The Ancient Chimera of Universal, Absolute, and Objective Value

Economics Political Theory
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However, nobody can know with certainty that they would not stand to psychically gain at some point in the future if they continued to live. In this sense, life is still objectively valuable because it still provides the opportunity for psychic gain down the line.

Well, I (as an atheist) would say that their disposal of their own life for a higher end is ill-founded, because, again, we cannot measure the psychic gain that they could potentially obtain had they continued to live. I would even argue that the devotion of one’s life to a higher being is probably a rather inefficient and ineffective method of obtaining satisfaction. This is based on the assumption that a higher being does not exist, of course, and I don’t want this to devolve into a debate about religion, so we should table this scenario for the time being.

Well, the point is not that every actor does acknowledge the intrinsic value of life, but that they should, because life is the only method by which he can continue to fulfill as many of his desired ends as possible. In this way, objective ethics does not preclude actors from achieving whatever personal ends they may have that are not detrimental to their life (the end in itself and ultimate standard of value).

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When I said ‘higher’ end I did not mean specifically a spiritual or religious purpose, but any end which the individual holds as more valuable than his own life. As an atheist, I know that after I die I won’t care one bit about my loved ones, my family or even my character when I was alive, yet, while I’m alive, I could reasonably make the choice to die for the sake of my loved ones, family or character. This would be a perfectly rational (though admittedly high time-preference!) action given my preferences.

As for your final paragraph, you seem to be applying some utilitarian calculus in order to determine whether their ‘net’ utility by satisfying ends is maximized. You are assuming that it is ones duty to fulfill as many desired ends as possible and thus maximize utility.

Perhaps when you use the word ‘should’ you intend the non-normative ‘its the best means towards obtaining your end’ sense of the term. If this is the case, your argument is probably true for most people. It is in most people’s best interest (they can fulfill their subjective ends) to stay alive. There are people for whom this cannot be said to be true with confidence. Regardless, you are equivocating between the normative and non-normative use of the word ‘should’ and the usage of the word that makes any sense within the context you use it cannot provide a basis for objective or universal ethics.

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The point I am making is that such a choice cannot be rational* (regardless of the final decision made when emotions, etc., are taken into account), because there is simply no way to know whether your immediate psychic loss will or will not be offset by psychic gain in the future.

  • To use the definition of rational egoism, anyways, which is that a rational action is one that maximizes one’s self-interest.

Well, I can see how my phrasing could connote that, but it’s not what I intended. I rather meant that, as life goes on, there are more opportunities for psychic gain (as well as loss, of course) around each turn. One could achieve more ends, one could achieve an end that takes more time, one could discover new ends that they wish to obtain, etc. The point is that a longer period of time provides more opportunities for psychic gain, not necessarily that the number of ends achieved is proportionally related to net psychic gain.

Life is the only way to achieve any end. It is in this sense that it has objective value. For as long as an actor works to sustain himself, his life is prolonged and he therefore is provided with more opportunities for psychic gain which may or may not be greater than any gains previously realized. Since life is necessary for any value to exist (as life is necessary for any ends to exist), the good is that which is directed toward self-sustaining, life-providing action. The evil is that which is directed toward self-destruction, because it is an act of abolishing ends and values.

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Sure it can. Rational egoism asserts that rational action is one that maximizes one’s self-interest conditional on the knowledge they have. If I am unaware of an opportunity that is better than my known choices, I am not irrational for choosing the best possibility out of my known choices. One doesn’t need perfect information to be rational.

Sure, yet each individual discounts future psychic gain at an unknown rate. There is no possible way given uncertainty to maximize psychic gain across time. A suicidal man might be aware that if he just continues living he might experience happiness, perhaps enough happiness for the future self to offset the dis-utility of his previous depression (after accounting for hindsight bias, etc). If he commits suicide, then he has weighed the elimination of present dis-utility as more important than the possibility of future happiness.

I disagree with your analysis. Firstly, life is necessary for any valuation to exist. This is an important distinction because you imply that life ‘creates value’, when it does nothing of the sort (outside of the individuals head). Life creates the conditions necessary for a valuation to be made regarding means and ends, but that is different from creating ‘value’, the maximization of which is ‘good’. Interpreting death as ‘abolishing ends and values’ is an interesting turn of phrase, but more accurately it ends that which conceives and is motivated by ends and values. I think value in this context is loaded as it is so often used in and outside ethics as ‘something inherently good to be maximized’ where in praxeology it is ‘what an individual maximizes’.

