What would be the harm?

[bennyboy]

Could you explain what obvious fault there is with the notion that we can, at least sometimes, recognize value rather than create it.. that this value is an issue of some value making property of the thing in question?

The obvious fault is that you need a subjective agent who has feelings about things for the idea of value even to make sense. Do you think that a rock values the soil around it? Or that the sun values the Earth?

I'm looking for something more than "all value is subjective because I/subjectivists say so".

For any given thing of value, you could find some who either do not value it, or hold a negative value toward it. There are two positions:
1) The thing has no intrinsic value, and subjective agents imbue it with value by dubbing it so.
2) The thing is intrinsically valuable, and functional people will know that, and dysfunctional people will not know it.

My position is (1) and yours is (2). You'll have to explain by what metric we will judge judges-- who is functional and who is dysfunctional? I believe that there's no way for you to do this without a circular reference-- "Obviously, a suicidal person is dysfunctional and a non-suicidal person is functional." Why? "Because they recognize the intrinsic value in life" or whatever.

I said in the previous thread that your stance was religious. That didn't sit well with Jorg at the time, I should have known that would be the case since this is atheistforums.org. But the analogy is still there-- this "knowing without knowing" that a particular mode of circular thinking is right simply because someone is so immersed in it.


Maybe at this point, we should establish a definition of value (spare me the dictionary link, please, and make your own) which isn't dependent on people's feelings about things. Because my position is so obvious to me that it's hard to comprehend that any sensible person could begin to argue against it.