Instrumental and intrinsic value

Instrumental and intrinsic value are terms scholars use to identify two properties that make something good. Instrumental value is used to identify when something achieves its desired goal. It is deemed successful by its consequences. It is merely an instrument for achieving an end, and may be discarded or modified if it does not. Intrinsic value identifies if something is right, or good, or necessary, in and of itself, irrespective of its utility. It is recognized as good by intuition or social prescription. Scholars use these names to explain the behavior and characteristics that maintain human societies.Social action, like all action, may be ...:... the distinction between what is good 'in itself' and what is good 'as a means.'The concept of intrinsic value has been glossed variously as what is valuable for its own sake, in itself, on its own, in its own right, as an end, or as such. By contrast, extrinsic value has been characterized mainly as what is valuable as a means, or for something else's sake.Among nonfinal values, instrumental value—intuitively, the value attaching a means to what is finally valuable—stands out as a bona fide example of what is not valuable for its own sake.:14, 29, 34Man who lives in a world of hazards … has sought to attain in two ways. One of them began with an attempt to propitiate the powers which environ him and determine his destiny. It expressed itself in supplication, sacrifice, ceremonial rite and magical cult …. The other course is to invent arts and by their means turn the powers of nature to account …:3… for over two thousand years, the … most influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition … has been devoted to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty, and goodness. … The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell us something quite different. … As long as the notion persists that knowledge is a disclosure of reality … prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values in its objects will come as a shock.:43–4Dewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme principle that can serve as a criterion of ethical evaluation with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is of a piece with empirical inquiry more generally. … This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as in God's commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or 'nature,' considered as giving humans a fixed telos .:114, 172–3; 197Value judgments have the form: if one acted in a particular way (or valued this object), then certain consequences would ensue, which would be valued. The difference between an apparent and a real good , between an unreflectively and a reflectively valued good, is captured by its value not just as immediately experienced in isolation, but in view of its wider consequences and how they are valued. … So viewed, value judgments are tools for discovering how to live a better life, just as scientific hypotheses are tools for uncovering new information about the world.he things people want are a function of their social experience, and that is carried on through structural institutions that specify their activities and attitudes. Thus the pattern of people's wants takes visible form partly as a result of the pattern of the institutional structure through which they participate in the economic process. As we have seen, to say that an economic problem exists is to say that part of the particular patterns of human relationships has ceased or failed to provide the effective participation of its members. In so saying, we are necessarily in the position of asserting that the instrumental efficiency of the economic process is the criterion of judgment in terms of which, and only in terms of which, we may resolve economic problems.Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of the gods or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.:143Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing those values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety is mere appearance.:v-vi, xThe term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.:xxxviWhen, in the 19th century, society began to elaborate an exclusively rational technique which acknowledged only considerations of efficiency, it was felt that not only the traditions but the deepest instincts of humankind had been violated.:73Culture is necessarily humanistic or it does not exist at all. .... t answers questions about the meaning of life, the possibility of reunion with ultimate being, the attempt to overcome human finitude, and all other questions that they have to ask and handle. But technique cannot deal with such things. .... Culture exists only if it raises the question of meaning and values . .... Technique is not at all concerned about the meaning of life, and it rejects any relation to values .:147–8a) It is artificial; b) it is autonomous with respect to values , ideas, and the state; c) It is ... self-determinative independently of all human intervention; d) It grows according to a process which is causal but not directed to ends; e) It is formed by an accumulation of means which have established primacy over ends; f) All its parts are mutually implicated to such a degree that it is impossible to separate them or to settle any technical problems in isolation.:22For although we have defended general principles of the moral responsibilities of professional people, it would be foolish and wrongheaded to suggest codified rules. It would be foolish because concrete cases are more complex and nuanced than any code could capture; it would be wrongheaded because it would suggest that our sense of moral responsibility can be fully captured by a code.:193In fact, as we have seen in many instances, technology simply allows us to go on doing stupid things in clever ways. The questions that technology cannot solve, although it will always frame and condition the answers, are 'What should we be trying to do? What kind of lives should we, as human beings, be seeking to live? And can this kind of life be pursued without exploiting others? But until we can at least propose answers to those questions we cannot really begin to do sensible things in the clever ways that technology might permit.:197Ontologically, scientific realism is committed to the existence of a mind-independent world or reality. A realist semantics implies that the theoretical claims about this reality have truth values, and should be construed literally ... Finally, the epistemological commitment is to the idea that these theoretical claims give us knowledge of the world. That is, predictively successful (mature, non-ad hoc) theories, taken literally as describing the nature of a mind-independent reality are (approximately) true.:9Scientific theories describe causal properties, concrete structures, and particulars such as objects, events, and processes. Semirealism maintains that under certain conditions it is reasonable for realists to believe that the best of these descriptions tell us not merely about things that can be experienced with the unaided senses, but also about some of the unobservable things underlying them.:151Causal properties are the fulcrum of semirealism. Their relations compose the concrete structures that are the primary subject matters of a tenable scientific realism. They regularly cohere to form interesting units, and these groupings make up the particulars investigated by the sciences and described by scientific theories.:119The primary motivation for thinking that there are such things as natural kinds is the idea that carving nature according to its own divisions yields groups of objects that are capable of supporting successful inductive generalizations and prediction. So the story goes, one's recognition of natural categories facilitates these practices, and thus furnishes an excellent explanation for their success.:151The moral here is that however realists choose to construct particulars out of instances of properties, they do so on the basis of a belief in the existence of those properties. That is the bedrock of realism. Property instances lend themselves to different forms of packaging , but as a feature of scientific description, this does not compromise realism with respect to the relevant packages.:81Abstraction is a process in which only some of the potentially many relevant factors present in reality are represented in a model or description with some aspect of the world, such as the nature or behavior of a specific object or process. ... Pragmatic constraints such as these play a role in shaping how scientific investigations are conducted, and together which and how many potentially relevant factors are incorporated into models and descriptions during the process of abstraction. The role of pragmatic constraints, however, does not undermine the idea that putative representations of factors composing abstract models can be thought to have counterparts in the world.:191 Instrumental and intrinsic value are terms scholars use to identify two properties that make something good. Instrumental value is used to identify when something achieves its desired goal. It is deemed successful by its consequences. It is merely an instrument for achieving an end, and may be discarded or modified if it does not. Intrinsic value identifies if something is right, or good, or necessary, in and of itself, irrespective of its utility. It is recognized as good by intuition or social prescription. Scholars use these names to explain the behavior and characteristics that maintain human societies. The classic names instrumental and intrinsic were coined by sociologist Max Weber, who spent years studying good meanings people assigned to their actions and beliefs. Here are Weber's original definitions with a comment showing his doubt that conditionally efficient means can achieve unconditionally legitimate ends, followed by three modern definitions from the Oxford Handbook of Value Theory.