Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T04:12:32.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In Defense of the Concept of Intrinsic Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael J. Zimmerman
Michael J. Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC27402, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The concept of intrinsic value has enjoyed a long, rich history. From the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day, philosophers have placed it at the foundation of much of their theorizing. This is especially true of G.E. Moore, who made it the cornerstone of his Principia Ethica. Yet this venerable concept has recently come under serious, sustained attack. My aim in this paper is to show that this attack has been unsuccessful.

When Principia Ethica appeared, its impact on the philosophical community was immediate and profound. Of course, much of what Moore had to say was, and continues to be, strongly disputed. The view that goodness is a simple nonnatural property has been criticized by many people and in many ways. Some have argued that goodness is an analyzable property. Others have argued that it is a natural property (or relation). Still others have argued, more radically, that goodness is not a property (or relation) at all. But none of these critics has rejected the very idea of goodness. None of them, that is, has contended that to say of something that it is good (in Moore's sense) is to speak nonsense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 389 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1903)Google Scholar

2 See Regan, Tom Bloomsbury's Prophet (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1986), xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar, 16 ff.

3 E.g., Ewing, A.C. The Definition of Good (New York: Macmillan 1947).Google Scholar

4 E.g., Perry, R.B. General Theory of Value (New York: Longmans, Green 1918)Google Scholar.

5 E.g., noncognitivists such as A.J. Ayer, Charles Stevenson, and R.M. Hare.

6 Geach, Peter ‘Good and Evil,’ Analysis 17 (1956) 33–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Williams, Bernard Morality (New York: Harper & Row 1972), 41 ffGoogle Scholar.

8 Foot, Philippa ‘Utilitarianism and the Virtues,’ Mind 94 (1985) 196–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Thomson, Judith Jarvis ‘On Some Ways in Which a Thing Can Be Good,’ Social and Political Philosophy 9 (1992) 96–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Goodness and Utilitarianism,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (1994) 7-21; ‘Moral Objectivity,’ in Moral Realism and Moral Objectivity, by Harman, Gilbert and Thomson, Judith Jarvis (Oxford: Blackwell 1996) 67–154Google Scholar; and ‘The Right and the Good,’ Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997) 273-98.

10 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 273-5Google Scholar

11 I shall focus on ‘Right,’ her latest presentation of these claims; but I shall also draw on the other works cited inn. 9, especially ‘On Some Ways.’

12 Geach, ‘Good,’ 33Google Scholar

13 Williams discusses this test explicitly in Morality, 41-2.

14 Moore, Principia, 7 ff.Google Scholar

15 Geach, ‘Good,’ 34Google Scholar

16 This is only a very rough summary of his view. See Moore, Principia, Ch. 6.

17 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 278Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 276 ff.

19 Ibid., 279 ff.

20 Thomson, ‘Goodness,’ 11Google Scholar

21 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 276Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 275

23 See Wright, Georg Henrik von The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963)Google Scholar, to which Thomson frequently expresses her indebtedness.

24 See Ch. 3 of Ross, W.O. The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1930)Google Scholar.

25 See Thomson, ‘Goodness,’ 12Google Scholar. Perhaps it is somewhat more plausible to contend that a good knife must be (considerably) better than the average possible knife, but I am not at all sure how one is supposed to count such things.

26 See Geach, ‘Good,’ 42Google Scholar, n. 1, where Geach refers to another chapter of Ross's Right.

27 See Thomson, ‘Goodness,’ 18, n. 4Google Scholar.

28 Ross sometimes engages in it; see, e.g., Right, Ch. 5 (but here Ross is careful to ensure that the reader doesn't forget that it is intrinsic goodness in particular with which he is concerned). Many others do, too. See, e.g., Butchvarov, Panayot Skepticism in Ethics (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1989), Chs. 3, 4.Google Scholar

29 Moore, Principia, 3Google Scholar

30 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 276Google Scholar

31 Thomson, ‘Objectivity,’ 129-30Google Scholar

32 Moore, G.E. Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1912), 27Google Scholar. Compare Chisholm, Roderick M. ‘Objectives and Intrinsic Value,’ in Jenseits vom Sein und Nichtsein, Haller, R. ed. (Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt 1972), 262Google Scholar. Moore would deny that such a ‘definition’ constitutes an ‘analysis,’ since he declares intrinsic goodness unanalyzable. We needn't, however, bother with this issue here.

