| | Joseph,
Hey, it was Steven Segal's birthday today, in case you were wondering. I hope he didn't find out that you dumped him on his birthday. To be honest, Steven and I never really were an item in the first place. Any interaction that we may have had would have been purely platonic (or is it, plutonic?). Two reasons for this are that I'm straight and taken. But I digress.
Can you name a single object on the earth that has intrinsic value? No. But "Earth First" folks can (they'll say that nature has intrinsic value -- and that we should be ashamed about the "footprint" that we've left on the "pure and good" planet).
Doesn't saying that an abstract concept has instrinsic value mean that we have already decided what has value before deciding what value is?
Yep.
Is gold of objective value? What about air?
No. Yes. Gold isn't of value to everyone (pre-economic bands and tribes), but air is.
Don't objective and intrinsic kind of run together?
No, though they might appear to be so. Both of them appear to be values that are the same for all, the objective ones because of our nature, the intrinsic ones because of "their" nature. But "intrinsic value" is what Rand called a stolen concept (or floating abstraction), wherein one uses terms that one is not even epistemologically-justified in using, but merely being epistemologically-parasitic on the work that others have done in gaining knowledge of what can be known.
An analogy of this behavior would be utilizing a skyscraper that somebody else built, in order to push someone to their doom. Trying to capitalize on someone else's production, without offering anything except the disintegration of value. That's what "intrinsic valuers" do, when allowed.
Objectivism seems to place self before virtue. When I say what about the self, I imagine that you would tell me happiness for one's self. Proper values will bring happiness, correct?
So happiness would not exist without both proper values and self.
Happiness would not exist without values, and neither would virtues (i.e., habitual actions aimed at values). Life, too, would not exist without values -- they are inextricably interwoven. You can place self above virtue -- in cases where learned virtues would fail to capture the values that they were always aimed at, but you cannot (without contradiction) place self above value.
(The achievement of) Proper values bring happiness, and happiness could not exist without proper values and self.
I put virtue above self. I used to do that, too (back when I was a Christian Socialist) -- it's an intrinsic value kind of thing. It's not proper to do that, though (virtue is NOT its own reward).
I am just now realizing that most people don't believe that things have universal value. Happiness has universal value.
If someone asked me why we should act so, I would say that virtue would never fail to make us happy.
Virtues can fail in this regard (if the context changes too much and they lose their efficacy), values can't.
I think that your definition of self as an ultimate value includes acting virtuosly, and my definition of virtue as an ultimate value includes the best choices for one's self. The end result is the same.
Not necessarily. If I think really hard, I may be able to come up with hypothetical situations where the end result actually diverges ...
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 4/11, 5:58pm)
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