Designed for Good by Kevin J. Brown

Author:Kevin J. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian ethics; Christian virtue; Christian philosophy; classical virtue ethics
ISBN: 9781683070405
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2016-12-29T14:25:12+00:00

What Is Valuable? From Instrumentalist to Essential

The Price of “Dignity”

It was Aristotle who long ago made a distinction between “use value” and “exchange value.” For most of us, use value is a familiar idea. There are certain goods that we desire for their own sake: friendship, education, a peaceful and comfortable family life, and above all, the virtues. To attain these, there are certain external goods that are necessary to have in our possession. For example, having hot water and heat in our homes, or chairs to sit on, or a car to drive, provides a measure of practicality that is central to so much of what we do. This is use value.

Exchange value is different. More often than not, exchanging something requires us to standardize various goods into a common currency. So, for example, if we were to ask how many chairs one car would be worth, we would first have to designate a way to parse out the worth of each good in order to answer. Exchange involves comparison, but this can be complicated when we are comparing many different goods. The solution? Find a common denominator. In other words, we can simplify the complexity of diverse goods by incorporating some external unit of measurement. This is our modern day notion of money. It may be unclear how many chairs a car would be worth, but we can more accurately compare the two if we first determine how much money a chair and a car are each worth. In other words, money serves to reconcile the difference in value between chairs, cars, and a variety of other goods and services.

But for Aristotle, the shift from use value to exchange value was a problem. Why? Can the full value of all goods be captured in a standardized unit of currency? If we are talking about chairs and cars, the answer may be yes. But if we are talking about more complex goods, like reading a book to a child, there is reason for skepticism. In other words, not all goods are instrumental. By “instrumental,” I mean a place or thing that serves as some kind of a means to an end. For example, gasoline is instrumental for a car to function correctly. Moreover, if something is purely instrumental, then its value is bound up in its degree of usefulness. The more useful something is, the more valuable it is. My VCR used to be instrumental for playing VHS movies, but now it is not (since VHS movies are obsolete). Thus the value of the VCR is effectively zero.

But can value be relegated to a good’s usefulness alone? If there is an essence to our reality, the answer is no. If some things are intrinsically valuable, then merely instrumental language is awkward at best, and corrosive and degrading at worst. Such language might be appropriate for goods we use to achieve specific ends, but not for what philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “higher goods.”[2] Higher goods are persons, places, and things that are not—and cannot be—valued for their usefulness alone.

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