33 The analogy may be flawed (as all analogies are in one way or another) in the following respect. It seems natural to say that something can have only one shape (or color) at once, whereas something might be good in several ways at once. But this is difficult. Something can have only one ‘overall’ shape at once, but its parts can be variously shaped. Perhaps we can also say that something can have only one ‘overall’ value at once, thereby preserving the analogy. Also, abstracting from shape (and color), we can clearly say that something can have more than one visual quality at once, thereby perhaps preserving the analogy in a different way. But whether or not either of these moves is acceptable, it certainly seems reasonable to think that shape (or color) and goodness are analogous at least in respect of being determinable properties.

34 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 277Google Scholar

35 This is not to say that the sort of definition of intrinsic goodness in terms of generic goodness apparently proposed by Moore in the passage in Ethics, quoted above, is acceptable. I find it unacceptable, for reasons that cannot be adequately discussed here.

36 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 289Google Scholar

37 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 277, n. 5Google Scholar

38 The tests, we might say, have been a red herring — though neither red nor herring.

39 Thomson, ‘On Some Ways,’ 99 ff.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 103

41 Ibid., 106-7

42 Moore, Principia, 99Google Scholar

43 This is true, I think, even though the term ‘intrinsic value’ is sometimes used to refer to more than one kind of value. On page 260 of his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1922), Moore says that to say that a kind of value is intrinsic is to say that its possession depends solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing that possesses it, and he goes on to declare that both goodness and beauty are kinds of intrinsic value. But notice that even then he restricts the term ‘intrinsically good’ to just one kind of intrinsic value. Unlike Moore here, but like many others, in this paper I am restricting my use of ‘intrinsic value’ to refer to intrinsic goodness, neutrality, and badness; even if beauty depends solely on the intrinsic nature of that which possesses it (something that seems to me quite dubious), I am not referring to it when I talk of intrinsic value. (Nonetheless, it may of course be that beauty is itself intrinsically good.)

44 See, among others: Brentano, Franz The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969)Google Scholar; Moore, Ross, Ewing, and Chisholm, in several works, including those cited above; Lemos, Noah Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Audi, Robert ‘Intrinsic Value and Moral Obligation,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997) 135-54.Google Scholar

45 Ross, W.D. Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1939), 290Google Scholar. It may be that the penchant of some writers, such as Moore, to use ‘good’ without qualification or ‘good absolutely’ to express intrinsic goodness in particular, is to be explained by their holding the view (I don't know whether this is true of Moore) that ethical or moral values somehow take precedence over other values. Far from this implying that being intrinsically good is not a way of being good, it presupposes that it is — a dominant way.

46 Ross, suggests one answer in Foundations. I suggest another in ‘The Moral Aspect of Nonmoral Goods and Evils,’ Utilitas 11 (1999) 1–15Google Scholar.

47 Foot, ‘Utilitarianism,’ 199Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 205-6

49 Ibid., 204

50 Thomson, ‘On Some Ways,’ 102Google Scholar

51 Thomson, ‘Right,’ 289Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 281-6

53 Butchvarov, Skepticism, 17Google Scholar. I would ask you also to consider the following observation, blatantly ad feminam though it may be. At one point Thomson asks: ‘Is it plausible to think that what has intrinsic goodness just is what a person (all people?) would value for its own sake if he or she were fully informed, free of neuroses, and assessing the matter in a cool hour?’ To which she responds: ‘No, unless we can show that people really would not love the nasty under this constraint.’ (‘On Some Ways,’ 108) This response appears to betray the fact that Thomson understands perfectly well what the proponents of intrinsic value take intrinsic value to be, and that she herself believes that some things have such value. For what else is ‘the nasty’ supposed to refer to here, if not to that which is intrinsically bad?

My thanks to Krister Bykvist, Howard Sobel, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft.