Recent Work on Intrinsic Value

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value
Author: Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2006-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1402038461

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value brings together for the first time many of the most important and influential writings on the topic of intrinsic value to have appeared in the last half-century. During this period, inquiry into the nature of intrinsic value has intensified to such an extent that at the moment it is one of the hottest topics in the field of theoretical ethics. The contributions to this volume have been selected in such a way that all of the fundamental questions concerning the nature of intrinsic value are treated in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. These questions include how to understand the concept of intrinsic value, what sorts of things can have intrinsic value, and how to compute intrinsic value. The editors have added an introduction that ties these questions together and places the contributions in context, and they have also provided an extensive bibliography. The result is a comprehensive, balanced, and detailed picture of current thinking about intrinsic value, one that provides an indispensable backdrop against which future writings on the topic may be assessed.

Life's Intrinsic Value

Life's Intrinsic Value
Author: Nicholas Agar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2001
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780231117869

Are bacteriophage T4 and the long-nosed elephant fish valuable in their own right? Agar defends an affirmative answer to this question by arguing that anything living is intrinsically valuable. The result is a challenge to prevailing definitions of value and a call for a scientifically-informed appreciation of nature.

Intrinsic Value

Intrinsic Value
Author: Noah M. Lemos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 1994-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 052146207X

This book explores the justification of our beliefs about intrinsic value.

On the Intrinsic Value of Everything

On the Intrinsic Value of Everything
Author: Scott A. Davison
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441162828

An innovative and concise exploration of the foundations of ethics.

The Nature of Intrinsic Value

The Nature of Intrinsic Value
Author: Michael J. Zimmerman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2001-08-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1461610125

At the heart of ethics reside the concepts of good and bad; they are at work when we assess whether a person is virtuous or vicious, an act right or wrong, a decision defensible or indefensible, a goal desirable or undesirable. But there are many varieties of goodness and badness. At their core lie intrinsic goodness and badness, the sort of value that something has for its own sake. It is in virtue of intrinsic value that other types of value may be understood, and hence that we can begin to come to terms with questions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and so on. This book investigates the nature of intrinsic value: just what it is for something to be valuable for its own sake, just what sort of thing can have such value, just how such a value is to be computed. In the final chapter, the fruits of this investigation are applied to a discussion of pleasure, pain, and displeasure and also of moral virtue and vice, in order to determine just what value lies within these phenomena.

Descriptive and Normative Approaches to Human Behavior

Descriptive and Normative Approaches to Human Behavior
Author: Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2012
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9814368016

The aim of the book is to present side-by-side representative and cutting-edge samples of work in mathematical psychology and the analytic philosophy with prominent use of mathematical formalisms.

Rationality, Virtue, and Liberation

Rationality, Virtue, and Liberation
Author: Stephen Petro
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319022857

This book explores the overlooked but vital theoretical relationships between R. M. Hare, Alan Gewirth, and Jürgen Habermas. The author claims their accounts of value, while failing to address classic virtue-theoretical critiques, bear the seeds of a resolution to the ultimate question “What is most valuable?” These dialectical approaches, as claimed, justify a reinterpretation of value and value judgment according to the Carnapian conception of an empirical-linguistic framework or grammar. Through a further synthesis with the work of Philippa Foot and Thomas Magnell, the author shows that “value” would be literally meaningless without four fundamental phenomena which constitute such a framework: Logical Judgment, Conceptual Synthesis, Conceptual Abstraction, and Freedom. As part of the 'grammar of goodness,' the excellence of these phenomena, in a highly concrete way, constitute the essence of the greatest good, as this book explains.

The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory
Author: Iwao Hirose
Publisher:
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199959307

Value theory, or axiology, looks at what things are good or bad, how good or bad they are, and, most fundamentally, what it is for a thing to be good or bad. Questions about value and about what is valuable are important to moral philosophers, since most moral theories hold that we ought to promote the good (even if this is not the only thing we ought to do). This Handbook focuses on value theory as it pertains to ethics, broadly construed, and provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary debates pertaining not only to philosophy but also to other disciplines-most notably, political theory and economics. The Handbook's twenty-two newly commissioned chapters are divided into three parts. Part I: Foundations concerns fundamental and interrelated issues about the nature of value and distinctions between kinds of value. Part II: Structure concerns formal properties of value that bear on the possibilities of measuring and comparing value. Part III: Extensions, finally, considers specific topics, ranging from health to freedom, where questions of value figure prominently.

The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species

The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species
Author: Ian A. Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2016-01-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317605969

Why save endangered species without clear aesthetic, economic, or ecosystemic value? This book takes on this challenging question through an account of the intrinsic goods of species. Ian A. Smith argues that a species’ intrinsic value stems from its ability to flourish—its organisms continuing to reproduce successfully and it avoiding extinction—which helps to demonstrate a further claim, that humans ought to preserve species that we have endangered. He shows our need to exercise humility in our relations with endangered species through the preservation of their intrinsic goods, which in turn rectifies our degradation of their importance. Unique in its appeal to virtue ethics and to species concepts, The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species is an important resource for scholars working in environmental ethics and the philosophy of biology.