values 35 (1):3-20.How to justify ascribing intrinsic value to nature? This task emerged in the 1990s as “the central theoretical quest of environmental philosophy”, especially as concerns non-sentient living nature and superorganismic entities such as species. Since then, many theories have been offered to answer the ontological question of how nature's intrinsic value is to be understood, ranging from Moorean non-naturalist, objectivist theories to Elliot's subjectivist “indexical theory”. The question I shall focus on in this paper is related but different: How can (...)
- Patient dignity in mental health care: from inherent worth to standing.Caner Turan & Oliver Sensen - 2026 - Academia Mental Health and Well-Being 3 (1):1-17.Respect for patient dignity is recognized as an ethical commitment in healthcare, yet the concept often remains too abstract to guide clinical practice. This challenge is salient in mental health contexts, where patients may experience diminished autonomy, stigma, or institutional constraints. This paper develops a conceptual and normative analysis of dignity in mental health care by distinguishing between two conceptions: dignity as inherent worth and dignity-as-standing. Drawing on philosophical analysis, empirical literature, and global policy frameworks, the paper evaluates each conception’s (...)
- Why we Must Change the Bioethical Terminology around So-Called “Lives Not Worth Living,” and “Worthwhile” and “Unworthwhile” Lives.Rebecca Bennett - 2025 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 34 (2):173-183.The terminology of “lives not worth living,” “worthwhile lives,” and “unworthwhile lives,” used by John Harris and many others, has become an accepted linguistic convention in bioethical discussions. These terms are used to distinguish lives of overwhelming negative experience from lives that are or are expected to be of overall positive value. As such, this terminology seems helpful in discussions around resource allocation, end-of-life decision making and questions of when it might be acceptable (and unacceptable) to reproduce. This paper argues (...)
- Failure.Gwen Bradford - 2025 - In Mauro Rossi & Christine Tappolet, Ill-Being: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press.In Achievement, I suggest that failures can be just as good as achievements. Achievements are valuable because of their effort and competence, and some failures have these features too, and are therefore valuable for the same reasons. While that may be true, surely it’s also true that failures are, or can be, genuinely bad – not merely a privation of the good of achievement, but themselves intrinsically bad. As is the case for many bads, it is surprisingly difficult to give (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 2 citations
- Ross and Aesthetic Value.Gwen Bradford - 2025 - In Robert Audi & David Phillips, The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Virtue, and Value. Oxford University Press. pp. 209-225.While Ross did not, so far as it seems, write on aesthetic value in any work dedicated exclusively to that topic, he nevertheless defends a view of aesthetic value in The Right and the Good that he further develops in Foundations of Ethics. Ross has a dispositionalist account of the definition of aesthetic value, meaning that he holds the view that aesthetic value, specifically beauty, is a disposition to induce aesthetic experience. Ross is further an instrumentalist about the value of (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Knowledge, Tennis, and Objective List Accounts of Well-Being.Alan H. Goldman - 2025 - Philosophia 53 (1):109-128.This paper argues that objective list accounts of well-being cannot account for the fact that not all knowledge, an item typically on such lists, is good for people independently of their attitudes toward it. The most obvious way to distinguish that knowledge that is intrinsically valuable is precisely in terms of subjective attitudes and aims. Tennis is a source of well-being for me. It is not simply instrumentally valuable to me as a means to any usual member of objective lists. (...)
- Sortal Quality: Pleasure, Desire, and Moral Worth.David Hunter - 2025 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world might be and not representations of things. Believing (...)
- Ross on Virtue and Vice.Thomas Hurka & Bowen Chan - 2025 - In Robert Audi & David Phillips, The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Virtue, and Value. Oxford University Press. pp. 169-188.This chapter examines Ross’s account of moral virtue as one of his four intrinsic goods and argues that in key respects it’s superior to the better-known accounts of Aristotle and Kant. Among the topics covered are: (1) Ross’s treatment of virtue as a secondary or derivative good, one that consists in fitting attitudes to other, independently given values or duties—this in contrast with many virtue-ethical views; (2) his sharp separation between the right and the morally good, so a wrong act (...)
