Objective Value: Towards a Theory

Today I will offer a brief synopsis of an argument advanced by Stuart C. Hackett in William Lane Craig’s reader on Philosophy of Religion. His argument can be found on pages 149-154 and it is entitled “The Value Dimension of The Cosmos: A Moral Argument.” Then I will expand upon it and offer my own insights, for better or worse.

The essential thesis of Hackett’s argument can be stated as follows: “…Persons, merely as such and just on account of their personhood, possess intrinsic value or worth. What this means is that persons are not to be construed as merely means or instruments of further ends, but rather as ends in themselves,” (pp. 149). By “ends” he means the goal of doing something. Looked at another way, doing something for a person – i.e. your friend, spouse, parent, etc. – has worth in virtue of the fact that it is being done for them, and no further appeal or justification is necessary to explain why the deed has worth. So you would not need to say, “I am doing this for my mother, which has value because doing so for her will make the economy grow, which is an inherently good thing to do.” Instead, a person (one’s mother, in this example) has inherent worth; therefore they are the reason for why things are done, not the means for achieving further ends.

Now, Hackett goes on to make an interesting observation as an extrapolation of this contention, “…In aiming at significant goals, a person implicitly accepts his own intrinsic worth and that of other persons as the rational basis of the worth of his choice, so that those goals themselves are judged appropriate, in the final analysis, because they are extrinsic means for actualizing the intrinsic worth of persons,” (pp. 150). Hackett later goes on to attempt to ground the worth of persons in the existence of a being of ultimate value – or God.

In this first portion of the article, the main point that Hackett attempts to communicate is that persons have intrinsic worth – as I have stated. He states that this is a rather unsurprising assertion in the commonsensical framework of everyday life, but that nonetheless there are those that would challenge it. Towards defending this supposition, he offers the above statements amongst a paragraph or two elaborating the idea that human beings involved in making choices presupposes the idea of either (a) a basis for intrinsic worth existing somewhere or (b) that, if such a basis does not exist, then choice making becomes absurd. I will now offer an elaboration on what I understand him to be saying and a potential defense of this position in the face of claims to the contrary.

In the ordinary event of making a decision it is not uncommon for the average person to engage in the simple process of what I will call value reductionism. The term “reductionism” I am borrowing from the more familiar sense of reductionism in which one attempts to reduce one thing to another, such as reducing the mind to the brain, or reducing morality to evolutionary processes and survival. In the sense that I wish to use it, a person engages in value reductionism when they go through a list of reasons or motivations for making a particular decision. An example of this would be the typical college student whose decision to attend a University is justified according to a reduction of the value of his decision to an ultimate ground of worth:

I will to college.
Why?
Because I want an education.
Why?
Because I want a decent job.
Why?
To support myself and my family.
Why do that?
Because my family is worth the effort and I do not want to burden others by forcing them to support me.
Why?
I do not need a reason to justify these as ends because they have intrinsic worth.

Now, the brief exercise that I have just run through is probably not the normal experience for a college student, because they usually have a myriad of reasons for attending school and few of them are thought out in such a linear fashion. Nonetheless, the point of making such a list is to demonstrate that the reaching of a final end of intrinsic worth – that is, basically a stopping point – makes the idea of choice much more coherent than if one does not suppose that such a stopping point exists. In other words, if there were no point at which one could stop the perpetual “Why?” by simply answering “Because it has inherent worth,” then the list of reasons for doing anything would continue on ad infinitum (to infinity, without end). On this hypothesis, no one actually knows why they do anything, which means that making a decision based upon emotion or impulse is all that one is left with. Furthermore, the idea that certain decisions are “better” than others becomes an incoherent concept, because no decision is directed towards grounds of inherent worth or less worth. And, finally, if someone says that a list of infinite reasons for doing something is what justifies making a decision, then two conclusions follow: (1) any decision to do anything is justified and (2) the person has actually contradicted themselves, because to assume an infinite list to be a justification for making a decision is to assume it has intrinsic value, which is precisely what the existence of the list is supposed to deny.

Given all of this, Hackett does not do so well in arguing that persons are the items which we should label as having intrinsic worth. He does say that persons act towards ends, which must presuppose themselves or someone else to have intrinsic worth, but there are numerous people that would either balk at this notion all together, or otherwise claim that it is difficult to support considering that most people do not structure their thinking along such lines. This observation would lead them to claim that people do not really know why they do most things, therefore one is question begging to say that people act as they do because persons have intrinsic worth. While these points can be acknowledged, it is difficult to outright deny Hackett’s point that, “…Any other proposed candidates for the status of intrinsic worth…turn out to be patently ridiculous on analysis – the pursuit for example, of power, wealth, knowledge, pleasure, or even health – all these ends are so obviously instrumental means to the well-being of persons as selves that any supposition that they are themselves intrinsically valuable becomes virtually ludicrous…” (pp. 150).

