Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1352133
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2013-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

INTRINSIC VALUE

Analytic philosophy’s most famous account of intrinsic value is that offered in the Principia Ethica of G. E. Moore. Here Moore provides a method (albeit an extremely intuitive one) for correctly judging the “intrinsic value” of things and their degrees of such value: “It is necessary to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good; and, in order to decide upon the relative degrees of value of different things, we must similarly consider what comparative value seems to attach to the isolated value of each.”34

Moore deploys this “method of absolute isolation” to argue, against radical hedonism, that the mere conscious sensation of pleasure is neither the only value nor even the highest value 35 If we consider the conscious sensation of pleasure alone, isolated from consciousness of the activity in which that pleasure is expressed, and then compare the intuited value of the isolated pleasure to the value of the combined consciousness of pleasure and its associated activity (an organic whole that Moore calls “enjoyment”), we will readily recognize that the organic whole of enjoyment could easily be greater in value.36 For instance, we can see that the value of enjoying a fine poem is more than a mere pleasurable consciousness existing in its own right without any relation to a meaningful object or activity such as reading the poem. Relying on his method of absolute isolation, Moore claims, “By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.”37 Though appreciating Moore’s case against hedonism and sympathizing with his aesthetic and ethic ideals, I wish to challenge the method of absolute isolation as the proper way of defining or assessing intrinsic value.

This method, which Moore advocates to argue the objectivity of values, is paradoxically based on the psychology of subjective intuition and personal judgment. Moreover, its precise act of absolute isolation—of considering the value of something as “existing absolutely by itself”—seems psychologically, if not also logically, impossible to perform.38 The very idea of one’s judging the value of something as if it existed by itself alone clearly courts a performative contradiction, since that very act of judging or imagining or assessing implies a relationship of intentionality between the thinking subject and the object. A further problem is simply the arbitrariness of isolating the intrinsically valued thing from other things that help define its meaning and value. It seems perverse, for example, to value Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon in absolute isolation from all previous and consequent painting, because part of the meaning of any artwork is determined by its perceived relations to other works in its genre or its tradition. And how can we isolate Moore’s valued states involving consciousness of human intercourse from the multiplicity of real-world objects and relationships that define that intercourse and thus shape the attractive forms of

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