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Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 7:57 pm Post subject: Does Intrinsic Value Exist?
Intrinsic Value seems to be a theme that Wielenberg argues for throughout the text. The concept that certain values are absolute in a naturalist world and that we should all strive to live up to them. Assuming a Godless Universe exists, do you believe there are Intrinsic Values? Feel free to comment and detail your ideas such as perhaps you feel Intrisic Value may exist by Wielenberg did not make a successful or valid arguement or provide enough support or proof.
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 2:57 am Post subject: Re: Does Intrinsic Value Exist?
In other threads, I've realized that the word intrinsic has multiple meanings.
As one interpretation, some of my beliefs are intrinsic to my nature, such as the belief that it's wrong to torture babies. In that sense, other things I believe, such as the Pythagorean theorem, are not intrinsic.
Another interpretation defines an intrinsic value as one that's a universal truth, apart from what any individual believes. With that interpretation, a mathematical concept like the Pythagorean theorem is an intrinsic truth, while the evilness of torturing babies may or may not be.
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 7:18 am Post subject: Re: Does Intrinsic Value Exist?
Quote:Another interpretation defines an intrinsic value as one that's a universal truth, apart from what any individual believes. With that interpretation, a mathematical concept like the Pythagorean theorem is an intrinsic truth, while the evilness of torturing babies may or may not be.
this is the definition the author seems to be going with and is what i tried to base the poll on.
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 3:33 am Post subject: Re: Does Intrinsic Value Exist?
It seems apparent to me that values are inextricably tied to point of view. I think right and wrong, moral and immoral are real: but human morality is only meaningful from a human point of view. From the point of view of the prairie chicken (which was hunted to extinction in the U.S.), anything which would have destroyed, limited, or crippled human beings would have been “good”. In fact there are many perfectly valid points of view from which destruction of human beings is good. Since this is, to me, obviously true, it is equally apparent that values cannot be necessary truths, in the sense of the Pythagorean theorem. If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett, 1984
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 2:58 am Post subject: Re: Does Intrinsic Value Exist? -- questions
Submitted for your discussion, my questions:
Must intrinisic values by definition be universal values?
God or no god, how can humans function without (at least) individually intrinsic values? Without them, we'd be blind to the most obvious of our pursuits.
RE: universal vs individual Is the question of instrinsic values derived from the degree to which our social experience shapes them; or, is the question of their exsistence a challenge to our socialization.
If intrinsic values are prior to and regardless of socialization, can they be isolated as a purely sensory experience?
If they are a product of socialization, can they be analyzed as psychological phenemona?
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 3:59 pm Post subject: Re: Does Intrinsic Value Exist?
The problem that I see by postulating a value derived from a transcendent or supernatural source is that its evidence enters only via the senses and/or experience. As such, the religious experience and the mystic experience, it would seem, are not so much departures from, but refinements of the senses.
In turn, I am wondering about the process of assigning a value supernatural or transcendent authority. More generally, I am also wondering about how sensory (gen- physio) construction effects participation in the social dynamic.
At the risk of reducing consciousness to a hard-wired biological system of meta-values, it would seem that increasing a chosen value's authority by invoking extra-sensory origins is a subversion.
My argument does not intend to discount the existance of intrinsic values or god. The argument is meant to state (anarchistically, perhaps) that the intrinsic-ness of any value lies in the degree to which it is directed rather than in the degree to which it directs.