So Hackett’s argument and my own extrapolations can be summarized as follows, along with a final comment. Persons in virtue of their personhood have inherent worth. What I mean by “worth” is that something is either (a) an end in and of itself or (b) a means to an end. Persons have intrinsic worth because no reason needs to be given for why someone should do something beneficial to a person. That persons act towards anything as either an intrinsic end or an instrumental end implies that intrinsic ends exist because if they did not then decision making would be incoherent, which it does not seem to be. The fact that some people do not recognize the intrinsic worth of persons is not an argument against this being true, and that one cannot offer an argument for why persons themselves have intrinsic worth does not render the claim indemonstrable. It is possible that the value of persons must not be argued for but rather perceived, just as one could not argue a colorblind person into believing in the color blue without trusting the testimony of others. Furthermore, to argue that persons have intrinsic worth is to presuppose the worth of argumentation and logic, which would need just as reasonable a justification before one should believe in it. And, obviously this justification could not be based in logic because then one would be using logic to prove the value of logic, which is circular reasoning. Therefore it is possible that the worth of persons is inarguable without being, in any sense of the word, less real.

The Impractical Value of The Bible

I must start off this piece by first acknowledging that there is much practical value to the Bible. It might seem rather odd that the opening content of an article would go contrary to its title, but since the title of this particular blog does not imply that its opposite is untrue – that is, that it is untrue that the Bible has practical value – I thought it would be important to point this out. Indeed, by virtue of the fact that the Bible is true and provides reliable information about the only way to God makes it very practical. However, the Bible is certainly not an instruction booklet for life (for Christians), and the history of its composition certain bespeaks of this truth when one considers that it is a collection of scrolls, histories, books of legislation, poetry, wisdom literature, tracts, letters, and prophetic revelations written over the course of a few thousand years (1500 to be more precise). To lump all of these various types of writing together under a single heading such as “The Bible” and to read it as a “book” certainly would not be the most accurate way to understand the nature and purpose of the Bible.

Having said this much, the reader should know that it is a necessary introduction to a rather controversial point which I am about to make. And instead of taking awhile to reach the substance of this blog, I will state it as tersely as possible right now.

For one reason or another many Christians that I interact with have a strange approach to studying the Bible. They seem to search each section of Scripture and look for the “practical” value in everything they read. I find them scouring through every book of the Bible as if it were an instruction pamphlet on how to deal with a particular challenge in this life. Furthermore, every time I want to stop and take things slowly, to perhaps ponder over a verse and consider various interpretations and what impact they would have on the overall authorial meaning, people are reluctant and they immediately prefer “practicality.” “If it isn’t practical, then what is the point in knowing it?” they say. Rarely am I ever afforded the opportunity to discuss with someone the broader theological or philosophical implications of a particular passage of Scripture.

While reflecting upon this attitude I came to a certain realization – and perhaps the credit is not due to myself because I had never thought of this idea before – of precisely why this is a naive and incorrect approach to reading the Bible. The question basically came to my mind like this: Why does everything that we learn about the Bible have to be “practical” and “applicable”? Why do I have to be able to read a portion of Scripture and extract a set of guidelines or rules for life? Why cannot one simply be content with learning a truth about our world, or about the historical figures in the Bible text, or the historical situations in which the Bible was written, instead of having to see how it relates to their life?

Here is my main observation: so much information that people consume readily is very impractical, inapplicable junk. They play video games, absorb pop culture, watch fashion trends, read magazines, watch movies, watch sports, and then talk about it with their friends despite the fact that all of this information has no practical value. I can’t create a “guide” for life by watching Star Wars, or playing Grand Theft Auto 3, or listening to classical music, or talking about the Raiders, etc., on and on the list goes! So why in the world would anyone be resistant to learning non-practical information about the Bible? It simply makes no sense.

What makes the situation worse is that information regarding the Bible has value regardless of its practicality, yet people will flee from a challenging investigation of the Biblical text. It is as if Christianity either has to be practical or it is not worth knowing, and this is simply wrong. If people begin to examine the other areas of their life they will realize how much useless information they absorb that is also very impractical, and hopefully they will see that filling their minds with “impractical” knowledge regarding God, theology, and Christian truth is much more important. Ultimately, I believe, it will also be more practical in the end because it will allow them to understand their beliefs better, to communicate them to others in a coherent way, and to have a sincere dedication to something that they have taken the time to investigate.

All this having been said, there is of course this possible objection: “But having information about the pop culture will allow me to talk to other people, which might give me a chance to share the Gospel. If I don’t know anything about other people’s interests then how can I relate to them?”

To this I respond by saying that it is in no way a bad thing to be knowledgeable enough about the popular culture so that one is able to talk to others. However, the observation that I make is a situation which Christians can have in-depth discussions of popular culture while maintaining just barely enough knowledge of the Bible to attend church and not be overwhelmed by a few Bible references. The truth of the matter seems to be that the situation ought to be reversed: Christians ought to know just enough of the popular culture to not be ignorant, but should be filled with information about the Bible that is beyond what they think they “need” to know. Since most of us are already filled with information about various subjects which we in no way “need” to know, why not replace our time spent absorbing such things with time spent reading four and five commentaries on a single book of the N.T.? I understand that this requires much work and might not be very “practical,” but neither is any of that other information, and this seems to be more important.

So the observations which I have made this far could be constructed as a tentative argument that it is better for Christians to be filled with impractical knowledge of the Bible, theology, philosophy, apologetics, history, etc., than just about anything else. It is not merely a defense of practicing such study habits, however, because I see it more like a call to action on the part of Christians who lack a rich knowledge of Scripture. If our lives must be spent absorbing some kind of information, then why not let this be what our minds dwell on? And why not push ourselves to be exerting our mentally faculties in an area of our lives which has vast treasuries of knowledge that concern truth?

I simply do not understand the attitude which is constantly forcing the Bible to be “practical.”