I think a more accurate rendition of your final statement is “the reasonable is that which is directed toward self-sustaining, life-providing action. The irrational is that which is directed toward self-destruction, because it is an act contrary to the stated ends of the individual (unless it isn’t).”

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I agree, but whereas in other circumstances, a psychic loss in the present could be “made up for” in the future, death is game over. You have no way to “recuperate” if your decision was made in error. Therefore, we can conclude that it is incredibly unlikely that death will maximize one’s self-interest.

Conceded. But then in this case, a rational man could still commit suicide out of regard for his own life (if that makes sense). I’ll have to try to flesh this out more later.

Every action intended to be self-sustaining implies that the actor finds himself worth sustaining (i.e., values his life). If an actor is rational (or “reasonable”), all of his actions will be directed toward self-sustenance. Since all of his actions are thus directed, in some part or another, by the valuation of his life, his life can properly be said to be his ultimate value, or an end in itself.

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And to conflate objective in the ontological sense with objective in the epistemic sense is also a fallacy.

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Thank you Jon for being reasonable.

Remove the quote Lilburne.

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Not if your end is to huddle up to 72 virgins in heaven.

Z.

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If it were merely a difference in degree, then moral sensations would be categorically of higher or lower intensity than other sensations, which clearly isn’t the case. The question of whether there’s a difference in kind comes down to a theory of perception, which is a psychological question that seems not to be germane to this discussion.

Purely on impression, though, I would say “yes” - at least in that I can distinguish the two types of sensations in my conscious awareness. Or did you mean something different by “varies…in kind”?

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Great post, Lilburne. Too bad I was sleeping when all action was happening. Making up for lost time:

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Zefreak, could you elaborate on this? (What does reductionism have to do with it?)

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“Don’t kill me.” The truth value is…? The truth conditions are…? You may object that a command is not a statement, but language isn’t that straightforward. How do we know that moral statements aren’t the same as commands, or attempts at commanding even when a command wouldn’t make sense?

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What would be an example of the word objective used in the ontological sense, then in the epistemic sense?

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I won’t presume people need a code of values, but the purpose a code of values can serve is “taking short-term pain for long-term gain.” In other words, it helps one maintain a lower time preference (assuming that is something said person desires to have).

Mises, in EP: “We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”

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Not all his actions. For example, earlier you wrote:

First of all, “spending waking moments with a loved one” certainly needn’t be conducive to my continued existence (let’s be clear that here you mean continued survival - if not, please specify).

Second, if it were anything it would be the reverse: I value my continued existence because I perceive it to be a requirement for my continued “spending [of] waking moments.”

Third, most likely the question of whether I value my continued survival is not even in my mind when I am “spending waking moments with a loved one.” If the verb to value X is to mean something other than “to - at this moment - consciously perceive X as conducive to my happiness,” please specify. Otherwise, what you’re saying doesn’t seem to hold.

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Summing up the thread, it’s almost a cliche that debate on this matter can quickly become convoluted, but it needn’t be. I’m going to repeat the Mises quote above because it is deeply clarifying:

“We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.” (Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics)

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To zefreak, Rand never fully asserted Life is the ultimate end for man as a moral creature. In fact, Rand many times throughout her writings pointed out that the act of avoiding death does not ensure life. That is to mean that a man’s measure of value defines what Life is. Life can be merely biological functioning, but when considering how we as humans live then it’s clear that we don’t measure the mere beating of our hearts or the squeezing of our glands as Life. Instead, we as humans find other things to attach to the meaning of Life: value or those artifacts that are expressions of it (actions, objects, emotions).

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I addressed spiritual/religious ends elsewhere.

Maybe it’s possible to not need a code of values (debatable), but the fact remains that everyone has one. Consequently, we need to ask why this is, and whether an objective code of values is indeed possible.

And yet, that response of mine was a reply to this:

Which seemingly asserts that men need a code of values for the purposes of trade and cooperation, but this is circular reasoning, because it is impossible to value trade and cooperation in the first place without such a code.

This, then, is the difference between a rational actor and an irrational actor.

It does not increase one’s survivability or length of life, agreed. Neither does it harm it, however, and it enhances the enjoyment one receives from life.

This is where I disagree. One enjoys “spending waking moments with a loved one” because it increases the quality or enjoyment of one’s continued existence. It’s an enjoyable activity precisely because we are capable of realizing our own mortality, that our time is limited, that further opportunities for such in the future may be diminished or eliminated, etc. If we were to imagine an immortal and invincible species, it would have no emotions, because pleasure and pain as sensations only developed as a reaction to what was beneficial or harmful to an organism. Similarly, it would have no reason to act because nothing would be to its ultimate benefit or detriment. We value and we act precisely because we value our life as an end in itself.

