So not only is the quantification of value is subjective (“water is worth so much to me at this point”) but also the meaning of the word ‘value’ itself? You’re sounding like Iambiguous.
What are we talking about if each of us has our own meaning for the word ‘value’? What’s the point of talking?
In a universe without people, there are no words and no language. There are no objective or subjective definitions. Yet, there is the unnamed ‘stuff’ which is the basis for life and subsequent thought. It comes before the thoughts and evaluations. Hence it’s value as a necessary material for what follows. In hindsight : “We needed that.”
This is an interesting pattern in your brain James …
Basically, it’s another way of saying “affectance”
I’ll pull this out a bit and make the claim that we don’t need bad for there to be good
Value is very simple:
Whatever we want or instant painless poof
And we cease to exist forever…
That’s the ideal of morality, like a platonic form
Anyone can agree that if they don’t find value, ergo impossible, then poof is rational, valuable
Everyone is happy then.
It satisfies all parties.
So there’s a meta solution that satisfies everyone, and there is no contrasting bad to make it obviously good for everyone.
That’s not how reality is thus far , but were it like that, there would only be value without anti value.
Allowing someone to poof on command is making their subjective self valuable… It’s an aspect of adding value to everyone , even though the resultant suicide seems to contradict that
That is why we have dictionaries and philosophers (who on off occasion read them).
You are conflating the hypothesis.
We are not saying that WE are IN the universe of which we are hypothesizing. We (actually I) are saying that IF such a universe existed, the way we would describe it from our universe would be …
And assuming that the hypothesized universe had absolutely no affect upon us in our universe such as to gain possible value for us, the term “value” would be irrelevant and to us, that universe would not even exist as we would not exist to it either. There is nothing that could ever been done with it (as per stipulation) and the concept of “value” is defined as a measure of relevance or importance TO someone. If there is no someone, there can be no relevance nor value.
For something to exist, it must have potential to affect (if not affect itself) upon something else. And then it only exists TO that something else. Similar with “value”.
If there were intrinsic value in ‘stuff’…
(And I borrow ‘stuff’ because it’s true, without a mind to recognise ‘stuff’ that way, there are no entities, no distinguished objects.)
…then what would the value of water in the desert be? Would it be a value on top of this intrinsic value, would it be another kind of value?
In short, I think it would be something else.
Intrinsic value would be a quality which we assign to ‘stuff’ or to recognised, identified, distinguished objects, which is derived from our observation of what? On what would it be based? On what measurable or recognisable quality about ‘stuff’ would it be based on?
Intrinsic value is only attributed to something and not derived from an inherent quality or said thing.
Let’s say that value is not an inherent quality of an object. Is it reasonable to attribute zero value to the object?
The attributed intrinsic value is separate from how some specific group or person might value it for some specific use at the moment, of course.
Or is all value just based on present/future usefulness?
Were your parents useful for your current existence? If yes, then they must have been useful before you were able to think about their usefulness. They must have been useful just prior to your conception.
If no, then what?
“Choosing to go to the gym in order to strengthen yourself” is an action that is in itself of neutral value.
To determine the value of an actor’s action, in relation to his own being, you need to relate it to his other actions (what is implied here is that beings perform multiple actions at the same time.) If his action is fighting with other actions he is performing, which means it is self-destructive, then it is bad; if it is not, then it is good.
In other words, it comes down to whether your instinct to “go to the gym to strengthen yourself” is repressing other instincts or not.
Repression quite simply means that you are stepping outside of your boundaries. It means that you are paying too much attention to one instinct and too little attention to other instincts.
That’s pretty much it. The rest consists in understanding the phenomenon of repression.
Repression is counter-active (or re-active.) It is an instinctive action that blocks other instinctive actions. It is not pro-rest. In-action is pro-rest. Re-action is anti-doing.
I attribute value to my parents.
And I attribute value to what makes me possible and so forth and things I like and appreciate.
But it’s me now who is looking back.
Though, isn’t your argument that my parents and everything else is being intrinsically valuable no matter what?
Mary Sue must have been good before I thought of her being a good girl because how else could I think of her being a good girl.
If she wasn’t being good before I thought of her then how could I think of her being a good…
Say what?
I think about something in a certain way - That doesn’t actually make it so just because I think of it in a certain way. Not now and not in the past.
I think we agree on that.
Mary Sue is not intrinsically evil or good.
I don’t subscribe to the liberal atheists who think good and bad can be derived universally without god, just so.
Either you listen to your god or you find your own good, as an individual or as a group and you take it from there.
This good will be based on the inherent qualities of the people involved and not be arbitrary.
No. The concept of value does not apply. It would like saying “how big is yellow?” The size of yellow is not zero because the concept of size does not apply at all.
When I say that a lion is better than a pig, this has nothing to do with lions being useful to me and everything to do with what lions are. Indeed, pigs are more useful to me.
To determine value, intelligence is required. Senses are not enough. In the same way that to determine what exists when it is not sensed requires intelligence.
People distrust indirect observation. Whatever cannot be directly observed does not exist.
To say that there is no objective value is fundamentally no different from saying that reality does not exist when we don’t sense it.
What we have here is people repressing the faculty of determining objective value of beings.
Lyssa is comparing it to, but really confusing it with, pseudo-objectivity which is subjectivity (instrumentalism) presented as objectivity.
As if my claim that lions are better than pigs is meant to please me in some sort of way.
Then you have a huge problem because if you value B and you value B and you don’t value C, you have no way to select between A, B and C unless you can quantify it in some way. You are the donkey, equidistant between two bales of hay, who starves because he can’t decide which one to go to. Left or right? Red or blue? I can’t decide. A real donkey recognizes that starvation is worse than making either choice. Avoiding starvation has a greater value than the value of moving to a particular bale.
Better in general. There is no “for what” because I am not speaking of instrumental value. (And I am not denying the existence of instrumental values. Not every value is objective value.)
What you’ve been trying to do in this thread is you’ve been trying to repress the instinct to determine objective value by arguing that the symbol “value” popularly refers to instrumental value and no other type of value.
You are focusing too much on symbols that represent actions and too little on actual actions.
Dictionaries do not cover every possible action that exists in the world. Thus, just because dictionaries do not speak of objective value does not mean there is no objective value.