What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

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?

Why would that be a problem.  The mere presence of a subjective agent does not make some thing, itself, subjective.  Have you seriously considered the implications of this statement....if it were true.  

I'm in the presence of a subjective agent right now.....you.  Do you feel that I would be justified in disregarding everything you've said to me on account of that..or do you think that even though you;re a subjective agent, and even though i need you, for your thoughts...that some of them are true?  Specifically, those criticisms you've levied against notions of objectivity?

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.

I'm not worried about intrinsic value, at present.  I've been giving you examples of instrumental values that are objective in the sense that moral theorists discuss them so that you can see why the statement "all values are subjective" might not be a true statement as objectivity and subjectivity are discussed in moral theory.  A more careful (and aruably more accurate) statement may be "all value judgements are subjectively possessed"

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.

Sure, I do think that there's such a thing as intrinsic value, but you know..see above.  Additionally, I can only tell you that moral disagreement may not signify anything relevant, and explain why, and give examples of how that explanation plays out in practice..so many times. In the case of the fire extinguisher and value disagreement..it wasn;t actually a value disagreement between the two parties - though it seemed as much at first glance. Once supplied with the relevant empirical knowledge the value judgements were equivalent. Non natural realists propose exactly this relationship between empirical claims and moral judgement.

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.

Calling something religious is a lazy way to admit that you don;t have an argument. 

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.

You ask for a definition and then rule out a dictionary, lol.  Your position may be obvious to you..I get that, but..again....as moral theorists are discussing subjectivity and objectivity, the presence of a subjective agent is not enough to establish subjectivity.  That a subjective agent is making some claim is not enough to establish that the claim is subjective, either.

What they're looking for, is some mind independent fact referred to -by- that subjective agent.  So, for example..it is a fact that oxygen is valuable to anything that depends on oxygen, and that fire extinguishers are good-for putting out fires.  We are not imagining this, it's a true statement  (and, in this case, of natural properties). Well being, like health, can be conceptualized as just such a metric. It may not be the only metric for moral evaluation...it may be the wrong metric for moral evaluation (though..it's super difficult to assert this one)...and it has problems. The problem it doesn't have, though, is a problem of not being meaningfully objective.

What's clear is that, to you, anything that comes from a subjective agent is subjective and you treat this as tautologically true (though what that would mean if it were is kind of amusing, given your subjective agency)...but that's not at all what moral theorists are discussing with objectivity or subjectivity.