“Value” implies the question: “valuable for what?” If you say, “valuable for the purposes of my happiness,” “happiness” is a meaningless concept without reference to a living being. Consequently, in order for you to find your happiness a worthy end, you have to first find your continued survival (well, at least until to the point of obtaining said happiness) to be a worthy end.

And yet this sidesteps the issue entirely, for we are not talking about value-free economics, but rather ethics, in which we attempt to determine what “good” is.

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“We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”

That’s quibbling. Diversion. Evasion. It’s akin to asking what came first - the chicken or the egg?

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We experience life at a very high level of abstraction, working at the symbolic rather than functional level. When we perceive a sunset, there are loads of external symbols that are recalled to varying degrees, depending on the individual and the associations built up around the symbol ‘sunset’. These associations may make the sunset more ‘spiritual’ or ‘magical’, but to cut through the excess baggage and clarify the concept ‘sunset’ as a strictly physical phenomenon is the goal of the reductionist.

Similarly, the concept ‘value’ is entangled within so many associations that are built up within the years, that it has become nearly worthless for communicating ideas. You provide the definition “to - at this moment - consciously perceive X as conducive to my happiness”. I do not dispute this definition. Perhaps initially our great ancestors had no concept as value except in the way you define it, but over the years, as similar objects were valued for similar reasons (water, shelter, group of people for cooperation), the concept developed an amount of conceptual baggage such that it became ‘any object or quality desirable as a means or as an end in itself’.

We can see the above in action with gold, and how many hard money cranks (distinguishing from mere hard money proponents, who like it for its stable supply) have, because it was historically valued as a means of exchange, began to see it as valuable in and of itself.

Notice how value as verb is reducible to individual preference. Value as noun, however, is not. The associations built up and eventually overshadowed the original meaning of the word, so that discussion re: value has became complicated and frustrating for all involved.

On to your question. By ‘similar in kind’ I mean that, because all statements of value are reducible to preference, from valuing a laptop and not wanting it to break to valuing human life and not wanting it to expire, then our physical and emotional responses are (unless I’m mistaken, but I don’t believe so) similar responses. The difference being that most people’s preferences regarding typical moral concerns (life, kindness, liberty, incest) are embedded to a higher degree within their worldview, and so the ‘moral sentiment’ is usually of a correspondingly greater degree.

I would not be too confident in personal experience of moral sentiment and proclaiming ‘ah! I can differentiate the two’. It is difficult to separate our actual response from the associations that we have developed around the object of our sentiment. In my own introspection, I cannot differentiate on feeling alone between the discomfort of failing a class or losing something highly valued and that of moral discomfort. It is only when I turn to the object of my sentiment that I can differentiate it as moral or not.

Atheism and Ancap
So?
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The “why” is that it helps one have a lower time preference, just like a “code” of personal finance does (Rule 1: Pay off your credit card in full every month, etc.). I think “objective” in the context of value is an incoherent notion, but that of course depends on how exactly it’s defined.

How is it impossible? I need no code of conduct simply to have the knowledge that I’m not strong enough to beat up Ug and take his stuff, to know that he’s offering to trade me a club for my clump of bananas, and to know that I want the club more than the bananas.

All right, so you’re talking about the “enjoyment one receives from life.” But below you seem to keep switching between this and just “continued survival.” I didn’t find any definite equivocations, but it’s a little confusing.

You start off talking about life enjoyment, but the mortality example seems to be about survival, then the last sentence seems to be about enjoyment again. Which is it?

Also, saying “it is owing to our mortality that we evolved our habit of valuing things” doesn’t imply that a man now living only values X because he knows he is going to die.

“Meaningless…without reference to a living being” for us as we discuss someone’s valuing of something, but not for the valuer. The valuer need not be consciously aware of his own life, mortality, etc. in that moment when he is valuing something. Although he may have evolved such a propensity to value because he is mortal, that doesn’t mean he is thinking of his mortality at that moment (and anyway, you’re apparently not talking about survival).

Back to “survival” now? And again, the question of whether I value my survival need not enter my mind at any given moment. Are you constantly thinking about your own survival and how long you have left? I’m certainly not. And what if you were granted immortality starting now (but your loved one remained mortal)?

