====================================================================== = Instrumental and intrinsic value = ====================================================================== Introduction ====================================================================== Instrumental and intrinsic value name a fundamental distinction in moral philosophy between valuing something as a means to an end and valuing something as an end in itself. Things are deemed to have instrumental value if they help one achieve a particular end. Intrinsic values, by contrast, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves. A tool or appliance, such as a hammer or washing machine, has instrumental value because it helps you pound in a nail or cleans your clothes. Happiness and pleasure are typically considered to have intrinsic value insofar as asking 'why' someone would want them makes little sense: they are desirable for their own sake irrespective of their possible instrumental value. Overview ====================================================================== The classic names 'instrumental' and 'intrinsic' were coined by sociologist Max Weber, who spent years studying good meanings people assigned to their actions and beliefs. Here are Weber's original definitions with a comment showing his doubt that conditionally efficient means can achieve unconditionally legitimate ends, followed by three modern definitions from the 'Oxford Handbook of Value Theory.' When people judge efficient means and legitimate ends at the same time, both can be considered as good. But when ends are judged separately from means, it may result in a conflict. What works may not be right; what is right may not work. Separating the criteria contaminates reasoning about the good. Philosopher John Dewey argued that separating criteria for good ends from those for good means necessarily contaminates recognition of efficient and legitimate patterns of behavior. Economist J. Fagg Foster explained why only instrumental value is capable of correlating good ends with good means. Philosopher Jacques Ellul argued that instrumental value has become completely contaminated by inhuman technological consequences, and must be subordinated to intrinsic supernatural value. Philosopher Anjan Chakravartty argued that instrumental value is only legitimate when it produces good scientific theories compatible with the intrinsic truth of mind-independent reality. The word "value is ambiguous, being both a verb and a noun and meaning both a criterion of judgment and a result of applying a criterion. To reduce ambiguity, throughout this article the noun "value" names a criterion of judgment but not an object judged valuable, which is named "valuation." The plural noun "values" identifies collections of valuations, without identifying the criterion applied. John Dewey ====================================================================== John Dewey thought that belief in intrinsic value was a mistake. Although the application of instrumental value is easily contaminated, it is the only means humans have to coordinate group behaviour efficiently and legitimately. Every social transaction has good or bad consequences depending on prevailing conditions, which may or may not be satisfied. Continuous reasoning adjusts institutions to keep them working on the right track as conditions change. Changing conditions demand changing judgments to maintain efficient and legitimate correlation of behavior. For Dewey, "restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values [valuations] and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life." "A culture which permits science to destroy traditional values [valuations] but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself." Dewey agreed with Weber that people talk as if they apply instrumental and intrinsic criteria. And he agreed with Weber's observation that intrinsic value is problematic because it ignores the relationship between context and consequences of beliefs and behaviors. Both men questioned how anything valued intrinsically "for its own sake" can have operationally efficient consequences. But Dewey rejected the common beliefâshared by Weberâthat supernatural intrinsic value is necessary to show humans what is permanently "right." He argued that both efficient and legitimate qualities must be discovered in daily life. Finding no evidence of "antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty, and goodness", Dewey argued that both efficient and legitimate 'goods' are discovered in the continuity of human experience. Philosophers label a "fixed reference point outside of conduct' a "natural kind," and presume it to have eternal existence knowable in itself without being experienced. Natural kinds are intrinsic valuations presumed to be "mind-independent" and "theory-independent." Dewey granted the existence of "reality" apart from human experience, but denied that it is structured as intrinsically real natural kinds. Instead, he saw reality as functional continuity of ways-of-acting rather than as interaction among pre-structured intrinsic kinds. Humans may intuit static kinds and qualities, but such private experience cannot warrant inferences or valuations about mind-independent reality. Reports or maps of perceptions or intuitions are never equivalent to territories mapped. People reason daily about what they ought to do and how they ought to do it. Inductively, they discover sequences