- The Axiology of Pain and Pleasure.Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco & Paul Bloomfield - 2025 - Journal of Value Inquiry (2):263-286.There is little more common in ethics than to think pain is intrinsically bad and pleasure is intrinsically good. A Humean-style error theory of the axiology of pain and pleasure is developed against these commonsense claims. We defend the thesis that the value of pain and pleasure is always contingent and only instrumental. We survey prominent theories of both intrinsic value and pain/pleasure, all of which assume that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable. We base our error theory on counterexamples (...)
- Digital Duplicates and Collective Scarcity.Benjamin Lange - 2025 - Philosophy and Technology 38 (1):1-5..Digital duplicates reduce the scarcity of individuals and thus may impact their instrumental and intrinsic value. I here expand upon this idea by introducing the notion of collective scarcity, which pertains to the limitations faced by social groups in maintaining their size, cohesion, and function.
- Self-Ownership and the Separateness of Persons.Konstantin Morozov - 2025 - Discourses of Ethics 3 (27):55-76.One of the main objections to utilitarianism is the separateness of persons thesis. According to it, each person possesses a unique subjective perspective, making it impossible to aggregate the well-being of individuals. At first glance, this assertion is purely descriptive and therefore cannot justify any normative conclusions. However, it can be understood as pointing to a significant normative fact: each person has intrinsic value, and therefore their well-being should not be considered simply as part of some aggregated social good. This (...)
- Toward a Consensus on the Intrinsic Value of Biodiversity.Katie H. Morrow - 2025 - Environmental Values 34 (3):262–279.This paper addresses the stalemate on the question whether biodiversity has intrinsic value. I distinguish between a “weak” conception and two “strong” conceptions of intrinsic value in the environmental ethics literature. The strong conceptions of intrinsic value are connected, respectively, to moral standing and to a strongly objectivist account of value. Neither of these forms of value likely applies to biodiversity. However, the weak conception of intrinsic value is neutral about both moral standing and the nature of value and plausibly (...)
- All Play and No Work? AI and Existential Unemployment.Gary David O’Brien - 2025 - The Journal of Ethics 29 (4):747-771.Recent developments in large language models and image generation software raise the possibility that AI systems might one day replace humans in some of the intrinsically valuable work through which humans find meaning in their lives – work like scientific and philosophical research and the creation of art. If AIs can do this work more efficiently than humans, this might make human performance of these activities pointless. This represents a threat to human wellbeing which is distinct from, and harder to (...)
- Six Types of Value and Their Interrelations in Aristotle.C. D. C. Reeve - 2025 - Rhizomata 13 (1):53-82.Six types of value have important interrelated roles in Aristotle’s practical and theoretical philosophy. The six are: value expressed in terms of goodness (agathonic value), that expressed in terms of happiness (eudaimonic value), that expressed in terms of pleasure (hedonic value), that expressed in terms of the noble (kalonic value), that expressed in terms of aptness, and that expressed in intrinsic terms (intrinsic value). In the present paper the nature of these types of value and of their interrelations are explored (...)
- Intrinsically Good, God Created Them.Daniel Rubio - 2025 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 11:113-138.Erik Wielenberg [2014] and Mark Murphy [2017], [2018] have defended a series of arguments for the conclusion that creatures are not good intrinsically. In response, I take two steps. First, I introduce a conception of intrinsic value that makes created intrinsic value unproblematic. Second, I respond to their arguments in turn. The first argument is from the sovereignty-aseity intuition and an analysis of intrinsicality that makes derivative good extrinsic. I challenge the analysis. The second comes from a conception of perfection (...)
- The Argument from Addition for No Best World.Daniel Rubio - 2025 - In Justin J. Daeley, Optimism and The Best Possible World. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.This chapter will amount to a detailed exposition and exploration of one of the most prominent arguments against the existence of an unsurpassable world: the argument from addition. Endorsed by a variety of thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Alvin Plantinga, and William Rowe, the argument from addition uses the possibility of adding good things to a candidate unsurpassable world to argue that every world is surpassable. While widely endorsed, the argument has come under recent criticism. By carefully working through (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 7 citations
- On the Value of Aesthetic and Intellectual Activity: A Reply to Ross.Nandi Theunissen - 2025 - In Robert Audi & David Phillips, The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Virtue, and Value. Oxford University Press. pp. 226-249.Is value personal in the sense that what is of value is of value for someone, or is it impersonal in the sense that what is of value, while it pertains to a subject, is of value simpliciter? Ross was a staunch proponent of the view that value is impersonal. I am a proponent of the view that value is personal. This essay asks which of us is right. The controversy is over the metaphysical structure of noninstrumental value. But this (...)