But that’s exactly the answer: “good” is just a word we attach to some thing or state of affairs we originally desired. To try to look for the concept of objective “good” in ethics is no less of a tail-chasing venture than Marxists looking for objective “good” in the pricing of labor.

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Ah, in that sense then I agree.

Right, it takes on a multifaceted meaning with all sorts of baggage that becomes very hard to sort out because our language customarily conflates it all into one word. Same with all moral language: ought, justification, duty, etc. Then someone tacks on the word “objective” and people don’t want to deny “objective reality” so they go for it. At least, it seems that many people go that route (not implying anyone on here arrived at objective ethics that way, but that that’s probably a factor in the general population).

That’s a great insight. Language is full of such anomalies. By sticking to the verb form and avoiding noun form we might have a better chance of averting misunderstanding.

Going off topic a bit, the discomfort you feel in both cases is of course physical. You feel an acerbic feeling in your stomach, a shearing pain in your spine, a subtle but vile twinge in your chest, a tightness in your throat - these are some of the physical sensations of negative emotions. And I’d agree, there may be no qualitative difference other than the patterns associated with the various “moral” senses being perceived in different parts of the body in different ways (people often report feeling empathy - where else? - near their heart).

Well yes, me too. It’s just that I can generally tell that the feeling of empathy is not the same as, say, the feeling of accidentally dropping a $50 bill down a storm drain or something like that. But if you mean, can I tell the difference between my seeing someone drop a 50 down a storm drain and my doing it myself, then maybe not - at least not in that moment if I am really trained on that person. Or even if I’m watching the same thing happen in a movie. The intensity of seeing someone drop it will be less than if I had dropped it myself only insofar as I am not fully empathizing with the other person.

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What makes a lower time preference desirable? You might answer that all we know is that some men wish for a lower time preference. While perhaps correct praxeologically, this says nothing about why every man alive adheres to some sort of moral code.

You need no code of conduct, but you do need a code of values. It implies that you value some things over others. Obviously, this is axiomatically true, but this is why zefreak’s answer is circular reasoning. Men “value some things over others” for the purposes of trade and cooperation, which they value more than other things.

Fair enough. To use Ayn Rand’s definition, “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” If we’re talking about a loved one, that person is loved because of his value to the actor. Happiness is obtainable both from self-sustaining action and from those corollary values, such as love, pride, etc. This is a bit further into Objectivism than I wanted to discuss, however, because we’d first need to agree that objective ethics are possible.

They are fundamentally related. Things can only be “for” or “against” us as mortal beings. Pleasure and pain are the most basic, automatic expressions of this. Emotions are higher-level expressions that are based on the values that we hold.

He doesn’t need to be consciously aware, but if he holds his life as his standard of value, that which ex-ante furthers his life will be good (valuable), while that which ex-ante inhibits it will be evil.

I was entertaining similar thought exercises when I first brought up the mortality issue. Since we as a species are, shall we say, genetically conditioned toward mortality, we have automatic mechanisms in place which warn us of danger to our life. Even if a man or mankind were granted immortality, he would still have values, although I’m not sure what code of values would then be appropriate.

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”)-men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash. If “desire” is the ethical standard, then one man’s desire to produce and another man’s desire to rob him have equal ethical validity; one man’s desire to be free and another man’s desire to enslave him have equal ethical validity; one man’s desire to be loved and admired for his virtues and another man’s desire for undeserved love and unearned admiration have equal ethical validity. And if the frustration of any desire constitutes a sacrifice, then a man who owns an automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or “aspires to” an automobile which the owner refuses to give him—and these two “sacrifices” have equal ethical status. If so, then man’s only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others to any desire of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man’s only ethical alternative is to be a sadist or a masochist.

(From The Objectivist Ethics.)

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You misunderstood me, Justin, or I misunderstood your question.

“You need no code of conduct, but you do need a code of values. It implies that you value some things over others. Obviously, this is axiomatically true, but this is why zefreak’s answer is circular reasoning. Men “value some things over others” for the purposes of trade and cooperation, which they value more than other things.”

I have never seen ‘code of values’ to refer to a scale of values. Rather I have only heard ‘code of values’ refer to a moral code, and hence took the question to be ‘why do people need principles that they live by’. My answer is only circular because you are not clearly defining your terms.

Also, remember I edited my post to clarify my position. Once again, it is not that men ‘need’ a code of values, which I am interpreting as rules or principles generally shared to live by. I was giving you reasons why such codes are useful to many people, hence why they adopt them.

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Well, yes, but life principles also imply value judgments.

I understand, but AJ was referring to the quoted text again.