Stop Multiplying Intrinsic Value

People love to call things intrinsically valuable or disvaluable, without giving the label much thought. It’s a difficult habit to quit. Calling something instrumentally valuable/disvaluable seems to rob it of moral oomph — to not call something instrumentally valuable is to say it is “merely” instrumentally valuable.

This is a mistake. Few things are intrinsically valuable or disvaluable. And this is what we should want. There are lots of reasons why we should seek to minimize the number of intrinsically valuable/disvaluable things in our moral theories. This post is about why you should join me in thinking this, and quit the habit of rushing to label anything you dislike as “intrinsically disvaluable.”

Something is intrinsically valuable when it is valuable in and of itself. That is to say, it has value — it is worth promoting, it gives you reasons for action — independent of any of its consequences. The paradigmatic example here is extreme joy. The sensation of extreme joy is valuable in itself: the world is made better (value is added) simply by its obtaining. This is so even if someone’s being extremely happy causally leads to lots of bad things happening.

Instrumental value, on the other hand, is not like this. Something is instrumentally valuable when it leads to something valuable, but the thing itself needn’t be of any value.

Now, it may seem as though instrumentally valuable things are uninteresting, and it is the intrinsically valuable things that we should really focus on. But appearances can be deceiving. Money, for instance, is only instrumentally valuable: it is not as thought green paper is itself valuable. It’s just that that green paper then allows you to buy things which are actually valuable. Most of the things that we focus our moral attention on are in fact not the intrinsically valuable things themselves, but are often connected with the intrinsically valuable things.

Here’s an (I think uncontroversial) example of something that is “only” instrumentally disvaluable: the action of lighting another human being on fire. This is an absolutely horrible thing. But it is rather clearly “only” instrumentally disvaluable: this action is bad because it leads to intense suffering. And the existence of intense suffering is an intrinsically disvaluable thing. To see that the action of lighting someone on fire is not intrinsically disvaluable, simply imagine a scenario where the person who is lit on fire is neurologically different from the rest of us, such that his skin being on fire actually makes him extremely happy. When his skin is on fire, he feels the same feeling of joy that you and I would feel when we achieve some great feat, like climbing Mount Everest or getting published in a prestigious law journal.

Now, the very same action — getting matches, flicking the lighter, applying heat to the skin — no longer seems like it makes the world worse. Indeed, if I am aware that the man is this way, it seems I have just as much reason to do this action as I would to do any other actions that we’d normally consider good for friends to do (like encouraging you to work on climbing, giving you motivation to achieve your goals, etc.). In fact, if you imagine yourself in a society where everyone gets happy from applying having heat on their skin — where you are considered a nice person if you are willing to take time out of your day to apply fire to other people’s skin so that they are happy, much like how in our society you are considered nice if you give your partner constant massages — it would be bizarre if someone suggested to you “no, no, that bodily motion of turning on your lighter and applying it to flesh is adding disvalue to the world. You’d better stop doing it now!” Simply imagine an alien came down to Earth and said that about massages, simply because, on their planet, massages often causally lead to pain.

This little exercise shows that most of the things that we abhore and rightly denounce as wrong to do, we abhore because they are tightly connected to intrinsic disvalue. Applying fire to human skin often leads to a whole host of bad things. But it is not itself identical with disvalue. And this is evidenced by the fact that we can construct lots of causally-weird scenarios where we keep the act itself, and yet no disvalue obtains.

And this is all totally fine. I do not become a “defender of human skin-burning” just by pointing out that it is “only” instrumentally disvaluable. Instrumental disvalue is hugely important.

Of course, there is no inconsistency in just labelling lots of things as intrinsically disvaluable. You could insist, for instance, that the act of applying fire to skin is actually intrinsically disvaluable, and all my thought exercise shows is that this intrinsic disvalue gets outweighed by the intrinsic value of the positive experience, so that it is all-things-considered worth bringing about. Of course, on this approach, you won’t be able to account for the intuition that, in the case of someone who gets happy from it, you have just as much reason to light them on fire as you do to help others achieve success. But you can always just bite that bullet.

In this way, you can always insist that lots of things are just intrinsically bad or good. And it is perfectly logically consistent. But let me show you why you should not do this.

You should view labelling something as intrinsically valuable/disvaluable as costly. This is because every additional kind of intrinsic value in your moral theory is an additional theoretical posit. And, not only does this detract from various theoretical virtues, but this kind of “value proliferation” really comes back to bite you when you start doing metaethics.

When you try explaining why something is valuable or disvaluable, or why value obtains where it does, nice and parsimonious explanations run out the more variety there is in what you’ve posited as an instance of value. The more gerrymandered and inflated your value theory is, the more difficult it becomes to give a unifying explanation of what it is that grounds morality.

As a sort of analogy, imagine that in every instance of some physical event, physicists resorted to positing a different “fundamental force” that explained that event. The sheer number of different basic, fundamental forces in such a theory would make it nearly impossible to provide a unifying theory of everything. Ideally, you only resort to positing new, fundamental forces or entities when you absolutely have to. If you can explain a physical event in terms of the forces already present in your theory, you should do so.

The same is true when it comes to value. You don’t want to have various kinds of experiences, dispositions, and bodily motions all be bearers of different kinds of intrinsic value. Theories that only posit a few things as intrinsically valuable (say, well-being and virtue) and explain everything else as instrumentally connected to those things are preferable.

And this isn’t only because they are simpler and more parsimonious. It is because they make metaethics much easier. When we try to explain in virtue of what moral reasons arise, it is much easier to build successful explanations when the explanandum is unified in this way. For example, one popular way of providing a foundation for ethics is contractualism, where we imagine what rational agents behind a veil of ignorance would agree to. This approach tries to explain morality in terms of impartial prudence. Famously, this approach is very amenable to grounding utilitarianism, as it is rather plausible that agents would pick the rules that would maximize their expected well-being ex ante (which is just to maximize well-being for all). But one has to twist oneself into knots when applying contractualism to ground their theory if it has all sorts of random side-posits as intrinsically valuable. If I insist that the bodily motion of applying fire to skin is intrinsically disvaluable, I’ve got to try to provide some contractual explanation of the badness of that bodily motion … which is even harder than it sounds.

So, while it is tempting to label horrible things as intrinsically disvaluable, we should really try to limit our use of that label. Much like failing to eat healthy early on in life, this habit will come back to bite us as we progress along.