- Symbolic value and the limits of good-for theory.Aaron Abma - 2024 - Noûs 59 (2):542-563.Good-for theorists claim that to be valuable is to be good for someone, in the sense of being beneficial for them. Their opponents deny this, arguing that some things are good-simpliciter: good independently of being good for anyone. In this article I argue in favor of good-simpliciter. I appeal to the category of symbolically valuable acts, acts which seem valuable even when they do not benefit anyone and even when they are costly to the agent. I explore various strategies a (...)
- Irreplaceable Value.Gwen Bradford - 2024 - In Russ Shafer-Landau, Oxford Studies of Metaethics 19. Oxford University Press USA.If the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, or the Sword of Goujian were destroyed, nothing could replace them. New works of art that are even more impressive may be created, which may replenish the value in the world in quantity, but they would not fully replace the loss. Works of art and historical artifacts have irreplaceable value. But just what is irreplaceable value? This paper presents perhaps the first analysis. Irreplaceable value is a matter of intrinsic (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark 9 citations
- Direct acquaintance with intrinsic value.Martin Dimitrov - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 75 (2):428-449.Upon introspection, we judge that suffering feels bad. I argue there is no appearance-reality gap when it comes to introspective judgments about simple, intrinsic, nonrepresentational phenomenal states like itches, tingling, and suffering's feeling bad. On constitutivism about phenomenal introspection, there is no appearance-reality gap here because these judgments are literally constituted by the phenomenal states they are about. As a result, we are directly acquainted with the intrinsic properties of experience in having these judgments. Reflecting on our direct acquaintance with (...)
- On fellowship.Dale Dorsey - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (1):133-152.This paper explores a form of communion between persons that the philosophy of value has a tendency to ignore. In discussions of interpersonal relationships and experiences, focus is almost always directed to the phenomenon of friendship and family: two or more individuals that share a history, have longstanding relationships of mutual care. Friendship is said, among other things, to be of intrinsic value, to directly benefit the friend, to generate special obligations, and to yield advances in a person’s virtue. But (...)
- It’s Not the Slope that Matters: Well-Being and Shapes of Lives.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 22 (1-2).Many believe that an upward-sloping life is better than a downward-sloping life because of its shape. This is a common way of formulating the shape of a life hypothesis. We argue that the hypothesis is mistaken. We need not assume that there is something intrinsically valuable in the shape of one’s life to justify the tendency to judge an upward-sloping life as better than a downward sloping one. Instead, we can appeal to more fundamental and less controversial claims to justify (...)
- Monotheism and Value Monism.Martin Jakobsen - 2024 - Philosophia Christi 26 (1):75-89.This article addresses the following metaethical questions: how many intrinsic values are there? Robert Adams holds the view that there is only one intrinsic value, a view called “intrinsic value monism,” but does not present any arguments in favor of this view. This paper makes the case that there are good reasons for upholding value monism. I argue that our ability to weigh different values against each other supports value monism and that monotheistic worship also supports monism.
- Individuality as Difference.Guy Kahane - 2024 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 52 (4):362-396.Today’s culture tells us to respect, even celebrate, the many ways in which we are different from each other. These are moral claims about how to relate to people, given that they are different. But does it also matter whether we are different in the first place? I argue for the intrinsic value to us of individuality, understood in terms of our differences from others. Past defences of individuality often unhelpfully conflate it with autonomy or authenticity, but these can come (...)
- Better Life Stories Make Better Lives: A Reply to Berg.Antti Kauppinen - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1507-1521.Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best (...)
- Liveliness as a Theory of Meaning in Life: Problems and Prospects.Kirk Lougheed - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (4):797-813.I aim to more fully develop a theory of meaning in life based on the concept of life force that is important to a substantial number of Africans in the sub-Sahara region. While life force implies a large invisible ontology, Thaddeus Metz has recently developed an entirely naturalistic version of it known as liveliness. However, he also offers two objections that hinge on the idea that life force cannot accommodate intuitions that certain types of knowledge and progress are valuable for (...)
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