of efficient means that achieve consequences. Once an end is reachedâa problem solvedâreasoning turns to new conditions of means-end relations. Valuations which ignore conditions that determine consequences cannot coordinate behavior to solve real problems. They contaminate rationality. In brief, Dewey rejected the traditional belief that judging things good-in-themselves, apart from existing means-end relations, can be rational. The sole rational criterion is instrumental value. Each valuation is conditional but, cumulatively, all are developmentalâand therefore socially legitimate solutions of problems. Competent instrumental valuations treat the "function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, 'provided' these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the specific problems evoking the operations â¦"; J. Fagg Foster ====================================================================== John Fagg Foster made John Dewey's rejection of intrinsic value more operational by showing that its competent use rejects the legitimacy of utilitarian endsâsatisfaction of whatever ends individuals adopt. It requires recognizing developmental sequences of means and ends. Utilitarians hold that individual wants cannot be rationally justified. They are intrinsically worthy subjective valuations and cannot be judged instrumentally. This belief supports philosophers who hold that facts ("what is") can serve as instrumental means for achieving ends, but cannot authorize ends ("what ought to be"). This fact-value distinction creates what philosophers label the is-ought problem: wants are intrinsically fact-free, good in themselves, while efficient tools are valuation-free, usable for good or bad ends. In modern North American culture, this utilitarian belief supports the Libertarian assertion that every individual's intrinsic right to satisfy wants makes it illegitimate for anyoneâbut especially governmentsâto tell people what they ought to do. Foster found the is-ought problem a useful place to attack the irrational separation of good means from good ends. He argued that want-satisfaction ("what ought to be") cannot serve as an intrinsic moral compass because wants are themselves consequences of transient conditions. Since wants are shaped by social conditions, they must be judged instrumentally. They arise in problematic situations when habitual patterns of behavior fail to maintain instrumental correlations. Foster supported with homely examples his thesis that problematic situations--"what is"--contain the means for judging legitimate ends: "what ought to be." Rational efficient means achieve rational developmental ends. Consider the problem all infants face learning to walk. They spontaneously recognize that walking is more efficient than crawlingâan instrumental valuation of a desirable end. They learn to walk by repeatedly moving and balancing, judging the efficiency with which these means achieve their instrumental goal. When they master this new way-of-acting, they experience great satisfaction, but satisfaction is never their end-in-view. To guard against contamination of instrumental value by judging means and ends independently, Foster revised his definition to embrace both. ;Instrumental value Instrumental value is the criterion of judgment which seeks instrumentally-efficient means that "work" to achieve developmentally-continuous ends. This definition stresses the condition that instrumental success is never short term; it must not lead down a dead-end street. The same point is made by the currently popular concern for sustainabilityâa synonym for instrumental value. Dewey's and Foster's argument that there is no intrinsic alternative to instrumental value continues to be ignored rather than refuted. Scholars continue to accept the possibility and necessity of knowing "what ought to be" independently of transient conditions that determine actual consequences of every action. Jacques Ellul and Anjan Chakravartty were prominent exponents of the truth and reality of intrinsic value as constraint on relativistic instrumental value. Jacques Ellul ====================================================================== Jacques Ellul made scholarly contributions to many fields, but his American reputation grew out of his criticism of the autonomous authority of instrumental value, the criterion that Dewey and Foster found to be the core of human rationality. And he specifically criticized the valuations central to Dewey's and Foster's thesis: evolving instrumental technology. His principal work, published in 1954, bore the French title 'La technique.' It addressed the problem Dewey addressed in 1929: a culture in which the authority of evolving technology destroys traditional valuations without creating legitimate new ones. Both men agreed that conditionally efficient valuationsâ"what is"âbecome irrational when viewed as unconditionally efficient in themselvesâ"what ought to be." But while Dewey argued that contaminated instrumental valuations can be self-correcting, Ellul concluded that technology had become intrinsically destructive. The only escape from this evil is to restore authority to unconditional sacred valuations: 'La technique' was published in English in 1964 with the title 'The Technological Society', and quickly entered ongoing disputes in the United States over the responsibility of instrumental value for destructive social consequences. The translator of 'Technological Society' summarized Ellul's thesis: Ellul opened 'The Technological Society' by asserting that instrumental efficiency is no longer a conditional criterion. It has become autonomous and absolute. He blamed instrumental valuations for destroying intrinsic meanings of human life. "Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature. Life in such an environment has no meaning. Weber had labeled the discrediting of intrinsic valuations "disenchantment;" Ellul came to label it "terrorism." He dated its domination to the 1800s, when centuries-old handicraft techniques were massively eliminated by inhuman industry. Ellul's core accusation was that instrumental efficiency had become absoluteâa good-in-itself. It wraps societies in a new technological milieu with six intrinsically inhuman characteristics: Philosophers Tiles and Oberdiek found Ellul's characterization of instrumental value inaccurate. They criticized him for anthropomorphizing and demonizing instrumental value. They countered by examining the moral reasoning of scientists whose work led to nuclear weapons. Those scientists demonstrated the capacity of instrumental judgments to provide them with a moral compass to judge nuclear technology. They were morally responsible without intrinsic rules. Tiles's and Oberdiek's conclusion coincided with that of Dewey and Foster: instrumental value, when competently applied, is self-correcting and provides humans with a developmental moral compass. Anjan Chakravartty ====================================================================== Anjan Chakravartty came indirectly to question the autonomous authority of instrumental value. He viewed it as a foil for the currently dominant philosophical school labeled "scientific realism," with which he identifies. In 2007, he published a work defending the ultimate authority of intrinsic valuations to which realists are committed. He linked the pragmatic instrumental criterion to discredited anti-realist empiricist schools including logical positivism and instrumentalism Chakravartty began his study with rough characterizations of realist and anti-realist valuations of theories. Anti-realists believe "that theories are merely instruments for predicting observable phenomena or systematizing observation reports." They assert that theories can never report or prescribe truth or reality "in itself." By contrast, scientific realists believe that theories can "correctly describe both observable and unobservable parts of the world." Well-confirmed theories--"what ought to be" as the end of reasoningâare more than tools. They are maps of intrinsic properties of an unobservable and unconditional territory--"what is" as natural-but-metaphysical real kinds. Chakravartty treated criteria of judgment as ungrounded opinion, but admitted that realists apply the instrumental criterion to judge theories that "work." He restricted that criterion's scope, claiming that every instrumental judgment is inductive, heuristic, accidental. Later experience might confirm a singular judgment only if it proves to have universal validity, meaning it possesses "detection properties" of natural kinds. This inference is his fundamental ground for believing in intrinsic value. He committed modern realists to three metaphysical valuations or intrinsic kinds of knowledge of truth. Competent realists affirm that natural kinds 1) exist in a mind-independent territory possessing 2) meaningful and 3) mappable intrinsic properties. He labeled these intrinsic valuations semirealist, meaning they are currently the most accurate theoretical descriptions of mind-independent natural kinds. He found these carefully qualified statements necessary to replace earlier realist claims of intrinsic reality discredited by advancing instrumental valuations. Science has destroyed for many people the supernatural intrinsic value embraced by Weber and Ellul. But Chakravartty defended intrinsic valuations as necessary elements of all scienceâbelief in unobservable continuities. He advanced the thesis of semirealism, according to which well-tested theories are good maps of natural kinds, as confirmed by their instrumental success. Their predictive success means they conform to mind-independent, unconditional reality. Chakravartty argued that these semirealist valuations legitimize scientific theorizing about pragmatic kinds. The fact that theoretical kinds are frequently replaced does not mean that mind-independent reality is changing, but simply that theoretical maps are approximating intrinsic reality. In sum, Chakravartty argued that contingent instrumental valuations are warranted only as they approximate unchanging intrinsic valuations. Scholars continue to perfect their explanations of intrinsic value, as they deny the developmental continuity of applications of instrumental value. Realist intrinsic value as proposed by Chakravartty, is widely endorsed in modern scientific circles, while the supernatural intrinsic value endorsed by Weber and Ellul maintains its popularity throughout the world. Doubters about the reality of instrumental and intrinsic value are few. See also ====================================================================== * Fact-value distinction * Instrumentalism * Instrumental and value rationality * Instrumental and value-rational action * Natural kind * Value (ethics) * Value theory License ========= All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_intrinsic_value .